DWD's Reviews

A Must Read for Early 21st Century America? Published by Listening Library in 2010 Performed by Kirby Heyborne Duration: Approximately 12 hours Unabridged. I've had Little Brother on my to-be-read list for while. But, it shot to the top of my list when it was pulled as the book in a "one book/one school" project at a Florida high school. I picked up the audiobook and my daughter and I listened as we commuted to school every day (she is a freshman at the school where I teach. The story is about Marcus, a teenager in San Francisco who is a hacker, skips school and is, generally speaking, a pretty with-it kid. I imagined him as a Ferris Bueller-type kid with a lot more tech at his disposal and in a much more serious situation. Marcus and three of his friends are skipping the end of school when the Bay Bridge and the tunnel underneath it are blown up by terrorists in an event that is even larger than 9/11. The Bay Bridge. Photo by Centpacrr. M arcus and his th...

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. Read by Pete Simonelli Duration: 12 hours, 2 minutes Computer expert (to say the least, the man was a pioneer in the field of virtual reality and was at the ground floor in multiple Silicon Valley projects and companies) Jaron Lanier discusses possible futures of the economy and the online community in this rambling, interesting audiobook. The author, Jaron Lanier Lanier spends quite a bit of time discussing what he calls Siren Servers. Siren Servers are massive collectors of data such as search engine sites, credit bureaus, the NSA, and some very large retail sites. These servers collect "free" data from you that is provided by tracking your searches, purchases, phone calls or GPS location on your cell phones and sell it to advertisers. Facebook is a sterling example. Lanier believes that you should be reimbursed for this information through a series of hundreds or even thousands of micropayments which would be used to...

Published in 1991 by Silver Burdett Press 118 pages of text. 8 pages of timelines, sources and an index at the end. This book is part of a larger series (The History of the Civil War Series). It is very readable with a good balance of national history versus the biography of Swedish immigrant inventor John Ericsson, with the glaring exception I note below. John Ericsson (1803-1889) was almost the stereotypical nutty professor type inventor - he never properly patented many of his best inventions. Ericsson built a great number of inventions, but unlike Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, he never really built any industries around them. He seemed to have trouble with personal relationships and was happiest when the was building in his laboratory. John Ericsson (1803-1889) Among other things, Ericsson invented a screw propeller, a "caloric" engine and, most importantly, he was the designer of the famed U.S.S. Monitor, the first ironclad in the Union navy, part...

Meandering book felt more like an expanded magazine article  Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) I am a history teacher and thought The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America might be an interesting new perspective on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution from the perspective of English theologian, philosopher and scientist Joseph Priestley. We get a hefty dose of scientific history which is appropriate but not my area of interest. We don't get a lot of detail on his theological writings that caused him to flee England for America and later made him unpopular with some politicians in America as well. We also get a lot of off-topic meanderings such as his pages full of information on the Carboniferous era (milions of year ago) that form a rhetorical touchstone for the rest of the book but mostly seemed to fill the book with extra pages. In fact, the large-type print, off-topic musings and small number of pages (2...

Enjoyable - offbeat, funny, informative, thought-provoking Published by Brilliance Audio in 2010. Read by Sandra Burr. Duration: 10 hours, 27 minutes. Unabridged.  The point of Mary Roach's Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void is not the technical challenges of sending an object to Mars. We have demonstrated that we can send a probe to Mars, operate it and do a bit of exploring. No, this is about sending a human to Mars, a much more difficult proposition. Mary Roach deals with the following (and more) in her Packing for Mars : -We eat, drink, and create bodily waste. How do we store enough food to make the trip to Mars? -How do we deal with expelling bodily waste in a zero gravity environment (no toilets - everything would just float out!) -What do we do with the waste? Can you recycle it back into food? Who would want to eat that? -Can people actually live together in cramped quarters for months at a time with no break and not kill one...

Henry Jenkins has written several books dealing with technology, media, bloggers, gamers and the like. Now with Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century he has added education to the mix. Jenkins notes several important things about the future of education (which interested me as a teacher). Formal education must address technology. It cannot be just paper and pencil. Technology is part of the modern world's media - it is not just newspapers, books, magazines, TV and movies. There are blogs, social media and a new one I hadn't really considered: video games. Jenkins encourages the use of video games to teach. There are already several games such as Sims and the various history-based empire building games that teach rules and strategies for life. Jenkins cites the example of a young man who learned a lot about Rome (and through Rome, the structures of all societies) by playing an online game, Caesar 3 . The lessons learned ...

Will formal education adapt and evolve to a new reality? Should it? Published in 2009. The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age is a preview or extract of a much larger work the authors are currently writing. In reality, this should be read like a very long magazine article exploring how the digital age may affect and is affecting higher education in particular and to a lesser extent elementary and secondary education. The "book" begins and ends, to its disadvantage, with a lot of jargon-filled commentary such as: "We contend that the future of learning institutions demands a deep, epistemological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution." Yes, yes, yes. This is college writing at its classic wordiness. Fortunately, once we get into the heart of the paper it gets quite interesting and more reader friendly. There are some big, important questions being asked here, such as, ...