I starting reading Henry Jenkin's blog a while back and he refers to very interesting things. In one of his latest posts he recommended a novel by Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, and I picked it up on the author's site, ready for my iPhone with a CC license. I also ordered a print copy from Amazon. I just wanted to check it out first. It was a very fun read. I just finished it that same day. It's not too long. It got me thinking about how it could be used in school... I'll not go through convincing the English teachers to assign it (I'm convincing every teacher of doing lots of new stuff with computers), but it would be a fun book to teach (by a geeky teacher). I felt it was sort of instructional, as it explained encryption (back to Turing and the Enigma) and dealt with some interesting privacy and security issues. It also got me thinking again about encrypting mail and IM conversations, and hiding my Internet traffic... yeah, I know, a little paranoid, but encryption of mail is not a bad idea though tough to implement. Thinking of the school, I could do it with the teachers that have their own laptop, but not with the others, getting them to use pgp with their school-issued gmail accounts and FireGpG or enigmail... stop rambling...
Totally recommended read... that was the point. I yet have to look at the educator's guide that comes with it.
