I like infographics.  I subscribe to the feed for visual.ly, which brings me ten to thirty new infographics each day.  The site itself is a repository of more than 2000 infographics, and growing.  Good infrographics are strong on impact, good at simplification, and well documented.  I can’t say that many of the infographics at visual.ly are strong on documentation.  You need a high powered magnifier to read the tiny print in which the URLs are shown at the bottom of infographics.  And if you do figure out what they are, visiting those sites often does not inspire confidence and sometimes proves...

This is a continuation of my interview with the Academic Technology Systems Administrators about technology planning at Palomar College.  In this part we focus on some rubber meets the road issues like paperless environments, AV technologies, telephony, and lots of other issues.  The written response of the technicians is provided in the post below, and the audio of an interview with them follows the post. Additional Questions for ATRC Staff 1.  Would you support a goal of creating a paperless environment at Palomar College, if it meant that you would not have access to printers and would have to rely...

As I have said, I love books.  When I can’t read, I listen to audio books.  On my short commute to college, or on other road trips, I can “read” 25-35 more books per year than I could if I actually had to physically read them.  Accordingly, after hassling for a long time with checking audio books out of the library, or downloading public domain audio books from Project Gutenberg or LibriVox, I decided it was worthwhile to try Audible.com.  That was a couple of years ago and I haven’t looked back since. I subscribe to what is called an  “AudioListener Gold” account,...

Nick Bilton has an interesting segment in the latest NY Times Techtalk podcast on “controlled serendipity.”  It is his answer to the common problem we all face:  with so much content available, how do you keep up with it without wasting unconscionable amounts of time?  Bilton, along with the rest of us who are working through this problem, suggest the use of an aggregator to sweep the web for content areas in which we are interested.  In Bilton’s case he says it is Twitter, but if you listen to the podcast carefully, Twitter acts as his outgoing distribution channel more than...