Blurts

You may have heard that there is an interesting copyright dispute between the street artist who created the red/white/blue poster of Pres. Obama and the AP photo service and photographer who generated the original image. The dispute bears on the right of an artist to create something new from an original source and is relevant to all of those interested in mashup type content creation. Tech&Learning is attempting to create a learning activity based on the case and offers both original information sources (the link to the pro position was messed up when I reviewed the lesson) and the opportunity to offer opinions of several case related questions. Aggregated data are made available through Google docs. Of course, the popular vote has no bearing on how the case will be decided. This is a good conversation starter.

ial networking sites and popular culture is creating a lack of the ability to sustain attention, process extended text, and focus on more than the trivial. This time the voice belongs to a Professor from Oxford.

As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.

Read the comments – range from insightful to bizarre. Just the number of comments generated is interesting.

Again, the article offers no data in favor of the position taken. It seems very possible that both positions are over reaching – I am willing to say that kids are more socially focused and less educated in traditional skill areas. There are many scenarios that fit such outcomes ranging from things have gone terribly wrong to the skills being tested are less relevant than once may have been the case.

Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker columnist, will be the opening speaker at NECC. I have read a couple of his books (Outliers, Blink, Tipping Point). I wasn’t that impressed by Blink, but I found many of the concepts advanced in Outliers to be interesting and well reasoned. It has taken me a while to identify the approach – I have decided that it reminds me of Freakomomics – the type of logical analysis that makes sense in hindsight, but that only some folks are capable of seeing when looking forward. For whatever reason, Gladwell seems to address educational topics from time to time and I guess this is what prompted the invitation to address NECC. Not a researcher. Not an educator. Gladwell is an individual with some challenging ideas and an entertaining way of presenting them. 

As an example, take a look at a recent New Yorker article regarding the futility of predicting performance at the next level (pro quarterback and classroom teacher). As I understand the argument the skills necessary to succeed are difficult to teach, but they can sometimes be spotted in the wild. The proposal then seems to be to LOWER the barriers to trying, offer a low starting salary with heavy mentoring, but heavily reward those who seem to have IT because IT can make a larger enough difference in student achievement to be worth the process and the extra incentives. I hope I have caught the gist here. This type of article frustrates me. Not because the conclusion seems to indicate that what those of us who work to prepare teachers matter little, but  because the logic of the analysis relies on positions offered by individuals in fields I do not follow (e.g., economics) without citations. I have no way to evaluate whether it is true that a great teacher is worth a year and a half in student achievement compared to a poor teachers generating half year gains without the opportunity to evaluate the data. Am I to believe that the Journal of Educational Psychology and the American Educational Research Journal would not be all over carefully measured effects of this magnitude? Is this supposed to be some kind of conspiracy? Perhaps someone will send me the references.

P.S. – This post popped up several weeks later – comprehensive summary and interesting discussion

LastFm has denied reports that it shares data on who plays what music with record companies. The allegation surfaced about a week ago in reference to reported information on an unreleased U2 album. It seemed to me that LastFM would certainly have knowledge of the type described. The assumption being that anyone playing such music must have obtained it illegally. It seems very plausible that LastFM would have data linking individual users with specific songs played. The issue is whether these data would be shared. LastFM has asked users who cancalled their accounts to consider reinstatement.

A more enthusiastic denial.

Charlie Rose interviews Marc Andreeson – comments on Ning, Twitter, social networking, and Internet resources and strategies.

I have done my part to promote Last.FM. I am fascinated by online social networking and take ideas I pick up in one area (i.e., music) to inform my thinking about others (education). As a promoter of this service, I feel I should share the following  information. It appears that Last.FM may share information about your music collection with the RIAA. No, I do not have an illegal copy of the soon to release U2 CD as mentioned in the TechCrunch post. Last.FM uses scrobbling if you want to keep track of music you place on your computers and ipod. As I understand it, scrobbling means various programs send a little data to a centralized database and these data are accumulated to provide a picture of activities conducted with these programs (the music you play). You can share these data with othes and perhaps use common interests to learn about related, but new music. However, if you do this, it appears the recording industry may also be exploring your music collection. I guess anyone can look.

If you care, here is the record of the last 68,000+ songs played on my various devices.