September 2008 Archives

So if you decided to buy music from Wal Mart in the last six months you may just be out of luck. I just read on TechCrunch that Wal Mart is going DRM free -- yay! The problem is that they are closing down the DRM server, so no more listening to any music purchased during the DRM days. From TechCrunch:

Six months after Wal*Mart jumped onto the music peddling party bus back in August of 2007, they decided to make the switch to 100% DRM-free tracks. Awesome, right?

Unfortunately, any music purchased during that 6-month window before the switch is still at the mercy of Wal*Mart; if they were to pull the plug on the DRM server, the files would become useless on anything but the computer originally used for authorization. In just under two weeks, that's exactly what will happen.

Yet another reason why I continue to shake my head at the DRM models out there. Trust me, I understand why the industry feels DRM is the right thing, I just can't understand why we tie it to an ass backwards model. Why not make the owner (or the licensee) be the key instead of the device? I don't know, but I can't imagine how I would feel right now if all my iTunes purchases were going to get bricked ... I've been buying all my music from Amazon for the past several months for this reason ... I am not interested in getting the shaft with my content. Seems like I should be able to assert my identity as a key for things I have purchased. I guess others feel differently.

Time to make some changes ... Brad and I discussed the following changes to blogs.psu.edu today:

• The new blogs at psu homepage should be upgraded to MT 4.2 with the following pages:
• Home - hybrid of existing blogs.psu.edu and new personal start page
• Support - from blogger.psu.edu
• News - blog posts about updates and system features, changes, etc
• Community - patterned after most social web spaces
• Tag Search - Designed like a google search with very basic instructions under it describing how to use it

System wide stats to talk about (as of 11:39 AM on 9/26/2008):

• 3,837 blogs
• 18,225 entries
• 2,509 pages
• 3,502 users
• 7,297 comments
• 10,169 assets
• 5,880 unique tags

I've written before about what is going on in the Schreyer Honors College portfolio project. It is a very cool thing to watch. And speaking of watching, today I got an update and a link into the new aggregation view that the Blog team put together. You can see pieces of posts from across the SHC ecosystem all tagged with "PSUHonors" ... BTW, you can do a search from that page for any tag and get a mash up.

Another quick pointer is to an ePortfolio in the teacher education program that uses the templates built for Carla Zembal-Saul's summer Fellowship. This uses a modified tag cloud associated with program outcomes.

This is simply a demonstration of how you can embed a google docs spreadsheet form into a blog post to do simple data collection. Your data is then available in a google spreadsheet.

Rationale for Visiting Game Centers and Businesses

1. Learn from others - mistakes and successes.

2. Collect ideas for growth and maturation of our lab and program.

3. Benchmark us against others.

4. Build connections and networks with others

5. Gauge student reactions/student usage

6. Gauge faculty reactions/faculty usage

7. Best practices for utilizing these spaces for applied research/experiments

Potential Game Centers to Visit

1. New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab - http://www.learninggameslab.org

2. Fullsail Gaming - http://www.fullsail.com

3. Georgia University Gaming Lab - http://campustechnology.com/articles/58965/

4. CMU's Education Technology Center - http://www.etc.cmu.edu/

5. Syracuse Library Game Lab - http://gamelab.syr.edu/

Just a quick example of embedding a youtube playlist into MT 4.

I was just looking over some of the new features in iTunes 8 and one of them is a claim to be more accessible to those with disabilities. I am hopeful this is a move in the right direction and I am really interested in how this plays out in the PSU iTunes U environment. Anyone know?