Links and Resources: September 3rd, 2008

When one teaches, two learn.
– Robert Half

On with the links.

• Deb Perelman over at ZDnet.com adds her 2 cents on why tech jobs possibilities remain good as employment starts to erode in other sectors.
  
• Jim Lanzalotto draws the same conclusion in a ComputerWorld piece titled Despite recession talk, it's still a good time to be in IT. You'll find a number of comments that don't necessarily agree with him and you should take a look at them too. I like the one where the guy says he'd tell his kids to join the circus rather than go into Science, Technology Engineering and Math (STEM). Okay ... there certainly aren't any foreigners in circus acts or any really popular circuses from foreign countries.
  
• Here are a couple of links related to the cost of college. The first is from the Everett Herald's James McCusker entitled Can we afford higher education's external costs. In brief, the debt students accumulate changes their behavior after graduation (a dentist won't practice in a rural area, for instance). McCusker asks if society can afford that externalization of the high cost of college. In the current issue of Money magazine, they ask "Is college still worth the price". Short answer is yes, with a maybe. Long answer is no, with a however.
  
• In a recent post on podcasting I mentioned that LibriVox provides free audio books for works in the public domain. If eBooks are more your thing, you'll want to check out the The Gutenberg Project. Concept is the same, works are in the public domain so they can be made available free. Looks like they have sheet music, audio books and DVDs too. Also look at the Internet Archives, which is a wealth of all sorts of public domain/open source materials. You can download episodes of You Bet You Live with Groucho Marx (no, he wasn't the leader of the Soviet Union, that was Harpo).
• Wordle is an internet based application that creates a word cloud of your blog, feed or text string. A word cloud graphically represent the frequency of word use through font size, placement, color, etc. Here's an example of one I created of the Advisory Bored on September 2nd. What can you do with it? I have no idea. The last link is is suppose to be fun. Were you planning on building a Teddy Bear that is interfaced with your computer?
  

Post script: I was finishing the Wordle link at midnight in Seattle. At that very moment Jeff Utecht, a teacher at a school in Thailand tweets (that's a Twitter message) that his U Tech Tips blog has a post from Dennis Harter, a teacher in Bangkok, called Wordle - DIY Word Clouds. Dennis suggests a couple of interesting uses for Wordle. That's globalization and the internet at work for you.

Tags: Education, IT Jobs, College Costs, James McCusker, Money Magazine, LibriVox, Internet Archives, Gutenberg Project, Jeff Utecht, U Tech Tips, Dennis Harter, Wordle