RodeWorks

I have always enjoyed shopping in record — now music — stores, but as I see it right now their days are numbered. Yesterday I noticed that the new Jack Johnson Curious George soundtrack is going to $14.99 — its only $9.99 on iTunes and includes a bonus track. Then I was browsing and picked up the new Leo Kotke CD which I’ve been thinking about buying. But I noticed it is copy protected and I can’t rip it to play on my iPod. Is there some much on line trading of Kotke’s music that they need to risk pissing off loyal fans? Well here is one buyer who is not buying!

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I’ve gotten tons of helpful links, reviews, and tips from Lockergnome. This latest one is pretty cool and I’ve added the code to my page. You Firefox and other users of cool web browsing programs will find the RSS link even easier to find.

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I caught a link to this blog today, and have added it to my feeds.  In this post Jeremy provides a very informative concept map for an e-portfolio application.  It’s well worth a look

Jeremy Hiebert’s headspaceJ — Instructional Design and Technology
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Just took a long walk and listened to this podcast along the way.  Great discussion of the issues around PLEs.  One thing I took away was Liber’s point that the WebCT/Blackboard/Sakai/Moodle systems still have a place, but they need a way to integrate their content into other systems a student uses.  How about RSS feeds and a blog API interface.  Then I can pull content out, and add posts back in on a system of my choosing! And these technologies are here now.  We don’t need to take time and money to create something ourselves, as was required in the past.  Just look around — the future is here.

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In my research for a system to help us manage our dialect sound files, I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about Sakai, WebCT and other learning managment systems, as compared to MySpace and FaceBook.com. As an online student myself (using WebCT at Capella U.), a teacher and a technology planner I think the LMS folks are making improvements, but I’ve come to think they are fixing the wrong problems. These LMS’ are still focused on the traditional university - classroom - professor centric model. The students are sort of like spokes on a wheel with the class/faculty member at the hub. Contrast this to the MySpace/FaceBook.com model, which is student centric. The student takes their social life and creates a system where they are at the middle.

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I’ve taken my PowerPoint slides from my talk at the NYPHP meeting last month and posted them.  I just used the plain-vanilla save-to-web feature out of Powerpoint, without too much fancy tweaking.  Of course when viewing just the slides you miss the brilliance of my verbal wit and humor — and no one taped the session, so you had to be there.  Enjoy!