Blurts

I applied for access to Google Music beta when I first learned Google was planning a music service and I received an invitation about a week ago. The service takes an “upload” your own music and then play it from anywhere approach. I uploaded my music but have not used it much because no scrobbling add-on (send a record of the song you play to last.fm) was immediately available. I expected it would not take long for the scripters to come up with something and was not disappointed. Several scripts were announced today (here is the source for the one I am using).

This link will forward you to an interesting link from David Warlick considering the future of textbooks. It offers a nice summary and deserves attention. I know that many of these ideas are shared and some clearly believe such ideas are our inevitable future. I like many of these ideas, but I still find them idealistic.

I don’t really want to spend a lot of time right now (hence a post on my blurts blog), but here are some points to consider:

• An author provides an integrated consideration of a topic. The “big picture” is important and is not present in links here and there.
• I wonder what proportion of educators will see it their responsibilities to review available resources and fashion a curriculum. This would be one more time commitment and I just don’t see it as a path many will follow.
• I really like the concept of “participatory” and agree that educators and students have much to contribute. I personally haven’t had a lot of luck making this happen so far. Creating content others will use is easy enough if you have some time. What is difficult to generate is the sharing that bring resources back in the opposite direction. I don’t intend this comment to seem judgmental – it is what I would describe as an observation of what is typical.

Here is another new service I guess I would throw in the general category of web research. I might describe Scrible as a combination of Diigo and Instapaper (or Evernote and Delicious). In other words, it offers a way to annotate, highlight, and tag content and also save content apart from the source (within Scrible) for later consideration.

Somewhere there is probably a table which identifies the features of all of these services but I don’t know where. My problem with this category of online tools is that I find something appealing in nearly all of these services and cannot seem to commit to any given one. Ever have that experience of knowing you found something useful and saved it somewhere, but you cannot remember where. Perhaps this is a boredom thing – I sometimes would rather play with cool tools than get work done. There is also the problem of investing time in creating a body of content in one service only to find that something I like better comes along. Is migration possible or do you just move on? Then there is the reality of good services never finding a way to pay the bills and closing up shop. So it goes online. The new ideas keep coming and this is a good thing.

We are big Twins fans. We have tickets (our kids use them) and we watch or listen to most games. This has been a terrible year so far, but things will eventually turn around. We discovered MLB while we were out of town. This is MLB at Bat, not the video feed. Pretty impressive app – lots of stats, pitch by pitch info, and the radio feed from the broadcasters for either team.