I am back from a long drive down to Virginia to pick up my two older daughters from college. On the way down, I listened to a fair amount of Sarah Vowell’s book, “The Wordy Shipmates”, about the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Company. It is fascinating and well written and made the long drive down in the rain, which fortunately never turned to freezing rain along my trip, go much more quickly.

I arrived in Staunton, VA at around two in the morning and went quickly to sleep. In the morning, I arose, and spent much time with my daughters as they loaded their stuff in the car and we ran some final errands before driving back to Connecticut.

We had some time to talk, and I talked about technology and blogging, and they talked about their classes. However, they were tired from their semester and spent much of the trip back resting.

Before going down to pick them up, I purchased a small FM transmitter that plugs into iPods, so we could listen to their iPods on the trip back.

Other parts of the trip included time thinking about the nature of comments on blogs, and more importantly newspaper sites, which I hope to write more about later, as well as further reflections on teaching technology in public schools. One thought that I want to compare is how at least one part of teaching technology today, is perhaps the twenty first century equivalent of teaching penmanship.

Yet each of these topics requires much more thinking than I’m ready to do after a long drive.