If you’re trying to search for thing  on the Internet  presenting the material in different ways has been hard. After all, one search engine looks pretty much like another. It may be hard, but, thanks to Google, it’s not impossible. If you click on that Google link in the last sentence, it should open up into a search on our first PM, Sir John A Macdonald. That’s fairly standard stuff so far, right?

The cool thing that I’ve recently discovered was that if you click on the line at the top of the search where it says “Web +Show Options” it not only will let you change what’s highlighted in your search it will let you change how your search is presented. If you go down to “Standard View,” for example, and click on “Wonder Wheel,” you get a really neat visual representation of your search results. You can click on the various spokes of the wheel, and the relevant results show up to the right of the wheel.

And if you like that, you’ve got to try the timeline. That option is a wonderful thing for a history teacher.

Accommodating different learning styles doesn’t always have to be onerous.

A U.S. court recently decided that a woman who illegally shared 24 songs over the Internet would have to pay damages of $80,000 per song for a grand total of $1.92 million. The songs she shared could have been download from the Internet for about 99 cents per title.

While I’m all in favor of punishing people who steal music (or provide it for others to be stolen) Biblical standards for restitution (such as Exodus 22) provide for damages of 4 or 5 times the amount stolen. While that is likely a general guideline and not necessarily and exact amount, 80,000 times the amount stolen seems a bit inflated

There has to be some middle ground between sharing files willy nilly and punitively penalyzing illegal file sharing.