This article says no.
Iphone 2.0: Why You're Better Off Avoiding the iPhone

the technology they use is explicitly chosen to divide people into separate digital cells, and to position Apple as sole warden. When your business depends on people paying for the privilege of being locked up, the prison better look and feel luxurious, and the bars better not be too visible.

TED | TEDBlog: My year of living biblically: A.J. Jacobs on TED.com

Speaking at the most recent EG conference, author, philosopher, prankster and journalist A.J. Jacobs talks about the year he spent living biblically -- following the rules in the Bible as literally as possible.

ABC 'Scrubs' In - Forbes.com

Without skipping a beat, star Zach Braff chimes in: "It'll be on CBS next year."

Rather than let him wrap up his final season and bow out with a series finale--as creator David Chase was allowed with HBO's The Sopranos and JJ Abrams is poised to do with ABC's Lost--NBC abruptly pulled the plug on Lawrence's series following the 100-day writers' strike.

Lame NBC, very lame..

VW Newsroom: VOLKSWAGEN GROUP OF AMERICA ANNOUNCES IT WILL PRODUCE CARS IN CHATTANOOGA; DECISION MARKS COMPANY’S ONGOING COMMITMENT TO NORTH AMERICAN MARKET

I'm pretty sure my dry-cleaner has a clipping from the newspaper about how he was also instrumental in this achievement..

'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft' | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

You actually believe you're in a dimly lit basement staring at a computer screen.

YouTube - jonlajoie's Channel

Not that these issues are different for anyone else, but here is an interesting debate sparked by someone doing what I've been doing with my Sunday morning Bible class, which is to use movie clips to introduce a topic for discussion.

Using video clips before a bible study... | Geeks & God

Basically it boils down to, Does fair use work any differently for religious educational groups and in what settings?

To totally disregard copyright laws check this out:

Here is a brief bio that I put together for the new UTC Communication Department website.

Chris Willis loves going to school. Having graduated from UTC with bachelor's degrees in Environmental Science and Sociology, he returned for a Master's in Writing, and is now pursuing a Doctorate of Education in Leadership and Learning at UTC. "I'm hoping this last degree will help to pull everything together," Chris says. Having taught as an adjunct professor for the Communication department for nine years, Chris believes that students learn best when given the opportunities and facilities to explore themselves creatively. "I love television and film and I'm focusing more now on teaching students how to tell stories visually--from the initial ideas to a final product that they can share with an audience."

Having worked in a computer lab for The Tennessee Valley Authority as a training specialist, Chris came to UTC full-time as a technology specialist for Continuing Edcucation, focused primarily on distance learning through videoconferencing. Due to a growing interest in developing a campus television studio, Mr. Willis was involved in the grant-writing, design, and implementation of a brand-new facility at UTC, which has been used by the entire campus for video production and editing. Some of the work of the UTC Television Studio can be viewed online, as well as being broadcast on Comcast Cable Channel 3.

More about my life can be seen here or view my vita here.

How Does Distance Education Compare With Classroom Instruction? A Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Literature -- Bernard et al. 74 (3): 379 -- Review of Educational Research

Dividing achievement outcomes into synchronous and asynchronous forms of DE produced a somewhat different impression. In general, mean achievement effect sizes for synchronous applications favored classroom instruction, while effect sizes for asynchronous applications favored DE.

An interesting way to conduct research without travel, plus to get ideas from participants as to what is important.

Delphi method is a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of independent experts. The carefully selected experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, participants are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of the group. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a pre-defined stop criterion (e.g. number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results) and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.

An interesting article from Canadian George Siemens, dealing with how technology supports "off-loading " human knowledge.

Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn. United States Distance Learning Association. Jan05_01

• Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.

• Many of the processes previously handled by learning theories (especially in cognitive information processing) can now be off-loaded to, or supported by, technology.

• Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).

A central tenet of most learning theories is that learning occurs inside a person.

Additional concerns arise from the rapid increase in information. In today’s environment, action is often needed without personal learning – that is, we need to act by drawing information outside of our primary knowledge. The ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill.

We can no longer personally experience and acquire learning that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections.

Butterfly Effect - “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” profoundly impacts what we learn and how we act based on our learning."

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.

Conclusion:

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.

Pedagogy First? Whatever. In dealing with faculty and instructional designers, a series of almost default phrases are vocalized once technology is mentioned: "We need to start with pedagogy"..."It's pedagogy first".

Or, whenever I'm in a meeting and someone says "pedagogy first", the apparently genetic instinct to nod viciously is enacted by everyone around the table. "Yes, that is right. We need to have priorities here. Let's tame technology and focus instead on what we already know and are comfortable with. Let’s ensure that technology does not get away from the tried and true method of containing innovation and new approaches.”

