Month: May 2005

Me2Me … Very Interesting

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I just read a great post over at Copyfight by Jason Schultz, INDUCE’s biggest threat: Me2Me apps. Jason describes the me2me application as the devices that allow you to share with yourself — I don’t think doing that causes blindness or anything else your grandmother may have told you. But, it does worry the hell out of the RIAA and the MPAA. Jason contends that this new breed of software or hardware (think Apple’s Airport Express and Tivo’s Home Media) could be the next scary thing:

This is, of course, the RIAA and MPAA’s worst nightmare. Both industries have based their business models on controlling each and every permutation of playback for their content. The RIAA wants to make you pay when you buy the CD, when you download the iTune, when you listen to an Internet webcast, etc. The MPAA wants to charge you at the theater, for every copy of a DVD you buy, and (via advertising) for every show you watch on TV. Yet the more and more we as users and consumers are allowed to control and choose our own form of playback, the less Hollywood can justify charging us for each one. The more utility we get out of Me2Me apps, the less we’re willing to pay someone for an extra copy or delivery mechanism. In the end, Me2Me technology may pose a larger threat to Big Content’s bottom line than P2P ever did.

It just sort of jumped out at me that this seems like it should be the era of personal media — what with all these digital lifestyle devices showing up on the scene. I usually don’t like to take huge quotes out of context, but I thought it was a good one. At any rate it makes me wonder how it will come down given the potential for growth in the academic podcasting space and the ease of remixing media — I am seeing this stuff explode and if this scares the hell out of the powers that be, then it could spell the end to personal media management as we’ve come to expect it. Now, back to reality … even Jason says that, “Me2Me technology, however, would be much much harder to outlaw. Many Me2Me uses would arguably be fair or non-infringing uses.” He says that in comparison of how the RIAA and MPAA in the Grokster case were able to show that over 90% of P2P use is for infringement … still it leaves me wondering.

This would be an interesting discussion for some students … any thoughts?

ID3 Tags for Podcasts

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I am running down the PGSIT 2005 assignment track now that I am starting to have an idea of what we are going to do. I wrote a little bit about it yesterday — I even got a few emails from people with some ideas that I’ll share later. Today I just wanted to drop this great podcast resource in so I’d have it for the scholars. This one is from Podcast 411 and its a little tutorial on how to use meta data and ID3 tags the right way. Very useful.

Podcasting for Education … Sparking An Idea

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I was pointed to this by a couple of people and I thought it would be worth a quick post … The NY Times ran a piece about how a professor at Marymount Manhattan College has been remixing media to make museum tours more interesting to students, With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour – New York Times. Here’s a quick quote:

The creators of this guide, David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan College, and a group of his students, describe it on their Web site as a way to “hack the gallery experience” or “remix MoMa,” which they do with a distinctly collegiate blend of irony, pop music and heavy breathing. It is one of the newest adaptations in the world of podcasting – downloading radio shows, music and kitchen-sink audio to an MP3 player.

It got me thinking about the upcoming PA Governor’s School for Information Technology and how we could have the kids do the same thing … I was talking with my wife, Kristin — who by the way was quoted in the New York Times herself the other day — about how we could use this concept to have the kids create sound seeing tours of the PSU/PGSIT experience. What we’ve been doing each of the last six years we’ve been running the program is to task the kids with a large, overarching IT-related challenge. In the past we’ve had them figure out how to take a large bank online, how to create a next generation (legal) music distribution company, how to secure our airports, and more.

