Month: April 2010

The news broke today that LaLa was shutting down. I have been a loyal LaLa user for a long time and have invested several hundred dollars so I could play the music I wanted to listen to online. I knew Apple had purchased them. I suspected this would happen, but I assumed existing commitments would be honored.

Apple is going to give me credit at the iTunes store. First, LaLa did not allow the download of a song, but gave you access for 10 cents. Apple wants to sell you the song for $1+. I do not want to have 1/10 the number of songs on one computer. At the very least, the appropriate thing to do would be to credit my credit card, not my iTunes account. I already have thousands of songs I purchased through iTunes. What I wanted was to be able to play my music from any computer connected to the Internet. This is what I paid for.

So, what is the lesson. Is it you can’t trust online companies to provide the service users pay for? Clearly some companies go out of business and can no longer honor their commitments. This is not the same thing. It looks like you get a better deal and commitments you have made no longer matter.

It has been a tough week for those who make a commitment to online services. First, Ning discontinued the free service it provided stranding those who had used this service to offer large amounts of user created content. OK, so users did not put any money into this company and maybe you get what you pay for. This situation with LaLa is a little different.

The more recent Learning and Leading has an article authored by Judi Harris and colleagues. There are certain writers who have promoted core ideas that appeal to me and Harris is one. She has a concept – activity types – that makes sense to me as an important idea in professional development. Rather than promoting specific examples she proposes that educators think in terms of categories of activities. I have always understood the purpose of this approach as an attempt to steer folks away from the duplication of specific examples which may or may not be appropriate for their unique situations. Instead, the idea is to understand tasks at a more general level. I am guessing the use of examples in instruction is typically not attempt to promote the exact same task, but does it come across in this fashion? Harris and others have established a wiki to outline the various activity structures they have identified.

So, this distinction between activity types and examples has caused me to consider what structural variables guide my own thinking. Sometimes I think such organizational patterns exist but we fail to reflect enough on our own thinking to externalize these patterns. Here is an initial effort.

I think I organize my take on tech integration in terms of:

• Conceptual frameworks – e.g., authoring to learn, 21st century skills
• Tools
• Tactics (something like activity structures),
• Examples

So, authoring to learn is a general generative framework that assumes students can be encouraged to process content they have experienced by explaining this content to others. This process can be accomplished using various tools (e.g., podcast, wiki, blog). Various pedagogical strategies (cooperative learning, editing, discussion) can be employed in implementing a given project. Of course, to explain various nuances of the combination of framework, tool and tactic, it is likely useful to use multiple examples to illustrate various combinations and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

I wonder how teachers make instructional decisions. Is there a process to what they decide to do? Would a structured approach help?

I just purchased Barcode Scanner for my Droid phone. It works great. Scan the barcode on a book and sure enough it identifies the book. Scan the barcode on a 9.5 oz box of Hot Tamales and it informs me that I can get this box for $3 from Amazon and $1.79 from alwaysdirect.com.

Not impressed? Consider this. Walk into the bookstore and check out the prices on the textbooks needed for next semester. I bet you can find a better price and simply order from your phone.

Game changer

Web developers are constantly looking for a niche to fill – a focus for a site that will attract a reasonable number of users. Some social sites are general and some encourage interaction around a topic or process. I would argue that Facebook is an example of the general approach and users can shape the general tool to their interests. In contract, a social bookmarking site (e.g., Diigo) is organized around a process (personal bookmarking) that has a social element (sharing bookmarks).

The books we read can become the basis for social interaction. Face to face groups that agree to read and then discuss a given book are common. In a way, this focus and the potential for a similar interaction has found an online niche.

I have two examples of this category of services. Both allow users to identify the books they have read, are reading, or want to read. Both allow comments on these books and opportunities for interaction. I have treated these services like I have treated the social music services I use (e.g., LastFM) – spend some time with the record-keeping capabilities of the service, but I ignore the social component. I am not interested in sharing concert experiences related to the musical groups I follow (I have no such experiences) and I am also am limited in the time I can spend interacting online so I mostly post comments on the books I read to my blogs rather than the book sites.  So, I am not a poster boy for these services, but perhaps you find this focused topical sharing of interest. I do read the comments of others related to some of the books I have read.

So my two suggestions if you are interesting in exploring social conversations around books are:

Shelfari.com –

GoodReads