“Ever since the world caught wind of the Pure Digital Flip cam’s success, super-cheap digital pocket camcorders have sprouted up everywhere. With everyone and their mother trying to become the next Lil Show Stoppa or Soulja Girl, people need a cheap and easy way to capture those magic moments. I tested six of these cams—from Creative, RCA/Audiovox, DXG and Pure Digital—all $180 or less.”

“Turning historical and social-science data into pictures could help scholars identify new patterns in old records, according to researchers who gathered at George Mason University this weekend for a conference on technology in the humanities.At a session devoted to visualization — as making pictures out of data is called — participants discussed their favorite examples. Here are three they discussed…”

The first visualization site is called WorldMapper, and if a great example of how data visualizations convey meaning that most people cant see when looking at raw data sets.

“A professor at Michigan State University has created a free online video game to help students learn Chinese.The multi-player role-playing game, Zon/New Chengo, allows users to choose Mandarin phrases to converse with other characters in the game about exchanging money, buying breakfast, and other activities visitors to China would experience.”

“Pre-twentieth century music all exists in the public domain, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get access either to recordings or sheet music. Want to include a Beethoven sonata as background music in your wedding video, documentary, or indie feature film? You’ll need to pay unless you can dig up an ancient recorded copy from the early 1900s (and can live with the sound quality). Want to pass out sheet music of that same sonata to your high school band? Again, you will need to pay unless you can track down an ancient, out-of-copyright score.”

By Neil McAllister, PC World
May 22, 2008

“Good news for those of you who have been following the XML office document standards battle. Microsoft Wednesday announced that Office 2007 will support ODF Open Document Format, the document standard used by OpenOffice.org and other open source productivity suites, with the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2, due sometime in early 2009.”

“If you think that you always get what you pay for, the just-released beta of OpenOffice 3.0 should convince you otherwise. This free, open source software suite provides most of what anyone could want in an office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, database, drawing tools, and math equation editor.”

via Gizmodo

Maxtor 500GB OneTouch™ 4 External Hard Drive $89.99 at Staples®

Everyone needs a backup hard drive.  At $0.18 a Gigabyte, this is one of the cheapest I’ve seen so fare.  If you get frisky, add $10.01 in filler and user the $25 off $100 coupons that are floating around right now, it comes to $75 or $0.15/GB.

“Over at the Oxford University Press’s blog, OUP publisher Niko Pfund paid Wikipedia the ultimate compliment: He compared it to the Oxford English Dictionary.”

In an earlier post, I mentioned that as an anthropologist I like to pay attention to clichés as little insights into the current state of education. I pointed out that the often-heard lament that “some students are not cut out for school” is a telling statement about the state of our schools not so much our students because school is designed for learning, and we would never say “some students are not cut out for learning.” Yet the lament passes without a hint of protest. It’s just something we say.

“The journalist in me has been avoiding this post (too navel-gazing, too self-absorbed), but the blogger in me can’t help it. Media is changing—how it is produced and how it is consumed. The worlds of blogging and journalism are colliding and I want to get some thoughts down on this transition before I forget what the old world was like or feel too comfortable in the new one.”

“The newsroom is increasingly being seen as the most experimental place in the business”

I don’t know what this has to do with laptops or educational technology, but…

How To: Inoculate Kids Against Advertising
Lisa made her kids impervious to advertising by asking pointed questions that forced them to think about the source and truthfulness of ads. She knew action was needed when when her kids, who werent old enough to read, stopped in front of the bleach while shopping to ask the advertisers dream question: “Mom, arent we going to buy some Clorox?” Hit the jump to see how she responded.

Timmy writes “Wired Science has picked ten of the best videos from YouTube and their own show on PBS to highlight the wonderful things chemistry can do. Only four of them involve fire or explosions. The rest range from music videos about the polymerase chain reaction to reactions that repeatedly change color. One shows how to pour sodium acetate stalagmites. Another shows Chris Hardwick giving instructions for building a glow stick while making absurd comments.”

Is the movement toward free and open access to published material a human-rights issue? Richard Smith says it is. The former editor of the British journal BMJ is on the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes journal articles online and makes them freely available to the public.