I feel like everytime I watch The Daily Show I come to the realization that everyone should watch this show in order to see the ridiculousness that exists in the world. He does such a nice job of pointing out the obvious contradictions of the worlds figures. (Of course, it helps to have a staff of people who must just watch C-Span, CNN, Fox News, etc… all day and tag and categorize everything that is said or done.) I feel bad basically just blogging about what Jon Stewart says, but they say that imitation is the must sincere form of flattery, so I guess that is what this is. I want to spread the word of the more hilarious stories he does.
So, on the June 18th episode of The Daily Show, Stewart reports to us how the house republicans are trying to compare what is happening in Iran to their own “oppression” in the house and they are both using Twitter to speak out. Here is one example of the ridiculousness:
I guess I see the point he is trying to make, but sometimes we need to put issues in perspective. The people in Iran are using Twitter because they have no other outlet to the world since the Iranian government has shut down their access. The members of Congress can get on the news whenever they want. I don’t think that Mr. Hoekstra was trying to trivialize the situation in Iran, but it seems like he could choose his tweets more carefully.
But, it’s not just politicians! After a great post on The Nation regarding the use of social networking to report in Iran, this was the response of one reader: Continue Reading…
I have recently become very interested in the phenomenon that is Twitter. I don’t know exactly how yet, but I believe that Twitter will, and is, changing the world. I started using Twitter in my classroom and in the letter I sent to my parents I expound on Twitter’s virtues, so I don’t want to rehash all of them here, but here is a link to that post which lists several of Twitter’s uses.
What I find most compelling about Twitter is its real time nature. As news or events happen you can find out instantly. This might be as mundane as your friend going to the grocery store or as big as a plane crashing into the Hudson river.
I am a big fan of screen shots when I am trying to explain a technology topic. This might range from reporting a bug to a website or typing up documentation for my students. When I am working offline I have been using MWSnap which is a free screen capture program that has some nice features above and beyond Window’s print screen. While MWSnap works well, there a web application that is even better for taking screen shots of on-line content (like web sites). This web application is called Kwout and is located at http://kwout.com/. What sets Kwout apart from other screen capture programs is that when you capture a piece of a website the image you capture becomes an image map embedded with hotlinks from the original web site. Here is an example from Wikipedia of my favorite physicist. If you run your mouse over the hyperlinks in the picture, they are actual links to the actual url. Continue Reading…
When I watch a video like this (I have seen similar one before) I feel extremely overwhelmed. The amount of knowledge and information out there is so huge. I find myself constantly saying that the combined knowledge of the world is at our fingertips and we just need to start taking advantage of it. Look at the growth of Facebook, and that was primarily with college students. Also, Facebook was free and televisions weren’t but those number are still huge.Now, I wonder if Twitter is going to beat that to be biggest fastest.
That there are more texts sent each day then people in the world, Holy Cow! Adults often just mock the younger generation and their texting, but to ignore the phenomenon is just ignorant. The Technology Tailor on WGN Radio, Alex Goldstein (or something like that) constantly mocks Continue Reading…
Last week I attended the Illinois Computer Educator’s (ICE) Conference in St. Charles, IL. This is the second year I attended the conference. Last year, I went to a pre-conference workshop on how to use pivot tables in Excel, which was interesting, but this year I attended the actual conference. They are many sessions to choose from, and I chose to focus mostly on sessions about new web 2.0 tools (which aren’t all actually web 2.0) and how to implement them.
On a side note, I would like to define web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies are technologies that utilize two-way information. Continue Reading…
Today at the Ice Conference, here was today’s first memorable comment. It was a picture (which I found a link to on the internet) which is a commentary and where man (possibly at least) started from and where he is today.
