Rethinking School

As a native of Los Angeles I can say that gangs have always been (at least in my living memory) a feature of life there. I am delighted in hearing that there are new ways of trying to get past problems that so many have written off as being ‘incurable’, and these solutions seem to be working. While we don’t have the same set of societal issues in Ireland, there are lessons to be learned from this that could be applied here.

Perhaps I’m hard-wired for optimism, but there is something about this that definitely gives me hope.

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Burn your books, readers are coming

This is fairly off topic for me but today I will write about technology [and I do so knowing the proper tech blogging crew probably covered this three years ago!], namely the hand held gadget called a Reader. I recently received one for Christmas (my wife gets me all the cool stuff I own – iPods etc.) and despite being a confirmed bookworm I am totally impressed with the Reader, and of course there are other makers as well (amazon etc.).

So why burn your books? Well, find some storage anyway because the written word is likely, over time to go the same route as music did. It makes sense on several levels and the points are below.

1. Books take up space, physical space, my house is full of books, my desk at work is too, I am a book lover, I wouldn’t say I have a ‘private library’ but I do have a damn big book collection. If I could fit all of these onto a small hard drive and …

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