Flickr Graph is a visualization tool that looks at the social relationships inside flickr.com. It lets you visually see contact connections between yourself and others. Type in a username and see a display of their contacts. Click on contact and see their connections. Another example of someone taking advantage of the API’s built into Flickr.

Something Less Than A Cadillac
Tim Stahmer has a great post today about a computer based literacy program that Los Angeles Unified invested over $50 million dollars in and found that their results are less than stellar… Tim asks some very good questions…

Is it really a good thing to have five and six-year olds sitting in front of computers drilling their reading skills? Is this kind of drill and practice software the best use of $50 million? Couldn’t that money have been spent on programs that put the students in contact with people instead of machines?

I have to agree with him. I’m a firm believer that access to technology is something that needs to be appropriate and developmentally sound. Having five year olds sit in front of a computer screen for over 30 minutes a day seems just crazy to me. There is a difference between using technology as a tool for research and self expression, and using technology to bypass the interaction between student and teacher. I wonder how many additional teachers $50 million could of bought that could of lowered class size?

Google Maps
This looks pretty interesting… Found this on The Tao of Mac along with posts to some other interesting map tools… Take a look at Map24. A very slick Java based map web application. More about Google Maps below…

Maps are great for getting around, but online maps could be a lot better. So Google decided to make dynamic, interactive maps that are draggable — no clicking and waiting for graphics to reload each time you want to view the adjacent parts of a map. Want to be able to type in the name of a region or neighborhood and see any part of it as easily as with a regular street map? Now you can with Google Maps.

Since these maps are draggable, you can use your mouse or the directional arrows to pan left, right, up and down to see areas that are hidden offscreen. You can also use the slider to zoom in and zoom out.

It’s like having a huge map you can scroll around in.

BetterSearch - A Firefox Extension For Enhancing Search Engines

An extension for Firefox which enhances Google, MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, AllTheWeb, del.icio.us and Simpy.com. Adds a thumbnail preview of web pages and Amazon product images. Also adds the following links: “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine”…