Room With A View

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.

Great song and a great idea. You can find more at Playing For Change.

Stinto looks like an interesting tool. It’s a quick easy way to set up a chat room. No email addresses or passwords are necessary for users. The whole thing disappears after a short period of inactivity. It might be useful in classroom situations when a teacher needs a quick and short term chat solution. It could be easily set up on the spur of the moment.

I spend a lot of time thinking of how education needs to change–to modernize. This article in the Globe and Mail regarding schools in Afghanistan reminds me of how fortunate I am to be able to think about these things.

School enrollment in Afghanistan is up despite attacks on students and teachers by the Taliban.

Today I read Karl Fishch’s post The Invention of Air, PLNs, and School Transformation. In it he says, “I believe one of the big hurdles for getting folks in my building to blog professionally is their fear of not having a polished piece of writing, or of being not completely correct about something.” His post resonated with me because that’s how I feel.

It’s not a fear as such, it’s more of an expectation on my part. My education drilled into me that what I write needs to be well thought out, accurate, and complete. I like blogs to be the same. Karl challenges my thinking by pointing out that science is not that way and has never been that way. It’s worth a read.

This article leaves me with many questions but it quotes a study which suggests that students that watched a podcast of a lecture scored better than students that actually attended the lecture. It’s worth a read.

Several weeks back Google announced job cuts and cuts to some of its on-line apps. Among others it announced that Google Notebook will no longer accept new users and Google Video will no longer accept user-uploaded content. I use Google Notebook with my classes.

I’m not surprised it’s getting shut down. Of all the apps I use with students and teachers it’s the least understood. Many people are happy just to make their notes in Google Docs. Though Docs and Notebooks are similar I like the ability to right click on content and have it saved to a notebook. Regardless of how one feels about Google Notebook it points out the potential downside of cloud computing.

Cloud computing put users at the mercy of others. Other than more traditional websites that schools control, cloud based sites can be shuttered quickly and with no guaranteed input from users.

I find the concept of cloud computing very attractive. Someone else has to worry about the cost of storage and data backup. Also, it makes client software support easy because it’s browser based. But as attractive as I find it, the fact that someone else controls accessibility makes it not a viable option for schools as a primary solution. Anyone who suggests otherwise has their head in the clouds

Stinto looks like an interesting tool. It’s a quick easy way to set up a chat room. No email addresses or passwords are necessary for users. The whole thing disappears after a short period of inactivity. It might be useful in classroom situations when a teacher needs a quick and short term chat solution. It could be easily set up on the spur of the moment.