The NYT is a technology hub this morning and some of these articles are worth sharing
Digital Classrooms Digital Textbooks

I’ve Got Mail

Breakfast Can Wait. The Day’s First Stop Is Online.
It's quite interesting to read the second and third articles in conjunction with each other. Both articles identify this tug that information (or the possibility of new information) has on our collective consciousness. In my mind, and in my experience, this constant 'waiting for something to happen (email/facebook/blog update) promotes, again this is for myself, a state of tension that is difficult to identify unless I'm distinctly cut off from them. My previous position was at a company who did everything through email and in the IT section where I worked we used IM (instant messaging) to share information. Thus typically some sort of informational message was constantly popping into my screen. Transitioning from that comapny to the college library where I know where was surprisingly difficult in the mental transition of setting goals for the day. Where I was used to my day being a reactive one based on the information pumped into my computer, at the library on a busy day I may get 10 emails. This seriously blew my mind the first two weeks of working here and I find myself staring at Outlook and whacking away at the F9 button to make sure there weren' any message hanging just outside of the range of the computer's consciousness.
One of the questions I think that we as a culture and a nation, possibly a world, are going to have to address is what is a good relationship to the amount of technology and information to which we have access to? I don't think we have successfully done this yet. There are many books dealing with exploring what the technology and information have done to our society and some of those effects but I'm not sure if we've begun to grapple with how to successfully navigate them as the second article points out. The idea of a machine updating ties nicely into the evolutionary concept that progress is continually happening and that things are consistently getting better.
If any of the 3-4 readers of this blog know of any, or even any blog postings/articles that may deal with this I would be interested in reading them, so please feel free to share.