Hi all,

There are some fantastic ideas on this site. Then there are some not so fantastic ideas on this site. When in doubt, I let my students have a look and tell me their gut reaction. So when they saw the (now aging) discussion over the "hipster PDA" some days ago, it caused some of the most raucous fits of laughter all year.

They, and now I, would like to know whether the "pen-and-paper PDA" was a big joke... right? I mean, are people really congratulating each other for carrying around paper and a pen in their pocket to keep track of their lives? Er, did we just reinvent something? Most of my students are from upper Harlem. They don't come from families that can buy $600 Treo devices so for them, a crumpled napkin and a half-broken pencil is about as efficient and good of a "PDA" as anything else. Except they don't call it the "hipster PDA"--as they chimed in yesterday, they call it "common sense." As one of them concluded, next thing we know, we'll be hearing about blog posts about how awesome it is to read a book in paper form rather than online, because that way we can take notes in real-time without digital mediation, and that increases productivity, and hence it is an amazing idea.

Or a big joke.