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Wednesday, December 13, 2006 |
Complete Mozart Works Now Free. An anonymous reader writes "Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works available for the first time free on the Internet. Although most classical music is obviously too old to be under copyright, the rights to specific editions of pieces are owned by the publishers. Now, the International Mozart Foundation has acquired the right to publish the prestigious New Mozart Edition of every Mozart work on the internet. The response has been so overwhelming that the Foundation has been forced to increase their server capacity."[Slashdot]
11:08:04 PM  Google It!.
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Clay Shirky - A Story Too Good to Check - Valleywag. Clay Shirky has admirably put into text the reasons to be sceptical about second life. And I like the way he connects the hype with the source: "the press has a congenital weakness for the Content Is King story. Second Life has made it acceptable to root for the DRM provider, because of their enlightened user agreements concerning ownership." Looking beyond the hype, which as Shirkey notes is "push-driven" we see a set of dubious numbers which, even if charitably interpreted, amount to no more than a few tens of thousands of users, and "in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error." I agree with his prediction, that Second Life is a "try me" virus, "where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited." Via Tuttle. [Link] [Tags: Digital Rights Management (DRM)] [Comment] Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ OLDaily RSS 2.0, December 13, 2006. [Conversation]
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11:06:02 PM Google It!.
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College cheaters, Katrina's children. December 13th How's this for a headline? None expelled this semester 70 percent of students across nation admit to cheating Amazing news, isn't it? None expelled for cheating this semester. It's from Monday's Chicago Flame, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This should be a sobering story for Secretary of Education Spellings as she tries to spread NCLB's teaching-to-the-test madness to higher education. If you believe the statistics in this story, either UIC students are pretty slick or testing security is weak. _______________________________ What do these kids need besides lectures on "being responsible"? If this NBC Nightly News story doesn't grab you, you're dead. Sixteen months and billions of dollars after Katrina, why are thousands stuck in cities like Houston and Atlanta? Why are these students "raising themselves"? Where is their new housing? Where are the new schools with extra resources for these neediest kids Mike Klonsky's Small Talk, December 14, 2006. [Conversation]
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11:02:26 PM Google It!.
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Timeline software with AJAX. Mike Winiski of Furman University points to an interesting AJAX application called Timeline. It is part of the SIMILE project at MIT and is basically: a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Timelines are something that my upper elementary teachers use and have their students create. It would be interesting to work with some of them to learn how to do this. I'd like to get some of our students using these types of tools to develop timelines based on specific assignments, not to mention it could come in handy when explaining timelines to parent groups for things like curriculum adoptions, and for viewing the school's yearlong calendar. Technorati Tags: Mike Winiski, timeline Bookmark to: Education/Technology, December 14, 2006. [Conversation]
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10:59:30 PM Google It!.
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EduTools ePortfolio Review. The WCET EduTools study of seven ePortfolio tools has been completed and is online:In the Spring of 2006, EduTools and ePAC International undertook the review of seven ePortfolio products on the behalf of seven partner institutions or systems of institutions. In consultation with ePAC and the project partners, a set of 69 electronic portfolio features were identified and defined by Bruce Landon. Based on those features, reviews were conducted and completed in April 2006. According to the agreement with the partners, the feature set and reviews are now available for public use. E-Portfolios for Learning, December 14, 2006. [Conversation]
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10:57:50 PM Google It!.
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Video Search by Phonetics. One of the holy grails of technology is video search. What if you could search a database of video for clips that say this or that. Efforts have centered on voice to text technologies, but Nexidia is taking a different approach, something that they call Speech Intelligence. Their technology listens for phonetics, the same thing that we listen for. This Google video plays an interview with the company's SVP for Marketing and Product Management, Anna Convery. Think about the possibilities of teachers being able to create their own digital multimedia learning environments (textbooks), when they can search news and entertainment archives, and remix their findings into instructional media. OK, admittedly, U.S. copyright law has a ways to go in order to adapt this this sort of remix classroom. But do they have a choice? Technorati Tags: warlick education video technology search nexidia speechintelligence Plesser, Andy. "Nexidia Is Pioneering Video Searc 2 Cents Worth, December 13, 2006. [Conversation]
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3:21:29 PM Google It!.
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Who links to You?. This is a follow on to my post yesterday about transparency. There are many ways to find out who is linking to you without the added transparency that mybloglog.com offers. If you simply want to know who is linking to you there are many choices. Who Links to me is a site that aggregates many of these tools. What is interesting is the wide diversity in results. Here are the recent results on my blog as an example. Google Page Rank for this page: 6 Yahoo! has found 39,200 links to this site. MSN Search has found 1,928 links to this site. Blogrolling.com has found 16 blogrolls that contain this link. Google Backlink Search: 1,540 Alexa Traffic Details: did not work Technorati Search: 489 links (or 219 links from 123 sources Icerocket Search: 137 sources Del.icio.us Bookmarks: no history I guess I should set up something in del.icio.us. I do not do enough to promote this blog. Do you know of other tools? What has been your experience? Portals and KM, December 13, 2006. [Conversation]
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3:19:29 PM Google It!.
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Uncanny moment in Second Life. On the theme of the uncanny and Second Life, consider this screenshot from Steven Kaye, who was visiting Warren Ellis: The most apparent creepy aspect is perhaps the desolate ground, gray and lifeless for much of the observable area. A boulder offsets the layer of human habitation. Peer a bit closer in, and you'll see some floating bits. Those are things belonging to Steve's avatar, including a collar. His body failed to appear by that moment. Another twist on the missing body part meme. This is surreal, funny, and a bit disturbing. It's somewhere between memorial and puppet, the objects standing in for the body in a provocative way. Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education, December 13, 2006. [Conversation]
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3:16:08 PM Google It!.
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Data formats for digital democracy: XML vs CSV. As a first experiment I grabbed the DCStat reported-crime feed for November, sucked it into Excel 2003, consolidated incidents by day, pivoted them on type of offense (homicide, burglary), and exported them back out as a CSV (comma-separated value) file that Swivel could import. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] Here's one of those pivot tables in Swivel. The auto-generated charts don't do much for this style of dataset. But the point of this week's column is that just publishing a named dataset, along with pointers to the raw data, is inherently valuable. ... Jon's Radio, December 13, 2006. [Conversation]
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3:14:23 PM Google It!.
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OpenOffice.org 2.1 Released With New Templates. Several readers wrote in to mention the release of OpenOffice.org 2.1. It includes support for 64-bit Linux and a number of other improvements, including multiple monitor support for Impress, improved Calc HTML export, and automatic notification of updates. Also, all of the templates and clip-art that were submitted for the template contest are available to download.[Slashdot]
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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