Year: 2008

Posted on

Banning Laptops in the Law Lecture Hall, Some More…

Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School, says the key for professors is to know when laptops are good for class and when they’re not.
“Technologies are not good for everything,” says Mr. Nesson, who is also a founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “Sometimes they destroy some good things along with the opportunities they make available.”
In Mr. Nesson’s classes, laptops are good for looking up legal material. During class students are encouraged to find the right evidence rule on the Web and to contribute to a class wiki, a communal Web site they frequently edit and update.
He says laptops are not good, however, during and immediately following a guest speaker’s presentation. He requests that the computers stay shut, signaling to students that they should all participate in discussing issues the speaker raises.

Law Professors Rule Laptops Out of Order in Class – Chronicle.com

This just isn’t going to go away.  I think the real answer here is for law school tech folks and interested faculty to actively pursue and advocate for constructive ways to use laptops in class.  Make the laptop a useful tool rather than a distraction. 

Blogged with the Flock Browser
Posted on

Commercial Support for MySQL in Amazon EC2

MySQL :: MySQL Enterprise for Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 is a web service that allows organizations to right size their computing capacity on demand using Amazon’s proven computing environment. Using MySQL Enterprise for Amazon EC2, developers can cost-effectively deliver web-scale database applications in the “cloud”, fully backed by the database experts at MySQL. Amazon EC2 and MySQL are a great fit for organizations that want to reduce the capital expenditures and operating costs required to build out and run their IT infrastructure.

This is a pretty big deal. A definitive sign of support for the Amazon cloud on the part of Sun and MySQL.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Posted on

MSF Scraps Live Search Book and Academic

Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users.

Live Search : Book search winding down

Looks like Google is now the only mega player in this area.  I wonder if this has anything to do with the failure of the Yahoo! takeover?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: ,