New tinysides are coming soon. That makes me happy.

Copyright law, with respect to K-12 education, is severely broken. I just got an e-mail from a teacher who would like to compose a course that’s made from freely available materials, but how does one put together a broad course using only materials available in the public domain? I think the next step will be writing lots of letters, asking for permission to use this poem and that story. This would not be an issue, except that we want to share the course with other teachers.

Danah Boyd on the death of the English language:

SMS is, of course, taking this to a whole new level. This is pretty
well known outside of the US where SMS-speak has destroyed native
tongues everywhere, but we’re only about a year into massive texting
adoption amongst teens in the States. Now, they’re trying to be
expressive using as few characters as possible. Remember when
secretaries used to learn shorthand? Imagine how fast a teen today
would be at that. Maybe we should train them to be secretaries and give
them phones? Scratch that. But once again, the solution to a
technological limitation is to mess with the English language. Hmm.