On a mailing list of media educators, I heard about an article in Wired about corporations and people at the CIA editing articles in Wikipedia. A CalTech grad student built an application to track where anonymous edits were coming from and found that people from Diebold, Walmart and others were editing articles about their companies and that the CIA was editing articles on just about everything, including an entry which “deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.”.

Twenty-four years ago, I spent eight months traveling around the United States and Europe. This year, Noel Hidalgo is on “an open-source journey around the world documenting free culture, social innovators and global change”

Recently, he interviewed Dirk Slater about eRiders. Stop by and watch the video. Also, if you can spare some change, toss it Noel’s way. Now that Beth Kanter has raised the money she needs for her trip to Cambodia, I’m updating the widget I have to point to Noel’s effort.

Back here in Connecticut, Andy Thibault continues his excellent coverage of the Avery Doninger Case. His latest post is about the amount of money that the school district is paying their lawyer to thwart openness.

The Journal Inquirer adds more to the discussion. This paragraph from their article jumped out at me:

When attempts at compromise failed, Doninger, a community college instructor who has been researching the First Amendment in a doctoral program in educational leadership, said she and Avery decided to bring the matter to court.

From the little bit that I’ve read, Avery is pretty lucky to have such a cool mother and the community college where she is an instructor is pretty lucky to have her as well. If I were at Gateway Community College, I’d probably sign up for one of her classes based on how she has handled herself in this course. I wish her luck on her doctoral thesis and I hope that she gets some useful material for her dissertation.

As a final note, when I was preparing for my presentation last week on educational opportunities in Second Life, I took a little bit of time looking at the Idaho Bioterrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program website.

I’ve been feeling pretty run down recently. I believe it is from all the dust that our moving is stirring up aggregating my dust allergy. I noticed on Facebook many of my friends updating their statuses about whichever cold they were currently fighting. This made me stop and think, how do tools which promote constant partial attention fit in with any bioterrorism or epidemic situation? I remember back in 2001, I was active in a few online chat rooms and when the planes crashed into the World Trade Centers, many of us connected via these chat rooms. If we ever face a massive epidemic, how will people communicate online?