Food for Thought

There is a Flu Prevention PSA Contest currently running and you can vote for the winner. Even if you’re not interested in voting, take a look at the videos located at http://www.youtube.com/USGOVHHS and forward them on…the more people that see them the better.

The contest was to create a 15, 30, or 60 second video Public Service Announcement (PSA) that will inform and motivate people to take steps that will help prevent the spread of the flu.

At this week’s LIS annual planning day we’ll be spending some time thinking about the future of our work in the context of the future of higher ed. The following two articles have just recently been published and offer some views on the challenges ahead. As you can imagine, technology is a huge driver in the current evolution of education and pedagogy, and as a result, LIS does and should have a role to play.

The good bots over at techcrunch have picked up the latest TWILIS Headline of the Week. And since this is French site, they ran it through a translator. Here’s my favorite line

bq[en].

According to AppleInsider, Apple will start admitting to and fixing the hairline crack problems with MacBooks. Sign me up.

A posting to the College Libraries Listserv this week introduced www.academia.edu, a site for members of colleges and universities to post information about themselves, their studies and research interests.

Not hearing much about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)? They are going strong with major support from AMD, Brightstar, Chi Lin, eBay, Google, Marvell, NewsCorp, Nortel, Quanta, Red Hat, SES Astra. Hundreds of thousands of laptops have already been provided and the second iteration of “Give One Get One” program is underway through Amazon. The OLPC XS server has just been released with Moodle (KATIE) providing core services for education, collaboration, communication and publishing.

Cedar Rapid’s restaurant’s ‘Twitter Tuesday’ draws social networking fans.
http://gazetteonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008711119929

The settlement announced yesterday between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/) is a potentially major event for libraries and academic research in the U.S.

Luther is mentioned in this Chronicle article about the decline in land-line use.

Iowa State U. Will Make Students Pay to Set Up Land Lines

The Gazette, a newspaper serving the area around Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, recently ran a story about a new policy at Iowa State University: The institution will make students pay to have land-line telephones hooked up in their rooms. Given the triumph of cellphones, we would have thought that this was old news.

Practicing Peace

Sunday, September 21, is the annual International Day of Peace established by the United Nations in 1981 to commemorate and strengthen the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples.

Something to think about…