Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

Many have prolly already seen this, but I still find it interesting. It's Google's Eric Schmidt delivering the commencement address at Carnegie Mellon. I really wish more educators would think through how the characteristics he describes need to be used when designing curriculum. Educators and students need to be engaged and to be taught relevant skills, in addition to practicing creativity, criticality , and what I think of as progressive irreverence .

Interesting "failure to launch" list and story . I'd like to see what these "failures" made possible or probable, by laying the groundwork or context for new innovations and expectations. Or, paths never to be trodden again (i.e., Vista). Failure to Launch List Microsoft Vista Gateway HD DVD Vonage YouTube Sirius XM Microsoft Zune Palm Iridium Segway

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has released American Academic : The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997-2007 . The report is a 10-year analysis of hiring trends and faculty composition at community colleges and public and private colleges/universities. The findings show accelerated erosion of stable faculty positions with respectable wages and working conditions. AFT's report also shows that the trend of exploitation continues when it comes to "contingent" labor and graduate teaching assistants. Individuals within the academy that were interviewed about the report's findings, from my perusal of early reporting, seem to lay blame on market forces. To that I say, of course BUT individual departments and schools have allowed this to happen AND have even embraced this exploitation to protect the privileges of the already highly paid and tenured who enjoy low(er) teaching loads and academic freedom. This lowers the quality of intellectual explorat...

Google has a propriety book scanning technique AND has a patent on said technique. There's an article with diagrams at BuzzNewsRoom and at TechCrunch . As both articles highlight, Google is scanning thousands (millions?) of books a year...who knows how many? Regardless, the point is that the project is full speed ahead and it looks as if there's no turning back to the way things used to be when it comes to searching, retrieving, and accessing information/books. Being a library science scholar I can't help but think what this continues to mean for librarians. I am still working through scenarios, as every librarian should be, because these are exciting and quickly changing times. The main challenge/excitement for me is the fact that how we conceptualize the institution of library and the practices that articulate that institution is way different now. Libraries will never be able to scan books as quickly as Google. However, we will be able to curate better (or with di...

Here's a link to Google's blog post announcing their use of goats instead of lawn mowers. Click here . I'm digging it, seriously.