From an NYT post: "...the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty - and worse." Read more... (a free registration may be required to view the full article.)

The New Yorker carries an interesting book review by Steven Shapin "What Else Is New?". In reviewing David Edgerton's "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900", Steven states that uses, not innovations, drive human technology. To quote: "As users, we typically want our technology to be a black box; we don't want to be bothered with adjusting it, monitoring it, repairing it, or knowing about its inner workings. A sure sign of the success of a technology is that we scarcely think of it as technology at all."

A new web-based television service, or IPTV, for British Sign Language (BSL) users has recently launched in the UK. VeeSee TV airs news and other programmes in BSL and is available 24 hours a day. Read more...