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.

A better Powerpoint?

PPT annoys me- it's a useful program in a lot of ways, but it's just so bloody ugly and annoying. If you have a bunch of photos/graphs and some text to show it's a pretty decent tool, but it's very linear at the core, making people go through hoops if they want to jump around in a presentation rather than follow along.

So when my boss showed me Prezi I was instantly interested. At the core it's basically a presentation graphics program, but set up somewhat differently. There's only one slide- you can include text, graphics, video and the like on the slide in any arrangement. You can define a path to follow where the program will follow along, PPT like, or you can jump back and forth by zooming in and out and clicking on what you want. Prezi autoscales as you click- you can "hide" pictures and text by making them too small to see on the overview and then have them appear/vanish through zoom. There's some nice zooming/rotation animations, although I'm still not a believer in funky slide changes- it distracts from the content.

I really like the freeform setup of the content. Imagine you have a talk with three distinct threads. You can set them up at 0, 120 and 240 degrees and make it instantly clear how your talk is organized. it works equally well in "bush/tree" form where you start with a concept and expand out from that through multiple layers, each with an option. You basically build your talk's overview within the program automatically.

It's still clearly an early beta- it's missing a lot of stuff like user-defined text styles, the help is barely there and bugs abound, but that's not exactly unusual for Web 2.0 apps. There's an offline viewer so you can package up your content and use it in the boonies, and you can either get the free version or pay for more storage. I'm going to be very interested to see how this goes.

Learning by game.

Most everyone even remotely interested in video games will recognize the picture on the right. It's Guitar Hero, the game where you get a controller that looks like a little plastic guitar and you can rock out to all sorts of tunes, getting higher and higher scores the more accuratly you press the buttons on the "guitar". It's wildly popular, spawning endless sequels and imitators, including those that include multiple guitars, a drum set and a microphone so you can create your own virtual band.

Except that anyone who's actually played Guitar Hero knows that it's not GH or any clone. (No preening virtual rock stars in the background.) Instead, it's a freeware program called LittleBigStar. The main difference? No plastic guitar. Use your real one. Play the real songs.

LBS and an unreleased commercial competitor called Guitar Rising are the first wave of games that have come full circle. Lots of people want to play music with friends, but learning an instrument is hard. So the game makers created Guitar Hero and its clones and proceeded to make money hand over fist. Millions of copies have been sold- in fact, they've sold so well they now bring in more money than the sales of actual digital music. Players have spent hundreds of hours learning Through the Fire and the Flames on expert.

But you're still playing with a cheap plastic imitation of the real thing. So why not skip it and just use a real instrument? You can still use the same idea- hit the right notes at the right time and you get a higher score. Even better, the computer can adjust the difficulty: if you can't play a passage, just slow it down until you can, then pick up the pace later. Think of it as a metronome, but a lot more fun. Unlike guitar Hero, LBS also includes a top bar that mimics guitar TAB, so you can learn the notation at the same time that you are trying to max out your score

I'm not sure what to call this: it's not a simulation, but it's still a game. The closest thing I can think of is comparing a shooter game like Quake to a game of paintball. It's not virtual anymore- you're playing (within the limits of not dying) as close as possible to real combat. As a rank beginner, it's also close to impossible for me since I still need to watch my fingers rather than a screen, but LBS will force me to break that (bad) habit that I need to dump anyway.

These real life games aren't there yet- they still have difficulty handling quick chord changes and LBS shows that it's a labor of love by a single person, but expect to see a lot more of these pseudo-simulations coming soon.

IT; Teaching Luddites

Gettysburg is fairly unique in that a lot of the folks in IT teach a course or two per year. Most of the upper leadership have PhDs or at least a masters in EE with a lot of real world experience, and so we do everything from Shakespeare to Astronomy labs to first year seminars. We recently gave a quick set of talks at a lunch run by our campus center for creative teaching, and it was rather amusing to note how *little* most of actually do.

I've long been a believer in only using tech where it's appropriate, but almost all of the rest of the IT leadership is in the same boat. Our associate VP, our 17th century lit guy, has his students rework a scene in an old play, then act and film it using low end equipment. Rather than build the course around this, he actually goes very slowly, uses it for only one assignment and gets feedback from the students if it's useful. Our senior instructional technologist (population studies) wanted to use full bore GIS in her last class, but ended up backpedaling and trying something much less ambitious when it became obvious that it was not going to be possible. Our VP did go through with using Kindles as textbook readers, but his senior capstone CS course is built around real life experiences in the IT world far more than the technology. The head of computing services is the sort of guy who builds remotely operated radio telescopes, but then claims he doesn't really use tech all that much in his classes...

As for me, in my FYS I use only the most up-to-date technology. When making flint arrowheads, I use pressure flaking to rework hard hammer starters. We use only the most up to date gunpowder recipies, and I even let the students use paper to paint on rather than a rock wall after they finished making earth-pigment-based paints...

The only course where surfing Facebook is not only allowed but required

...is the NITLE seminar we're hosting right now at Gettysburg on Web2.0 technologies and social software.  I'm fascinated by the folks that showed up- they skew far older than you might expect, but many have been using technology in serious ways in their classes for years.  Blogging during class?  I'm just doing my homework!