Sarah is signed up for a class that uses a student response unit from eInstruction. I'll be interested to see how well it works, but so far I'm skeptical. First of all there is a $3.75 purchase for the "unit". There is a note that it can be "sold back" to the bookstore (at 50%) at the end of the term... Once you have the unit you simply log in and pay $15.00 to register for your class. So hundreds or thousands of students, having paid tuition to the state, purchased their books form the bookstore, and paid their technology fees to the university they are attending are now asked to pay an additional $15 to a third party so their instructor.

So what do you get for this extra $20 per class? Well, you get the ability to answer questions using a keypad... Answer all the multiple choice questions that someone can throw at you. So you don't have to really learn anything but how to spit back the right choice on a multiple choice quiz or test.

But what else happens? Students are required to give their private information, including credit card information to a third party, not the school, not a store where the student has any choice. Make it easy for the professor to take roll and require that a student give personal information to someone who has no interest in protecting the student's rights. Read more about Technology doesn't make it better

Lakewood studios has a product iList Studio that looks really cool. In a few minutes of working with it however, it falls short. It is missing some critical features. The instructions tell users to use MySQL 4.0, what I didn't see is that this is a requirement because it can't authenticate with later versions of MySQL. Second I can't tell that it deals with relationships which takes away the real power of using a relational database.

It appears to be worth keeping an eye on though. Just not worth the steep price tag yet.

The start of the high school football season is one of the markers of the beginning of a new school year. Dusk comes noticeably earlier now and the long days of summer wain at an ever faster pace.

At the law school the term is underway. Orientation sessions complete, a new group of students are on their way to earning JD degrees. A handful of intense IT projects are underway and the days are never boring.

Redstate.org has an aritcle Sun Tzu At Work? which begins to reveal what is likely behind the half truths of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It reveals that much more than truth the group is after orchestrating a political attack. There is nothing new or surprising about that, as much as it is interesting to see RNC bloggers admitting what the plan is.

What is interesting is that yesterday one of the news shows had a bunch of people from Missouri talking about the election and who they were going to vote for. One in particular stood out as they said that President George W. Bush would get their vote because of his "honesty and integrity". Read more about What the plan is...