A history of books

Putting this Evolution of the Book chart here so I can find it again. First saw it via Stephen's [Abram] Lighthouse. He posts more good stuff!

So here's my question: Has anyone over the past couple hundred years missed the scroll, the clay tablet; the papyrus or the sheepskin? I am guite sure my great-grandchildren will laugh when they read how people were once reluctant to give up paper books for electronic ones. And yes, my great-grandchildren WILL be reading.

Snappy rejoinders - short term pleasure, long term pain?

Last Thursday, I sent this out to our optional, informal school mailing list:

Hi folks,

Very interesting article on the NYTimes blog:
Do School Libraries Need Books?

5 different perspectives on the question.

Doug

A short time later I received this response from one of our high school teachers:

Blogs are for the self-obsessed & self-absorbed

have a nice day

So I fired back:

Hi _______ ,

Rather a blanket condemnation of a format, I'd say. I hope you taught my son when he was your student to judge the content of writing, rather than the container in which it comes.

Have a nice day to you as well,

Doug

Zing! Felt pretty good sending that out. At the time.

But I wonder now if I've made an enemy. Or created a relationship in which neither of us will now listen to the other? Were I to do it again, I would have gone over and had a visit with the teacher, F2F. Or ignored the comment completely.

I'm not having second thoughts about what I said. I believe format bigotry serves no one well and that good teachers should not model it. (Although I will admit many bloggers, including this one, are self-obsessed and self-absorbed.)

But I am wondering how I might have handled this better as a human being.

________________________________

I got a chuckle from the way James Likeks opened his column in this Valentine's Day morning's Star Tribune:

Here's some Valentine's Day advice: If you need it now, from a newspaper, you're already in trouble.

Yup.

Second Life program on cloud computing available

For the easily amused or terminally bored...

http://business.treet.tv/shows/istetalks/episodes/cloud-computing

Peggy Sheehy was a great host and Dawn Shrum of ISTE was a real confidence builder as a producer. If you get the chance to participate as either a presenter or attendee at a SecondLife event, do so. I've put some slides (with bullet points, sorry) up on slideshare here. This presentation was based on “Computing in the Clouds” Leading & Learning, Dec/Jan 2009/10.

Side benefit: I have a new ISTE t-shirt that is long enough that I no longer have bare midriff in SL.

Oh, this week our district tech committee endorsed going forward with giving all K-12 students access to GoogleApps for Education. Secondary students will go live this spring; elementary next fall. Elementary will start without e-mail, but that is not a firm decision. Chat, Groups and Video will not be available for either age level to begin with either.

Interesting comments from our high school students on the committee. When the Apps discussion was taking place, NEITHER student wanted e-mail - but for different reasons. The young man said he already had 4 or 5 Gmail accounts to keep track of now and didn't want another one; the young woman said she never uses e-mail, preferring to text or use Facebook. The group as a whole, however, thought e-mail access was needed for students since both businesses and post-secondary schools rely on it.