The mind has no timetable.  As inconvenient as it may be (like waking up at 4:00 AM with a blog post idea), our minds work at their own pace.  I'm not the first to recognize that our schooling system places timetables on learning and that human minds don't always fit into the nice little boxes that would make it so convenient.  But I am grateful for all the teachers and principals who get it; learning is the constant, not time.

Modality influences mentality.  I've been saying this for the last several days and while I keep toying with different words, I keep coming back to this statement.  The medium in which you do your work influences the way you think.  Would there be a post office if we wrote on clay tablets?  No chance.  Will there be a post office for long now that we have so many ways to share digital messages?  One wonders.  Here's a great example: students at Arapahoe High School blogged with Daniel Pink about his book "A Whole New Mind."  They skyped with him at the end of the unit.  When the class moved on to another literary work, "Little Brother," they decided to email author Corey Doctorow and asked to blog and skype with him.  They took the initiative because their mentality shifted from reading and writing about authors to reading and writing with authors.  It's not about the technology, but you just can't teach 21st Century skills without it.

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 I used to sound like an engineer, but these days I'm more like a character from Seasame Street.  Advanced degrees aside, my language once had such a professional and impressive cache: "We need to install a new TCP/IP protocol that will allow multiple subnets and virutal LANs..."  Now I talk about Moodle, Google and Doodle.  All I need now is a catchy jingle to help you remember how they are different.  Oh well.

Yes, LPS is heavily involved in Google Apps for Education.  Not long after I began my tenure at LPS, I read about how Arizona State University was migrating all their email services to Google.  That was prettty bleeding edge stuff back then, but I was very intrigued because LPS has all the right ingredients for such a move.  We have a fiber network (thanks again to the City of Littleton's enterprise agreement with Comcast) that ties our buildings together at such remarakable speeds that computers literally cannot see a difference between a resource located at the ESC and one hosted in the same...

Just when you may have started to think that the Internet would make something like a library obsolete, the giants of the Internet (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo) have made changes that should cause every citizen to clamor for a strong library service. I am referring to a recent article in eSchool News which points out that the major search providers have implemented new filters on search results based on social media activities. Editor Dennis Pierce suggests that our online habits in social networks are being used to filter the massive amount of information we access every day. So if you happen to access liberal social networks, your search results will be from more liberal sources; if you’re a conservative, the conservative sources will gain prominence...