The Internet is no more capable than the infrastructures that carry it. Here in the U.S. most of the infrastructures that carry the Internet are owned by telephone and cable companies. Those companies are not only in a position to limit use of the Internet for purposes other than those they favor, but to reduce the Net itself to something less, called “broadband.”

via Doc Searls Weblog · Broadband vs. Internet.

I’m kicking around the idea of building an online “course” of sorts to help people understand how the Internet works.

The real story here today shouldn’t be that Apple has ‘audaciously’ claimed ownership of the books make with iBooks Author but that they have created an avenue for non-commercial distribution that would exclude them entirely. That is actually unprecedented.

via Truly Unprecedented in iBooks 2 – David Smith.

Over 1 million signatures were collected in the recall effort of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  Now we wait as the Government Accountability Board verifies all of the signatures in a secret, undisclosed location.

There’s a live stream of these folks doing their work.  And a Twitter hashtag #recallcam for folks to play along.  @recallcam has led the way as the community has assigned names and stories to the workers, etc.

In an “art imitates life imitates art” moment, I caught the Talking Heads “Burning Down the House” while watching #recallcam yesterday.

My house is out of the ordinary
That’s right, don’t want to hurt nobody
Some things sure can sweep me off my feet
Burning down the house
No visible means of support and you have not seen nothin’ yet
Everything’s stuck together
I don’t know what you expect starting into the TV set
Fighting fire with fire

I’ve listened to this 30 seconds on loop a few hundred times out of utter amazement how well it fits to our situation in Wisconsin over the past year.  Try for yourself.

Apple’s Philip Schiller called iBooks Author “the most advanced, most powerful, yet most fun ebook authoring tool every created.”

via Apple iBooks Author App Lets You Make Your Own Books

Notice Philip doesn’t say “textbook” creator.  It’s solid.

As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it.

via Amazon Kindle: Your Highlights.

Here’s something that caught my eye while reading the Steve Jobs biography.

Most of the dinner conversation was about education. Murdoch had just hired Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to start a digital curriculum division. Murdoch recalled that Jobs was somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education. But Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials.

In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”

Here’s something that caught my eye yesterday.

Apple ‘Education Event’ set for January 19th in NYC

Discuss.

Everybody owning an iPhone needs to check out this week’s This American Life.

A lifelong Apple superfan, Daisey sees some photos online from the inside of a factory that makes iPhones, starts to wonder about the people working there, and flies to China to meet them.

via Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory | This American Life.

Thomas Friedman:

The best of these ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future. The countries that thrive will be those that build more of these towns that make possible “high-performance knowledge exchange and generation,” explains Blair Levin, who runs the Aspen Institute’s Gig.U project, a consortium of 37 university communities working to promote private investment in next-generation ecosystems.

Historians have noted that economic clusters always required access to abundant strategic inputs for success, says Levin. In the 1800s, it was access to abundant flowing water and raw materials. In the 1900s, it was access to abundant electricity and transportation. In the 2000s, he said, “it will be access to abundant bandwidth and abundant human intellectual capital,” — places like Silicon Valley, Austin, Boulder, Cambridge and Ann Arbor.

via So Much Fun. So Irrelevant. – NYTimes.com.

Pretending that artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where competent teachers may be replaced by apps is at best wishful thinking, regardless of what the vendors tell you.

via Wrong : Stager-to-Go.