Saturday, June 10, 2006

dvd discussion group

Pop Goes the Library covers a new initiative from the Stafford Branch of the Ocean County Library (where "Every Ocean County resident uses and champions the library." If true, Ocean County is library utopia) where people watch the dvds on their own time, like a book club, and then come in for discussion. They started it up for Gay Pride Month with several of the recent big gbltq films.

Very exciting. I haven't yet wrapped my mind around adapting such a concept for a high school library - for one thing, movies couldn't be rated R, and it seems so many discussion-worthy movies are, for another, there's the dvds - but I'm wondering if public libraries could really make a concerted effort with older teens in this regard. I'm wondering if R ratings matter so much in that realm. Certainly 20-somethings would be aaaaaalllll over this.

nsa and myspace

or, guess what kids? posting stuff online makes it totally public - to *everybody*

Yet another situation arises that is not only sketchy and angering from a 'why is my government so sucky?' perspective, but also inspires me to ask for the bazillionth time why the teaching of online safety and common sense (yes, we need to teach common sense to teenages) isn't du rigor in public eductation. Instead, we are busy trying to understand the basics of what is happening, finger-wagging, and fear-mongering. We teach stranger danger to second graders. We know how to do this. We just aren't.

Here's a clip from the New Scientist article via Lifehacker:
Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

creative commons and music

via lifehacker, a baby digg-like site that focuses exclusively on creative commons licensed music. Which means students could use these pieces in powerpoints and videos, and in some cases hack them up with garageband or audacity and use them some more. All of which is very very cool. Gotta love musicians (and all artists/creators) who release their stuff under more flexible copyright than the default.