Home Coffee Upgrades - How to Make Gourmet Coffee - Esquire

via esquire.com

Some cool tips from Esquire magazine on how to make your home coffee experience many times better including better filer coffee, French press coffee, frothy milk, ice coffee, and more. Worth a read/bookmark.

I plan to try the "double clutch" method with my home drip coffee pot and maybe the "hardcore French" method with my French press.

An interview with John Palfrey: Rumors, Cyberbullying and Anonymity

Q&A: Rumors, Cyberbullying and Anonymity

By DAVID POGUE
Published: July 22, 2010
via nytimes.com

David Pogue interviewed John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society about online rumors, cyberbullying, and more. It's worth a read if you work with children or have children of your own.

On a side note, I've been following John Palfrey for years after I met him at the 2005 NYSAIS tech/library conference (which I now co-chair). My blog post about it here. His blog post about meeting me is here. One of the other directors of the Berkman Center is Jonathan Zittrain who is also a Shady Side Academy alumnus, like me.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and What It Isn't

What 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Isn't

Allen Barra writes a critique of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the Wall Street Journal that is worth reading. We've been having discussions in our school on whether this 50-year old book is appropriate for 7th graders with its inclusion of viciously racist language (the "N" word) and moreover how we choose the cannon that is read at our school. It's an important conversation and a most difficult one. I think that we must recognize the value of tradition while respecting the evolving landscape of our countries, cities, and schools - finding the balance is incredibly challenging but is the real goal of these conversations.

Another way Google's Android software is better than Apple's iPhone software

Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software
via nytimes.com

The New York Times did an excellent summary of Google's new App Creator for Android. Why wait for someone to build an app for your phone when you can just build it yourself. Easily.

This is a great example of why my next phone will be an Android phone and not an Apple phone. I want a phone that lets me do what I want with it, not what Apple engineers let me do with it.

Article: To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery. My comment: Insanity.

via nytimes.com

This article on tools to catch/thwart cheating made me sad. This kind of stuff has no place in a school context. If we need video cameras to monitor students we must be designing schools and assessments wrong. Our systems need corrected, not supplanted with monitoring technology. Totally grossed out right now.