Interesting Items – December 13, 2008

• Wired Campus: 3 of the Funniest E-Mail Messages From Students to Professors — and What They Say About Technology – Chronicle.com

– This has some fun emails in it from students, but what is really telling about this article is the comments.

A discussion starts up between PhD’s and Techie’s. They both seem to attack each other for their own inferiority. For the Techie’s it’s the lack of a higher ed degree (according to the PhD’s). For the PhD’s, it a lack of knowledge about computers (according to the Techie’s).

This actually makes me a little sad since I have always seen us as colleagues. Can’t we all just get along and do our best to move the goals and visions of the University and academia forward? 🙂

• 10 Things About Lively

– This is a list created by students about what Lively (Google’s Virtual world) taught them. Good list for any virtual learning.

• iSpring Converter | Converter PowerPoint to Flash Converter

– This is a nice new way to convert powerpoints to flash for presentations. There is a freeware version as well! Thanks Neil for finding this!

• John M. Perez.Com: The 25 Best Alternatives To Your Enterprise Applications & Functions

– As we move even further into hard economic times, these open source alternatives are becoming even more important! Great collection here I got from a colleague!