Matt K. sent me this great link to a gallery of excerpts from student "answers" to questions on math and science exams. Looks pretty real to me, though that's always an open question with hysterical things floating around the Web.
The ninth image is unfortunately rather offensive, but the first eight are pure gold.

I hope, by the way, that everyone has discovered StumbleUpon, which is undoubtedly the most violently aggressive time sink I've ever encountered (I want everyone to be reduced down to my level of productivity, you see). It's basically a link list, but one that has been amped up with the wisdom of crowds and implemented as a FireFox extension (sort of like a time sink implemented as a button — what will they think of next?). It's my absolute favorite way to channel surf the web, and it usually turns up this kind of thing within a few clicks.

I will be adding nothing new to the blogosphere by mentioning this fantastic video by Michael Wesch, which has been careening around the Web faster than a dancing baby.

But I must ask: Does anyone else feel a wave of nostalgia watching this?

As a guide to what's new and cool in the world of web development, it seems to me a little too exuberant regarding something that really isn't all that new or revolutionary. If you're at all involved with Web development, "Web 2.0" is by now pretty old news.

But the video instantly takes me back to something like 1996 when I used to give presentations that sort of looked like this (and I could use terms like "radically decentered" in a talk on hypertext without laughing). Combine that with the earnest techno, the low-tech/live-tech look-and-feel, the "not since Gutenberg" evangelism — I'm just so filled with longing for the days when all that seemed just so cool and exciting.

It's all still cool, of course. In fact, it's probably cooler, given that the technical revolution we're seeing online (full-fledged applications of the sort we could only dream about back in '96) are truly revolutionary. But it's just not the same. Back in the mid-nineties, we looked at the Web (which was appallingly primitive by today's standards) and thought, "This changes Everything." Web 2.0 also changes everything, but not, you know, Everything. The first revolution was sudden. This one is more an evolutionary development to which we all easily and gleefully adapt. Back then, I was frequently asked by bemused audiences of my dev-angelical preaching whether I still liked books. Nowadays, no one would bother to ask such a silly question, because "doing literary studies with computers" doesn't really seem all that weird any more.

Ah, the good old days . . . you know, like, ten years ago.

I've created a 2-up version of why's poignant guide, which brings it down to about 63 pages.

I was an extremely early adopter of the Ruby programming language. In fact, I'm pretty sure I own one of the first printings of the first pickaxe book. There's even evidence to suggest that I was one of the first people to teach a course in Ruby at the college level. I'm not often so ahead of the curve, but there it is. I was way into Ruby way before it became fashionable.

And yet, somehow I managed to miss why's (poignant) guide to Ruby — an online tutorial on Ruby that comes close to being a graphic novel.

Thanks to Brett Barney of CDRH for pointing this out. He is obviously way, way, way ahead of the curve.