This is the last year for the PGSIT and we’d like to do something that pulls together all the stuff we’ve been looking at in the open source, podcasting, and the read/write web space. I think we’ll have the kids compete to create a design for the PGSIT Alumni Site that pulls together blogging, discussions, podcasts, and potentially a friendster like set of opportunities. You know, a space that they’d actually use … At any rate, that’s what I’m thinking … anyone have ideas out there?

iPod Teaching … ADCE Repeat

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I wrote quite a while back about a little tool my friend Bart Pursel showed me, iStory. We’ve actually built an “interactive case study” with it to go along with our Online IST 302 course we’ve recently finished up. Bart had a very linear case study about scope management built that was just going to be a series of pages (html) in the course … I guess I should say that Bart’s the lead in our Office of Learning Solutions here at the Institute and his primary focus is a concept he calls gaming for non-entertainment purposes. Lots of people are looking at that space, but Bart is a gamer, he understands games, and as a bonus he understands how to drop the game concept on top of learning needs. Good stuff.At any rate, when Bart started talking about this thing it was right around the time we bought a bunch of iPods for research purposes … it was well before Universities (Duke, Drexel, and Georgia State come to mind) really started looking how to deploy them on a large scale to support teaching and learning. We came across the iStory Creator software from iPodSoft and started playing with it. Long story short … Bart took his linear case study and developed a first beta of it as an interactive game that teaches people the concepts of scope management — all on the iPod. Its actually pretty cool … loads into the notes section of the iPod and allows you to make decision ala the old “choose your own adventure books” us geeks loved when we were kids.

I’ve been talking with one of the developers at iPodSoft — the guy in charge of the OSX version of iStory and he gave me a heads up on some of their next steps with the Mac version of the product … I just thought I’d share them with you here because there are tons of things you can do with this software (and the notes section of the iPod in general). First of all, take these with a grain of salt as with any software roadmap, its in flux (scope management anyone?) … here are some of the highlights from my friend:

1.0

  • Export as webpage (use one of 3 included themes or create your own)
  • Greater control over the HTML output of the websites

2.0

  • New iTunes like partner app that lets you manage all your notes, sync them with iPod and also download new ones via an iTunes Music Store like interface for the iStories on the iPodSoft site
  • This next thing is unconfirmed as I have just come up with it but I think it would be really cool to have in. I’ll try and confirm it in the next few days. The ability to set up your own server for downloading notes, where you can download via the partner app and upload via iStory itself. For example, a teacher could put notes up on the server for students to download. We would also like to add the ability to add images to notes, but we would need apple to add an image tag to the iPod Photo’s notes for that to work. If you could find out anything about this that would be great.

Notice that little request in there at the end? At any rate, you hear that iPod people … open this puppy up a little and great things can happen! By the way, this isn’t a commercial for the tool, its merely me pointing out a tool that let’s you do some interesting things with the iPod. I’d love it if any of you have used this tool before and have any general comments … or what the heck you are doing with the iPod in and outside your classroom in general.

iTunes, Podcasting & Teaching … We’ll See

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I wasn’t even going to bother with this … seems like forever ago that it hit the press, but Steve unleashed a little tidbit about native podcasting support in the next version of iTunes. That’s a nice step forward … here are a couple of pointers to some stories about it all.

I guess I expected this given all the smiles and winks I’d been given the last six months or so when talking with my friends from Apple about iTunes. What was really nice to see was the statement about adding upload functionality to the service. Downloading podcasts is a nice little feature, but the upload and share opportunity is what unlocks the important doors. When you consider iTunes is a free, cross platform solution you can see how much impact it could have on our classrooms. I’ve seen iTunes as a powerful content management solution for some time and the fact that Apple has continued to quietly add features just reinforces that (think pdf and video support) it is moving more in that direction.

I was linking into the iTMS from my Edison Services Syllabus during the Fall semester to point students to audio books I had listed to and music I was trying to turn them on to. This takes it a step further … if I understand it correctly we can all be stars in the iTMS … but that’s a big if … I am holding out to actually see these upload capabilities, but if they are there we’ll all be talking about that quite a bit more. Think how cool it’ll be to put your own podcasts into the store, author iMixes that has your stuff and a whole boatload of real stuff — audio books, songs, and other podcasts. A single click from my syllabus and students have an entire lecture series ready to go. The possibilities could be endless. I’m really looking forward to testing this out … does anyone think it’ll actually work this way? All I know is that I teach this Summer, this Fall, & this Spring so I’ll be pushing the limits of this stuff!

