Starting tomorrow, I'm teaching an online writing class over our 6 week spring term. As the final project in the course, students will complete a team-based paper assignment. Given that the class is online, Google Docs seems a very effective tool for students. Rather than having to create instructions myself for using Google Docs, I was lucky enough to find this extensive set of video tutorials over at ExpertVillage, How to Use Google Documents. This will be a great resource for use in my face-to-face classes as well.

If you like to create videos for sharing on the Internet, then TubeMogul is definitely for you:

TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.

Digital Trends reports that scientists at the University of Glasgow have discovered a way to increase storage capacity by 150,000 times: "It could mean 500,000 GB on a single chip and inch square."

Hmm...a 500,000 GB drive. I can think bigger than song storage:

• Digital versions of enough texts to dwarf the holdings of a university library.
• Record every moment of my life with a portable, always on, video cam (admittedly, might take a few of these chips, but it would take a long time to fill one up).
• Take snapshots and store entire sections of the Internet on a given day.
• Geek desire: high resolution video of every sci-fi series and movie ever made :-)

What kind of uses could you imagine for a storage drive this size?

On April 30, the OpenOffice community will release the beta version of the new OpenOffice 3.0. Over at OpenOffice.org Ninja, I found some screenshots of some of the new features that will be present in the 3.0 version. Of particular interest to writers will be the option to display document facing pages and the revision to Notes, the commenting feature:

The new Notes2. Click on the image above for a larger version.

The International Herald Tribune published a piece back in early April on the life of professional bloggers. The article notes that some bloggers on professional sites can make $30K with the top bloggers up to $70K. But it comes with a cost; these bloggers are chained to their computers, constantly trying to scoop the rest of the blogosphere:

Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else's post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.

This a good piece to share with professional writing students. While being a paid, professional blogger might sound idyllic, the self-imposed "digital sweatshop" requires a certain type of writer ready for an always-on, stressful career. Makes me amazed that Dennis hasn't burned out by now given that he's been blogging longer than all but a very small majority of bloggers on the web (about 9 years).

Wired Campus News noted earlier this week that HP has joined Intel, OLPC, and Asus with their own ultra mobile PC (UMPC), the HP Mini Note PC. There are a variety of configurations, including Windows Vista or SUSE Linux flavors with either a flash-based or more traditional mechanical hard drive. The cheapest model comes in at $499 with SUSE Linux and a 4GB SDHC.

I took a brief look, and it appears that the HP Mini Note is only available on the government and small and medium business purchase sections of the HP website. The obvious intention is that this will be a machine for classroom use or within industry. Is HP missing out on the individual consumer market that is growing because of the Eee PC? Why is it that education is seen as the potential market for inexpensive UMPC's and not individual consumers?

Best Buy now has the Eee PC in stock. Both the Linux and XP versions are $399. It appears that the Linux version is only being offered for purchase online.

Ars Technica has a short piece commemorating the ten year anniversary of the Free Software Summit where open source was presented as a philosophy of software development which extended free software ideology.

I'm back from CCCC, and I am happy to announce that the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) voted to approve a formal resolution regarding open source software usage in education. While the formal resolution has not been posted yet at the CCCC website (check back here later), the original draft which was submitted to CCCC can be viewed online.

It is important to be clear that this resolution is not a mandate requiring open source software usage. Rather, it states that open source software should be considered by CCCC in any software acquisition and that CCCC recommends that other educational institutions and organizations do the same.

This is a very sensible view on why not to use digital rights management. Ars Technica reports on one video game company who does not believe in including DRM copy protection on their video games because the pirates are not part of their customer base and likely will never buy the product: