Room With A View

I’m reading Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. In it he refers to John Seely Brown who was the Chief Scientist Xerox. Brown believes that we learn by tinkering. People have learned about engines by taking apart lawnmowers or motorcycles.  People learned about electronics by building radios. Open source software gives people the opportunity to learn about software. People can learn about music or video through remixing. Tinkering is learning.

I like the idea. It makes sense to me. It explains my preferred method of learning. Generally, I don’t like courses. I much prefer to learn a new piece of software through trial and error. I learned iMovie by editing videos of my kids. The first “movie” I made was of my son and his friends doing bike stunts.

I learned Wordpress and Drupal by installing them on an old computer at home. I read a lot of on-line manuals and watched tutorials but not before I’d mucked around with each program first. I do read manuals but only once I’ve mucked around first. By playing with something first it gives the manual the context I need to understand it. 

We need to give kids more time to tinker. In the current standards driven climate in which we practice, it’s not easy.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This looks like a good use of Google Forms in a PE class. Personally, I find opportunities for enhancing instruction with ict limited. I think I’ll follow this blog for a while to see what other good ideas float to the surface.

I’m amazed when I travel to Canada each summer just how expensive and lacking in service the cellphone industry is. Michael Geist has written about this before and in a recent post entitled Why Canada Lags on Wireless. In it he argues that the industry is held back by four things.

• Lack of competition
• Lack of wireless net neutrality
• Lack of transparency in cellphone plans
• Length of consumer contracts

Wired has a relatively new post entitled 10 Photography Pet Peeves We’d Throw Down a Black Hole. It’s got some good ideas and goes beyond a list of techniques like use the Rule of Thirds.

Where I Write: Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors in their Creative Spaces is a site created by photographer Kyle Cassidy. On the site Cassidy does just what the title suggests, he photographs authors where they write. Personally I find the photos fascinating and it is a good site to use with students when one teachers about authors and the writing process.

I have always justified my messy work spaces as being part of my creativity. Unfortunately, the photos do not support my rationale. Though the majority of the author’s work spaces are somewhat unkempt there are others that are monk like in their sparsity and simplicity. Oh well, please don’t tell my wife about this.

Joel Tenenbaum lost his music sharing case–the one I posted about on Wednesday. He was ordered to pay $675,00. You can find more links to the story here, here, and here.

This week’s Search Engine Podcast cast is entitled File Sharing IS Fair Use. In it host Jesse Brown interviews Harvard Law Prof. Charles Nesson. As much as I believe in openness to information and freedom of culture, his ideas are a bit out there. It’s well worth a listen.

I’ve been thinking about the audio school folks that all talked about the need to be entrepreneurial. The days of working one’s way up in the hierarchy of record companies is gone. The life of an audio engineer is now about business and contracts. In short they need to be self-employed. I imagine it’s the same for people working in the movie industry too.

My concern is that I don’t see schools–at least international schools–preparing kids to be self-employed. Schools should not follow business models. Nor do I think the role of schools is just to prepare kids to be good employees but I do think they should have enough business savvy at the end of high school that they have the confidence and skills that they can start the process of becoming self-employed. I suspect that most teachers–myself included–do not have the skills or the knowledge to teach this but it still needs to be done.

My family and I spent Thursday going around Vancouver checking on audio schools for my son. He graduates from ISB in a year and plans to be a rock star but he’s thinking about picking up some audio engineering skills along the way. We stopped in at three schools–Nimbus, Pacific Audio Visual Institute, and Columbia Academy. Each school had strengths but some common themes that emerged from all of them were:

• The technology is secondary. One has to have an ear for music/audio.
• The technology is always changing. One has to always be learning.
• People skills are as important as technical skills–maybe more so.
• One has to be entrepreneurial. There’s no job security.

Regarding music and video in schools many of my discussions with kids seem to be about what they can’t do. They can’t copy music because it’s illegal. They can’t use a video or music clip in a podcast project because we don’t have rights to re-broadcast the media. It’s extrememly limitting and for many teachers it means they don’t publish students’ media projects on our website or through other channels i.e. YouTube.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto takes a different view. Instead it suggests that culture has always been built by building on the work of others. It’s just been in the last 30 years or so that copyright laws have made it illegal.

Food for thought.