Let's abandon the somewhat silly notion of pedagogy first and recognize
that the choice of technology is driven by many contextual factors and
therefore context is what we are evaluating and considering when we
first start talking about possible technology to use. Then, after we
have selected technology, we can start talking about pedagogy. Pedagogy
is just not a practical starting point for deciding the technology we
should use.

Splash Valley Tennessee
Surely this can be done in an environmentally sensitive way. "Splash down into a natural wave pool full of cat-tails, lillies, and live frogs!"

I have to say I very much support the International Society for Technology in Education's new definition for the role of teachers.The Future of Instruction: Teacher as 'Co-Learner' : June 2008 : THE Journal

"Now and in the future, effective teachers of digital-age learners will be challenged to move away from models of teaching and learning as isolated endeavors. As they model work and learning that reflects inventive thinking and creativity, teachers must become comfortable as co-learners with their students and with colleagues around the world. Today it is less about staying ahead and more about moving ahead as members of dynamic learning communities. The Digital Age teaching professional must demonstrate a vision of technology infusion and develop the technology skills of others. These are the hallmarks of the new education leader."

OK, this guy is just full of great ideas. Something I've been meaning to do for a while, since self-reporting is a huge weakness at work.

Reminders: Keep Your Supervisors Up-to-Date « Youth Hacks

How about using this technique for spiritual matters, like, Hey Big Guy, here's what I've been up to..?

I've been thinking of some faith hacks for a while that might be useful for myself and others, then I assumed others may have but thinking the same things. This is all I found, but it is pretty good:

GTD Principle: Re-claiming Your Ability to Focus « Youth Hacks

The main idea was that we can only hold so many items in our short-term memory at once. I've heard 2 or 3, and I've heard 8, but either way, there's a ceiling on how many things we can hold in our attention at once. David Allen compares it to RAM in a computer.

As that RAM part of our brain gets full, we start to triage, only dealing with what we deem the most "urgent" at the moment. The result is that we don't get around to doing some of the things are really important to us, especially those that don't feel urgent (visiting students, praying, spending time with family, writing personal notes, self-improvement, etc.)

I think these things could easily make an improvement on helping me close some open loops on my mind related to spiritual matters, which sadly are the least likely things to get done on all of my lists.

Get productive about getting things done in your spiritual life. Ask yourself, What's the next action on this? Then do it.

Chattanooga Times Free Press | Chattanooga: Professor puts spin on periodic table

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga professor Dr. Hinsdale Bernard has been working on a three-dimensional model of the periodic table of the elements since he was a chemistry teacher in Trinidad in the late 1970s. He recently received a patent for the model he has been developing. His "Periodic Table in Three-Dimensional Form" is meant to be a learning tool that would appeal to youngsters from elemetary school to college age.

Also interesting that you can't embed Chatt Times videos..

Clutter: Extreme Lifehacker Home Office Makeover

Disorganization leads to lack of free time, lack of free time leads to believing you'll never be able to get it all under control again, and that is how I ended up as a terribly scattered person in a wretchedly cluttered office.

Wired Campus: Facial-Recognition Software Could Give Valuable Feedback to Online Professors - Chronicle.com

Many professors who teach online complain that they have no way of seeing whether their far-away students are following the lectures

This new software helps analyze whether or not students are watching, understanding, and engaged in web streaming courses, which is something we are tackling at UTC with my 797 project.

Photoshop enthusiast and frantic video editor Deke McClelland fits 101 tips for Adobe's premiere product into five minutes of video

Having just been on a tour of the Office for Students with Disabilities at UTC this week, I was glad to know what this guy was talking about below. This thing is pretty neat, though I wonder how it reacts when webpages are changed..

Awesome Highlighter (online resource) | Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

I’m a big fan of Kurzweil 3000, and one feature of the program that I especially appreciate is the way text can be highlighted and then extracted into a new file. This can be an extremely valuable study aid. Another helpful study aid in Kurzweil 3000 is the option of easily adding sticky notes to pages of text. Altogether Kurzweil 3000 contains the best set of tools I know of for helping learners deal with a wide range of challenges that can create barriers to learning.

..I would totally be OK with it.

Post-its Note Art: 8-bit Edition | Office Supplies Blog

Geek Art is Art where science, technology, or video games were the primary source of inspiration

Kung pao chicken made official for Olympics | Oddly Enough | Reuters

"Bean curd made by a pock-marked woman," as the Beijing Youth Daily rendered the spicy Sichuanese dish, is now "Mapo tofu." And "chicken without sexual life" becomes mere "steamed pullet."