Blurts

Parent Central (Canada) reports that California is moving to eBooks for K-12 education. Companies are expected to submit content, but it appears the state expects the content to be free. Not sure I understand the “business” or even “educational” model here. Does this mean the state will use “out of copyright” resources from providers who previously expected to make money. The cooperation of the publishing houses here makes little sense. The repurposing of out of date content in an age when publishing companies are charged with being too slow also makes little sense.

It appears that Apple iPhone and Touch twitters are encountering problems. No it is not a virus. It turns out that tweets are assigned a unique number and this number has grown extremely large. Those of us who use Twitterriffic are encountering difficulties because the programmers used a certain variable type that cannot handle numbers this large. The challenges of success.

This article from the Economist offers some interesting information concerning international differences in the time expected of students. Time differences seem to account for a lot and extending the time students spent is pretty much the core idea in the Knowledge is Power program touted by the O’Bama administration.

This link looks interesting and should be immediately relevant to my own students presently working on blog applications in education.

The Today Show offered an interesting piece on the increasing use of public libraries. Internet access is a large part of this change. People looking for work and people giving up their home wifi are showing up at libraries to use  the Internet. In many locations, smaller communicities, the library may provide the only free access to the Internet.

Interesting data on relative change in social sites. Facebook is still growing. Twitter stalls.