Last week during class we had a guest speaker teleconference in to give a lecture on the use of technology in education. The lecture had some interesting parts, but I felt that much of it was pedantic and outdated, and it sometimes felt that he didn't quite know that he was speaking to a room of people that are generally well versed in the magic of YouTube and the internet.

The professor made some interesting connections between the technologies that have been used in the past and their more contemporary counterparts, but largely it was an exploration of tools that have been around for many years and are widely known. I felt distracted during the lecture by his almost insincere excitement surrounding ideas like blogging as a pedagogical tool.

My favorite part of the lecture was his examples of work being done in the field, because it did show some unique implementation of the current technology.

In other news, the work on my project is going well. I am trying to clean up my prototype so that it is cleaner and clearer for the expo on Wednesday. I am a bit concerned that the prototype will really not be functional by the expo, because I simply don't have the time to build the back end and put in the time to design the learning activities, but I am hoping that the prototype as is will do for now.

The lit review, however, has been a bit more difficult. I am at home in Seattle right now, and getting information when I don't have the Stanford library handy has been a bit difficult. I have, however, gone onto the libraries site and grabbed about 30 sources that are oriented toward chronic unemployment solutions, vocational training, adult learning, and internet job searching. Some are scholarly journals, but most are books and government reports, so I hope that I can synthesize them into something readable in the few days after I get back.

Alright, time to get back to reading.