Weekend Reading: Umberto Eco prof-crush edition

• At LifeHacker: “Programming 101: Teach Yourself How to Code.”
• “Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset” (.pdf via Howard Rheingold on delicious) documents the ways nonprofits, government agencies, schools, and corporations are using network awareness to facilitate social change.
• This infographic of choose-your-own-adventure books has been widely linked, but that doesn’t make it less awesome.
• I’ve linked to this elsewhere, but it deserves a ProfHacker link, too, esp. in light of last week’s discussion of “Why Students Cheat?”: Kenny Goldsmith, the poet who, among many other laudable achievements, created the avant-garde archive UbuWeb, requires his students to buy a paper from a term paper mill and present it as their own.
• Spiegel has a terrific interview with Umberto Eco about lists.  The interviewers pressed him hard on the question of why he finds lists so interesting, until finally he comes up with a brilliant, brilliant line: “Why am I so interested in the subject? I can’t really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences.” It almost makes up for the fact that he namechecks Dan Brown elsewhere.

If I have to think about Christmas in mid-November, so do you.  At least this is funny:

Do They Know It’s Christmas? from Scott Aukerman on Vimeo.

Don’t forget: You can suggest links through e-mail, or Twitter, or by tagging posts in delicious with profhacker.

Picture of Umberto Eco by flickr user erinc_salor / CC licensed