Here’s what Stephen Downes says about this: “MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) has for some reason set up a Second Life site. It looks like stacks of books. All I’m going to do is pass this information on to you ans wash my hand of it.”

Have purchased one Flip Ultra and one Sony Webbie camera for the FDL. So far, I’d say the Flip is far more intuitive to use, but the Sony seems to take better quality videos.

Love that Skype screen view. So far, seems to work pretty good on both my HP Touchscreen Windows Vista and MacBook Pro – Leopard boxes.

This fall, I finally upgraded my three 3-yr-old iMacs to Leopard from Tiger. Aside from the weird way Apple went with wild cats as names and choose to go up quickly to the undisputed top cat in the food chain and then digressed to a lesser cat, the leopard, I have this to say: It was hardly worth the bother. Tiger worked fine up until I found a program that required Leopard. Now Snow Leopard, maybe never Snow Leopard, but Leopard. Does it run any better? Not on those boxes. Maybe on my brand new iMac, with its 64 bit capabilities – but so far, all this upgrading has been kind of a waste of money and feels a bit like Apple extortion. I say once you buy a computer, the operating system upgrades ought to be free forever after, especially if those upgrades get us any security upgrades.

Lots of folks are taking up with Skype these days, which makes this interview on CNN via Skype all the more interesting to me. Big media is using it to interview big culture (WIRED), about a man who tries to disappear from the grid. So much to discuss in this story!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/09/01/dcl.off.the.grid.intv.cnn

In other Skype news, eBay is selling (did you know eBay owned Skype?). eBay somehow thought people would want to sell and buy using Skype, forgetting that auctions are still a bit unnatural for we Americans. We are a bit embarrassed to barter FTF, and besides, Skype doesn’t let us impulse buy. It forces us to slow down and consider what we’re doing.