NY Times Kindle

In the past decade the medium of print has continually faced harder times. More and more consumers of the news turn to the internet and to podcasts. Not only has the newspaper industry suffered an assault by the internet, but like most other businesses it has been hit by the global recession as well. It is not just Americans newspapers which are suffering. One of America’s newspaper giants is on the verge of bankruptcy: The New York Times. The issues of the reproduction and the distribution of physical items has become daunting in the time of virtual reproduction and distribution. It has been stated that it would be cheaper to give long term subscribers (2 years or more) to the New York Times an Amazon Kindle, a virtual book/newspaper reading device, to view the virtual edition of the NY Times. In fact it would it would cost them 1/2 as much as distributing print. Everyday at 5 AM the digital NY Times is distributed to electronic devices world wide without Jimmy Brown the paperboy.
There are obviously good reasons for the NY Times to go digital. When $63 million dollars a quarter year is spent on raw materials, it is a lot of overhead. But will fans follow to digital press? Will fans have to? While the direction seems to be inevitable I think that an experience will be lost. There is an experience to a newspaper which involves the smell of ink, the portability, the cheap cost, and tangible feel of the page under your thumb.


Material from this blog was derived from the TWIT podcast: http://twit.tv/

When technology backfires

This past week I have hit a speed bump on the road of technology. Midweek I discovered two students cheating on the AR system. I personally am not that big of a fan of certain aspects of the AR system, but it has been entrenched in the institution. After talking with the culprits, as well as other random students, it has been revealed that the password to log on to the system had been out for the past year and plenty of students had been cheating. For instance they would exchange books; each of them reads one book and then they take their own test and one on the same book for a friend. Only five people in the building have the password, so it is kept fairly tight. Apparently a teacher wrote it down for a substitute (if this is indeed the truth, mistake to write it down) and a student saw it on the desk.
I addressed the situation only after consulting with other language arts teachers, the administrator of the AR system, and the school administration. I have no way that I could believe the integrity of the scores throughout the year; although I would have a hard time reversing old grades so I could not go back too far. The grades are compounded on a quarterly basis and we just finished a quarter three weeks ago. What I ended up doing was punishing the two that were caught with adding extra points to their goals and calling their parents. As far as the test scores, since I knew that the cheating had indeed went beyond these two students, I ended up voiding all scores for the quarter so far. The theory is that if they read the book, with a little review, they should not have a problem retaking a test. The people who did not read, will not get the points.
We (the five with the password) have made it our goal to change the password more often and keep it under lock and key. While addressing the issue I threw out the suggestion of everyone doing individual book reports on the same book, that was not received well. With the advent of the computer it seems that wide-scale cheating has become easier for kids to get away with because we assume that the securities that have been built into the programs will do our jobs for us. Not that there wasn’t cheating before computers.

Backtype- Blog organizer- Persona Defender

The program Backtype allows people to enter and search themselves. The program aggregates all comments from blogs and other commentary and bulletin sites. Anytime a person’s name appears in commentary the person will receive an alert. The alerts can be sent when the name is published, on a daily basis, or a weekly basis. Unlike Google alert, this program goes beyond names popping up on a website, it goes into the commentary subsites as well. You can punch in various names or spelling of names, just in case people misspell your last name. This would be a good way for teachers to protect their digital name against tech savvy students. Not only can the site serve as the eyes, it can also credit digital teachers for the comments and the blogs that they post. It tracks and compiles your comments into one site so that people can track and follow your randomly placed comments. Amongst the mass of blogs this device would help navigate through the endless amount of information available.


www.backtype.com
http://twit.tv/

Indaba Music- Musicians Unite

The internet’s spirit of collaboration has taken another step forward with the advent of Indaba Music. Indaba is a Zulu word for collaboration. The site is basically a social meeting spot and a virtual studio for musicians to team up and make music. The possibilities of this are exciting because it could potentially create melds of different cultures. For instance a drummer from Kenya could do a solo in a, American metal band’s song. You set up a profile and note want instruments you play, the bands that influence you, and what genres you cover. This ideally allows musicians to search for people who would ideally fit into their hypothetical song. Whether you want to use your own mixing program or the one offered on the website. The mixing program is easy to download and easy to use (although it is better if you have a little bit of background in music production). Once you start a session others can offer to join in. Periodically there are collaborations which feature 100+ artists.
For instance in a recent interview Stephen Colbert “retorted” common file use without copyright. He then said, “I hope people don’t make this into a sign,” cuing his audience to make it into a song. Indaba music picked it up and hundreds of artists picked it apart, making dance music with a periodic sampling of Stephen Colbert saying “Don’t remix this”. On a recent show of The Colbert Report Indaba co-founder Daniel Zaccagnino hand delivered some of the renditions to which Colbert further challenged his audience and Indaba users to do more remixes. Currently on Indaba home page they have the challenge and lots of Colbert quotes that’d make a great song. Communication via the internet does not necessarily have to be confined to printed documents or emails messages; it can take the form of musical communication.

http://www.indabamusic.com/

Alternate Uses for Existing Technology

As technology becomes more available to the classroom teacher we should be aware of alternative uses of existing applications. PowerPoint has been in the classroom for over a decade. It has been a means of combining icons and written documents for ease of display. However PowerPoint can be used for more than just that. PowerPoint can be helpful as an organizational tool for a high school course (ideally Language Arts).
After the students choose a topic have them search the internet for research (you may have to make sure that they know how to find a credible website or perhaps you could require a couple non-internet sources). When they find information they can copy and paste the whole portion into a PowerPoint document. As they are building the slides with this word for word information they should also be building a works cited page. The general rule for PowerPoint is to have limited notes for a more extensive speech. The next step for the students would be to cull the information into an outline of general ideas. Whether you would want them to present at this stage would be your choice.
What will be left over at this point is a rough outline for a paper to write. Since they no longer have the full quotes they can not plagiarize. All of their paper will have to be summary and synthesis of their sources and all sources would have to be cited directly or indirectly. This would be a good exercise not only for showing students how to outline a paper, but also a good exercise to train them on how to avoid plagiarizing. The activity is interactive and interesting to students who are used to working on computers.

Thanks to a coworker for the idea.