Information Literacy in the News

Last week there were some reports that CERN, the world's largest particle physics lab located in Geneva, is prepared to reveal their newest addition to their impressive resume of technological breakthroughs. CERN is the very organization that created the Internet that we know and love today. But what they have done now is create a super-fast Internet to exchange enormous packets of data between research centers. How does this affect us? Well, if the world adopts this newer “grid” as their web-surfing backbone, downloads of huge data packets will be done in seconds rather than minutes. But wait, that's not all!

3 hour movies downloaded in seconds? Full scale audio/visual real time holograms of teachers on another continent beamed into your classroom? Online gaming involving hundreds of players, if not thousands all at once? The possibilities are amazing, if not downright frightening. I’ve always believed that the Internet would get faster and faster as technology progresses, but would that allow for more efficient criminal activity? Even the grid project director Tony Doyle acknowledges the unpredictable nature of such a possibility becoming reality: “The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

Huge indeed. What do you think?

Here’s the link to the story from TimesOnline.uk:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece

Posted by Daryl Bullis at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times published an article this past Thursday (page C1) about the emergence of electronic books. While electronic books have been touted for the last decade or so, this article wonders if they might actually gain prominence this time around, as Amazon.com and Google are two key players. Amazon plans to unveil Kindle in October, "an electronic book reader...[that] will be priced at $400-$500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon's site." Goggle will charge users for access to some digital books, sharing the profits with publishers. The currently available Sony Reader, which costs about $300, can hold up to 80 books and the "battery...lasts for 7,500 page turns." However, Amazon's e-book format is proprietary, and will not work on non-Kindle readers, such as Sony's.

Do you or have you ever used an electronic book reader? Do you see advantages or disadvantages to them? Do you think most people would be willing to move to reading books on a device such as one of these readers?

Cited article:
Stone, B. (2007, September 6). Are books passe?: Web giants envision the next chapter. The New York Times, pp. C1, C9.

Posted by Trudi Jacobson at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)