MediaCommons: Nice Theory…

if:book: introducing MediaCommons – The fun-loving folks over at the Institue for the Future of the Book launched another project today. Well, really it’s a blog post announcing the pending launch of another project. Sigh… Something beyond a blog post would be nice here. I notice that the boss wonders about Sophie (BTW, I’d link to the FOTB website and the Sophie project except that the page contains some sort of hideous java plugin banner at the top that crashes Firefox 1.5 and annoys IE6, also, there isn’t anything about Sophie there beyond a couple of PDFs outlining what it might be) an earlier FOTB project that has yet to see the light of day. It seems to me that these folks are long on ideas and short on applications, which is ok, I guess. I’d much rather see something concrete.

<rant> One of the things that does bug me about this is the amount of play it is getting across the web from the Chronicle of Higher Education to Ars Technica. It would be nice if something that actually exists and works, like Classcaster and the Legal Education Podcasting Project, got some mention.  As a developer of tools in the educational technology field I do get tired of hearing about all of these great things that get trumpeted across the web only to never see the light of day when the actual working tools I develop are rarley mentioned outside of the small world I work in.</rant>

Well, back to work on something interesting and useful.

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Blogged with Flock

Banning Laptops in the Classroom: Ars Technica Weighs In.

The question of banning laptops in class: it’s academic, silly – Great piece. The author sees the problem: unfettered net access in the classroom. All of the dust up about laptops in the classroom has the distraction of net access at its core. After rushing to throw wifi into every nook and crany for no real reason, America’s institutions of higher education are looking to curtail that access. Faculty are definitely pushing back about student wireless access in the classroom, epsecially since there are no killer apps that require such access.

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Classcaster Podcasts Begin to Turn Up in iTunes

If you have Apple’s free iTunes version 4.9 or higher, search in the Podcasts section of the iTunes Music Store for "Lawyering Skills II" or click on the link below to go directly to the "Lawyering Skills II Legal Research" iTunes page.

Lawyering Skills II Legal Research

 
Last week I tweaked the default RSS2 template in Lifetype to generate itunes tags in the RSS2 feeds being published by Classcaster.   Now some of our more intrepid bloggers have added their podcasts to the iTunes Store.  If you want to follow along, do a search in iTunes for ‘Classcaster’.

 

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HigherEd BlogCon

HigherEd BlogCon aims to bring together in a single Web space many of the leading players who are transforming academe with their use of the new tools of the Social Web.

Preparations for HigherEd BlogCon – Overview

An online web conference to be held in April 2006.  It is corporate driven with ProfNet, CASE, Thomson Peterson’s, and PR Newswire doing all the organizational and logistic work.  Heck, they even have a tag: higheredblogcon.  This will be worth keeping track of.

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InfoTrac Gets Podcasts

Thomson Gale, part of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC), announces the addition of podcast feeds to InfoTrac on Thomson Gale PowerSearch and its Student Resource Center, Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center and History Resource Center databases. Weekly presidential radio addresses by George W. Bush from January 2005 to the present will be podcast beginning today. New presidential radio addresses will be added weekly.

Gale – Press Room – 2005 – 11 – Thomson Gale Adds Podcast Feeds To Database Resources – Home

Via Library Stuff.  So, will Thompson West pickup on this and include Classcaster stuff in Westlaw?

Another Easy Way to Have Fun With Asterisk

This article describes how to build a Linux-based telephone answering machine using a low cost winmodem (softmodem) for the telephone interface. We describe how to install the drivers and libraries, and how to select and install the proper modem card. Our answering machine program is a couple of hundred lines of C code in a single file. If you’ve ever used a telephone you should have no trouble understanding the code.

A $10 Linux Answering Machine LG #120

Good as a followup to my talk at ALE last night.  This card, some old PC, and your in business.  You could build a Classcaster box with this.