Rant time 2; SMART

So we have a new professor who's interested in doing neat things in Music Ed. He'd like to use a SMART board or some similar interface to be able to mark up music and take notes. Great.

The physical layout of the room makes a touch screen or standalone unit not really viable, but SMART markets a wireless slate that he's really excited about using. We order one and install it and get ready for interactive goodness.

Pen works, highliter works, camera does the neat little snapshot animation. Hmm, the Notebook icon doesn't seem to be working. That's a problem- without that you can't save your files, edit them, put up backgrounds (like musical staves) and so forth- the device is close to useless without it. So I go to the SMART site and try and download the software.

"This product is not eligible"

I spent a while going around in circles with tech support yesterday- the Notebook software is *not* included because, quote "People are using the Notebook software with non-SMART hardware"

Hunh? I just bought a $400 piece of SMART hardware and I want to actually, you know, use it. Instead, I'm being told that I can only use it if I purchase yet another piece of SMART hardware that does come with a license. If you read carefully the web page you'll find hints of that, but given that every other piece of SMART hardware comes with the Notebook software it's not exactly what you might expect.

Anyone know another good vendor, because I'm not so sure these folks are very SMART.

Rant time1; Microsoft

What is it with companies and interesting interfaces?

A couple of professors here are interested in using Microsoft Surface. Looks like a neat idea. Check price: Commercial version $12500. Ouch. But they're developers- we should get a discount, right? MS will sell developers a table for $2500 *more* than the commercial version. I'm not sure I can publish the academic pricing discount, but let's just say it's pretty skimpy. As in, I spend more on a trip to the grocery store than the academic discount is for a $15000 item. Do they care about this product at all? I remember back when NT 4 came out and seeing a student package of Visual Studio for every language plus a full version of NT 4.0 for $90- it’s the day I knew OS/2 was dead, since the equivalent boxes of OS/2 software sat next to it and cost over $1000.

I thought the chant was "Developers! Developers! Developers"

On failure

One thing I'm realizing from the NITLE summit so far is that the talks focused on failure are generally much more effective than those of successes. First, they tend to be funny- it's easier to poke fun at yourself when you look foolish. Second, it's easier to draw parallels in failures- the major successes, with all sorts of structure, collaboration, planning and assessment attached to it can seem awfully daunting when you haven't started down the path, especially when you know the stars won't align as well in your situation. But everyone has some terrible story to tell, and learning how to work around the issues ends up being the real interesting information. Finally, it reinforces the idea that failure is sometimes an option- when you try new things it doesn't always work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Experiments often fail- it's part of life even if we don't want to admit that we're the ones failing, and it shows ways to bets cut your losses and move on to something new.

I love failure...

Two visions of Powerpoint

I feel a bit like Jim Anchower since it's been so long since I updated, but Hola again.

I spent a day last week at a Edward Tufte workshop, focused entirely around presenting huge amounts of data in limited spaces, and how Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. Tufte has some good points here- the average bulleted list Powerpoint slide, read in a monotone by a speaker unsure of the material is one of the worst possible ways to get information across to a group. It's boring, slow and information poor. But I have to disagree that this is Powerpoint's fault: it's just a crappy speaker using a tool badly. Just because you're trying to drive a screw with a hammer doesn't mean that a screw is bad way to join things- it's just a crappy way to use the screw.

The NITLE workshop I'm at right now has a variety of people (including me) using a pecha-kucha format for our talks- 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. No more bullet lists, no more reading a slide of text - you don't have the time. 3-4 words and a funny picture or a single graph, that's it. It actually works even better IMHO if you both mess with the timings a bit as well as throw in blank slides to break up the flow- go fast, use the slides either for a bit of data or something to make the audience laugh and talk for the rest

The true irony was watching Mike Winiski from Furman doing a pecha-kucha Powerpoint talk on data visualization, using a lot of Tufte-like examples. He did his much more slowly and carefully than I did mine, and it worked very nicely- just enough to get you thinking about how you might want to do new stuff without bogging down into a boring discussion of how you make or use them. You can do all that off line at lunch, after 6 more talks in the P-K format.

Full circle

I had to chuckle upon seeing the video for the Struminator. In a previous blog post I commented about the fusion of a real instrument and a game as a teaching tool- playing music is fun, but learning a real instrument to play real music is hard so people created Guitar Hero to play a much easier fake instrument. With LittleBigStar we now (mostly) have the ability to use a real instrument to play a Guitar Hero-like game, which could be an amazing teaching tool. But of course there's one combination that didn't exist- fake instrument, real music.

Someone just had to do it...

Don't forget to cite your search engine

Groklaw brings us an interesting twist on the new search engine from the folks who brought you Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha. From their TOS:

Attribution and Licensing

As Wolfram|Alpha is an authoritative source of information, maintaining the integrity of its data and the computations we do with that data is vital to the success of our project. We generate information ourselves, and we also gather, compare, contrast, and confirm data from multiple external sources. Where we have used external sources of data we list the source or sources we relied on, but in most cases the assemblages of data you get from Wolfram|Alpha do not come directly from any one external source. In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it, so its provenance traces back both to underlying data sources and to the algorithms and knowledge built into the Wolfram|Alpha computational system. As such, the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself.

If you make results from Wolfram|Alpha available to anyone else, or incorporate those results into your own documents or presentations, you must include attribution indicating that the results and/or the presentation of the results came from Wolfram|Alpha. Some Wolfram|Alpha results include copyright statements or attributions linking the results to us or to third-party data providers, and you may not remove or obscure those attributions or copyright statements. Whenever possible, such attribution should take the form of a link to Wolfram|Alpha, either to the front page of the website or, better yet, to the specific query that generated the results you used. (This is also the most useful form of attribution for your readers, and they will appreciate your using links whenever possible.)

In short, they argue that since Alpha is not a plain search engine, but a tool that synthesizes information, they own the information that they synthesize. You have to cite it like any other source. This is not the case with Google- they require no attribution at all.

My first though was "This is stupid", but in retrospect I'm not so sure. We routinely allow copyright on synthesized, non-original information such as textbooks or journal review articles, with or without internal attribution. (Alpha cites its sources)

Where this is really going to get interesting is if Alpha starts citing news articles, music or video. Some news corporations are already annoyed about Google News, since they feel it takes their content and then profits from the aggregation. Will they feel the same way about Alpha? (I won't even get into what the RIAA or MPAA would think...)

Crap, crap crap!

http://www.blackboard.com/Company/Angel.aspx

I have *no* idea why Blackboard thinks this is a good idea. The Angel user community (and we're one) is made up of people who hate Blackboard with a passion. The company is a cancer in the world of higher ed with legendarily bad customer service. It's willing to sue other companies over trivial patents and has bought out and killed superior products multiple times. My guess is that of the ~400 institutions on Angel, less than 10% will make the switch back to BB when they kill Angel. Our faculty love Angel- they *vastly* prefer it to Blackboard, and we have the increased usage statistics to prove it.

By the fall I'll have test instances of Sakai and Moodle up and running and a faculty group looking at them. (My guess is that we'll go Moodle) We are *not* moving back to Blackboard under any circumstance, and we have only a year left on our Angel contract, so I suspect that by summer 2010 we'll be running a new LMS.