03 July 2002

Ray Kurzweil and Singularity SCIFI.com -- Excellent discussion by Ray Kurzweil on singularity.

Music Labels Grudgingly Sell Songs Online NYT -- The labels know they cannot stop Internet piracy. Several music labels have opened more of their holdings to electronic downloads. This will affect channel sales in High Street. x: 16331

WOD: cynosure cynosure: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. cynosure [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

e-learning on the bleak frontier. eLearn Magazine: In-Depth Tutorials: Learning Objects. Quote: "It's hard not to fall in love with the notion of reusable learning objects. The idea of a world filled with little self-contained lessons that you can assemble into any course you can think of seems so…well…cool. How could you not want something like that? Unfortunately, after five years of struggling with the challenge of finding that world, I have come to the conclusion that I am simply not smart enough to lead the way to the Promised Land of e-learning, where milk and honey flow from the earth and learning objects can be plucked like ripe fruit from fig trees." [Serious Instructional Technology] » What people are learning is that designing re-usable learning objects (RLO's) is no simpler than designing re-usable anything else! So much extra thought and effort has to be expended to understand the context something was designed in and then re-engineer & re-package it for arbitrary other contexts.  It's very hard.   And the tools provided to educators are no more, and often far less, sophisticated than those provided to engineers or software developers doing the same kind of tasks. Other major problems I perceive: models of excellence - do you have a catalogue of really excellent RLO's to learn from yourself? time for excellence - are you being paid to take time to really think hard, design and package RLO's? The storyline metaphor presented in the article is interesting and possibly helpful.  But as the authors point out: Because there's nothing quite like a good concrete example to make a lesson stick, a repeating storyline across the entire arc of a course tends to tie all the lessons together very effectively. We thought about picking a story that would work across all courses, but since we didn't have a clear idea of what all courses (both planned by the client and created by the learner) would be, we couldn't be sure that our storyline would always work. To the contrary, we worried that if some of the stories were different then most or all of them might have to be different, even within a single course. It's a pretty bleak looking frontier alright.   [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Peter Ford's Parent Teacher Night: "Talking with parents tonight at school. It's great to see how many are positive about the effect of weblogs on their child's education. "Weblogs have expanded her horizons," said one. She went on to outline how the whole family across the States have been reading her child's writing and research." If only he knew how true this is as well! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Making iPod Compabile with my TransNote MEDIAFOUR.com -- XPlay from Mediafour makes the iPod handheld digital music player PC-compatible. Industry analyst Charles Wolf of Needham Brokerage predicts that "the iPod running on Windows could capture almost 10% of the fast-growing portable music player market."

Janis Ian Defends File-Sharing JANIS IAN.com -- Janis Ian defends P2P and debunks the RIAA. I listened to many of Ian's 17 albums while going to college. Now Janis has gone articulate, debunking RIAA claims that ripping albums hurts their sales. Free exposure is practically a thing of the past for entertainers. Getting your record played at radio costs more money than most of us dream of ever earning. Free downloading gives a chance to every do-it-yourselfer out there. Every act that can't get signed to a major, for whatever reason, can reach literally millions of new listeners, enticing them to buy the CD and come to the concerts. Where else can a new act, or one that doesn't have a label deal, get that kind of exposure? As artists, we have the ear of the masses. We have the trust of the masses. By speaking out in our concerts and in the press, we can do a great deal to damp this hysteria, and put the blame for the sad state of our industry right back where it belongs - in the laps of record companies, radio programmers, and our own apparent inability to organize ourselves in order to better our own lives - and those of our fans. If we don't take the reins, no one will.