Recent Links 01/31/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recent Links 01/29/2009

  • Get Emails Without Revealing Your Email Address

    Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.

    So what?

    Here’s an example: Say you want to advertise a job opening on Twitter, and you don’t want to share your company email address. Some applicants may not want to post a public @reply, and they can’t send you a direct message if you don’t already follow them. Include a whspr! URL, and they can reach you discreetly.

    tags: email, tools, privacy, security, utilities

  • When you normally delete your files in Mac OS X, the operating system is only forgetting where those particular files are placed, while the data still physically remains on the drive. Beginning with Mac OS 10.3, Apple enhanced its security by introducing the Secure Empty Trash feature, which follows the U.S. DoD pattern of overwriting data seven times.

    Permanent Eraser provides an even stronger level of security by implementing the Gutmann Method. This utility overwrites your data thirty-five times, scrambles the original file name, and truncates the file size to nothing before Permanent Eraser finally unlinks it from the system. Once your data has been erased, it can no longer be read through traditional means.

    tags: mac, software, security, tools, utilities

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

John Cleese on Creativity

Great 10 minute video of John Cleese discussing creativity, how to foster it and how it may be discouraged in others. What stood out for me:

1) when getting “stuck” – move away from the problem and the solution will become apparent later
2) rewriting, reworking on a project results in a far better product
3) interruptions destroy creativity
4) we don’t really know where ideas come from – but “we don’t get them from our laptops” … they probably come from an unconscious part of our minds
5) racing around and “keeping balls in the air” will not result in creativity (ouch!)
6) to enhance creativity: must create an “oasis” of calm by creating boundaries of space and time for it to happen; give yourself a start and finishing time

Really interesting quote: “To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at that thing. Which means that if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely hopeless at it … Most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they’re doing. It explains a great deal of life.”

And even more important for educators:
there are teachers who know that they themselves are not very creative and, therefore, they may not value creativity even if they can recognize it.

Recent Links 01/28/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

But we didn’t make any crappy cars or overextend mortgages!

In todays New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The economic stimulus plan that Congress has scheduled for a vote on Wednesday would shower the nation’s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget.

Rest of the article here.

Recent Links 01/27/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

High Schools, Get in the Game!

In today’s New York Times:

Israeli Entrepreneur Plans a Free Global University That Will Be Online Online Only

An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.

“The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia,” said the entrepreneur, Shai Reshef, founder of several Internet-based educational businesses.

“The open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free,” Mr. Reshef said. “We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works. Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection.”

On the heels of MIT moving instruction from lectures to small group, high schools really need to take notice. The arguments about needing “traditional” teaching to prepare students for university no longer hold water. Rest of the NYT article here.

Recent Links 01/26/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recent Links 01/25/2009

  • Watch quality Canadian Documentary, Animation and Fiction. Welcome to the NFB’s new online Screening Room. Here you can watch full-length films, clips and trailers – all free for home viewing. Enjoy our featured films, new additions, old favourites and playlists.

    tags: film, video

  • Free Online Habit Tracker. A simple tool I built to help me keep track of my goals. Now you can use it too. – Joe

    tags: productivity, goals, tools, web2.0, organization, tracking, calendar

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.