A new tablet designed specifically for education. Just became available for pre-sales. Scheduled to ship Dec 20. Looks very interesting. It's being marketed toward a higher ed audience, but it will be interesting to see if interest and development spans to secondary and elementary as well.

This is a video of a talk that Lawrence Lessig (Professor, Stanford Law School) gave for an organization. In his talk, Lessig provides a powerful and piercing analysis and critique on the impact that legal restrictions on the re/use of media resources has on creativity and cultural production. During his talk, Lessig shows some remarkably creative mash-ups videos on YouTube to exemplify the kind of creativity/cultural production that is possible through ubiquitous digital media. Ironically, the organization that hosted the talk received a notice from Warner Bros Music after posting a video of the Lessig's talk on YouTube, which, according to Lessig's blog, "objected to its being posted on copyright grounds." Warner Brother Music Group has implemented content-id algorithms (i.e., technology that detects the digital "fingerprint" of corporate-"owned" copyrighted works) through media hosting services, including YouTube, FaceBook, and others. When the video of Lessig's talk was posted, it was 'dusted' for fingerprints of WBMG copyrighted works. The detection system identified the soundtracks in the YouTube videos Lessig showed, as materials to which they held copyright. Both the video of Lessig's talk and the blog conversation regarding WBMG's objection are must-see resources.