Blogs@SI … Interesting Events

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I just posted over at our pilot Blogs@SI site … the numbers are exploding — for us. Tonight there were over 600 visitors online. That’s up from a high of about 40 the last couple of days. I am really interested in figuring out where people are hearing about the space and how they are getting there. Any comments about that?

The Apple Digital Campus Exchange Is Alive

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Lots of work by lots of people went into making this happen … I am proud of the inital launch — and am happy to hear that in the first day we attracted over 100 new members to the space! Not bad for what we are calling a soft launch … if you call being dropped into Apple’s Hot News section a soft launch! Very cool. There is a very well designed set of pages available to the public and an even better area behind the membership space … get an account!

I’ve added a couple of posts, including one this morning about how the new ADC Exchange can be viewed as a good model for blogging in education over at my new blog, Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning in a Digital World. My friend D’Arcy Norman has been active in the space as well … I can’t thank him enough for taking the time and adding to the conversation! There are lots of smart people over there adding their thoughts and I imagine as more members join, the conversation is going to just get richer. I am looking forward to it. Let me know what you think!

The ADCE? A Living Example …

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As I am starting to really get around a bit here at the ADC Exchange it dawned on me that it is so close to a very powerful model for classroom utilization of blogs … we are missing a couple key components, but the start is really quite impressive given how all this came about (another story for another day). Right now, there are several blogs, written by several people, that cover critical themes related to the concepts of pervasive computing. All that is really missing is the front-end aggregator blog to pull it all together. What a learning environment! I have seen several good examples of the multi-user blogging system in place and it makes for quite a powerful conversation space.I teach with technology — I’ve done that since I started teaching six years ago. I am more than comfortable blowing things up and seeing where and how the pieces land. Students tend to get frustrated in the first week and say things like, “what the hell is going on here?” … but after that week, they come around, get excited, and get involved. That to me is the key to all this — trying things that will make the content, material, activities, and the other stuff of learning come to life. It sorts of fits that first level of instructional strategies — motivation. The technology aspects provide a spark … and I have to say the fact that students see their professor trying new things seems to get them interested in what I have to say. I guess they realize that I’m not worried about looking dumb or out of touch. Its kind of cool when you let your guard down, let your students call you by your first name (like friends tend to do), and just enter the learning space with them.

But, back to the Exchange place … the tool that drives this and all the other blogs is WordPress — IMHO, the best single user blogging tool available (did I mention its free?). It is so easy to install and get running. I used this instead of my University’s Learning Management System (LMS), ANGEL last fall and my students loved it. We looked at why they did and it just blew me away how much more they used the space than the “old-fashioned” message boards of the past. I have posted about some of these experiences in my Learning & Innovation blog, so head over to see some results. Interesting stuff. If you gave each student a space like this (or even, dare I say a Blogger space), let them respond to interesting questions, encourage them to write about what is meaningful to them, and them put a single access point at the front end in place (an aggregator) you’d have a very powerful, semi permanent learning environment. What do I mean by that? My goal with using a blog to encourage discussion last semester was to start a longitudinal space for students to use semester after semester. In the LMS world, once you finish the semester, the space is locked down and unusable by new members of your courses. Why must we start every semester from scratch? Why can’t our students stand on the shoulders of their previous peers? I think they can — but the tools have to support it.

Sorry for the rant, but it is nice to see a space like this with multiple perspectives all discussing a similar topic – sort of feels like a class. I think as you make your way around here, you should get sparks of ideas for how to change the landscape of your classrooms … doing so my provide either your students or you with the motivation to learn some new stuff. Isn’t that what education is all about? If you want to discuss any ideas, just drop a comment or email any of us! We’re dying to get the conversation started!