Category: General

What happened to “All things considered”?

After several years, I have dropped my subscription to Audible.com. My subscription had provided one audio book and one “periodical/radio” program per month. It was really the daily access to a radio program (“All Things Considered”) that motivated my membership. Out of the blue, the NPR programs were gone. I contacted Audible.Com by email, but did not really receive an understandable explanation.

Today, I discovered a blog entry (Tim Lauer) that provides the information I needed. It seems NPR is exploring providing audible content via podcasts (NPR podcasts). I am not certain how the funding model is supposed to work. I assume that some of the money I paid to Audible.Com went to NPR and the immediate benefit to NPR of offering content without compensation is not obvious. “All Things Considered” is not presently available by podcast (although it is available at no cost from the NPR website), but some other NPR programming can be received via podcast.

It is amazing to me how quickly this option has developed and how many things I listened to via other methods 6 months ago are now available in this way.

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Site Stats

File this in the “in case you are interested” category. I watch site statistics generated through log analyses programs. I started doing this with our book site to get a feel for what resources were being used and who was connecting. I purchased an inexpensive program to do the same for the blog site. While such information may not be of interest to the general public, you may find it interesting to learn what a system such as this can learn about you when you connect to their site. If you are a regular on this site, you might attempt to find find your address. Note that I do not log all possible information variables, but the analysis software identifies all information types that can be logged.

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You Don’t Learn Chemistry From Baking A Cake

I have always argued that educators have to be careful with the concept of “learning by doing.” The fact that a task requires motor activity (hands on) does not require that it also involve mental activity. This is not my original idea – Ausubel (an underappreciated scholar in my opinion) described certain tasks as rote discovery implying exactly the same thing. My favorite classroom example making this point is to compare the instructions for baking a cake (from a box) and the instructions for performing a high school chemistry experiment.

It appears the National Research Council has reached the same conclusion:

The typical high school lab is an isolated add-on that lacks clear goals, does not engage students in discussion and fails to illustrate how scientific methods lead to knowledge, says a report by the National Research Council.

(AP News Report) The full report will be available later this fall.

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Time Locked eBooks

And now, further comment on a favorite topic – the cost of textbooks. ZDNET reports that Princeton and several other colleges will offer students eBooks for certain courses. The eBooks are designed to be read on only a single computer and access is limited to 5 months. This seems pretty restrictive for only a 33% reduction in cost. The problem with this proposal as I see it is that students can purchase the full version and probably sell it back for 50%. In my experience, a once used book also sells for 75% of full cost. The price differential in either case is not very motivating. My target price for the $80 book would be in the $25-30 range.

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FCC Reclassifies Broadband

FCC changes (Media Law Blog) threaten your local ISP provider. The FCC has reclassified DSL as an information and not a telecommunications service. This change allows a DSL to deny ISPs access. Providers would seem to have the opportunity to function as the unique provider. The law is scheduled to be activated in a year and one would expect legal action to test this ruling.

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Let’s Ask the Audience

Time to begin getting folks in a back to school mood. If you watch “Millionaire”, you are familiar with the “ask the audience” life line (previous post). Contestants seem to use this opportunity first and it is probably most helpful. Your fall classes may offer a similar technology (I know this is the case at my institution). Students will be asked to purchase a simple input device that allow large numbers of students to respond to simple question posed during a lecture. The version I am familiar with presents questions and reveals responses using a software that connects to PowerPoint. Textbook companies are bundling the “clickers” with a book (hard to buy a used book under this condition) and fund the classroom hardware/software as a perk for the adoption.

C|NET offers an article on clickers in classrooms.

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