Music in Your Life

If you do video with your students, where do you get the music that helps bring the moving images to life?

One place to start might be Project Zero at http://zero-project.gr/

One beautiful example is by Roberta Volpe, Sulla pelle umida which is an MP3 file. If you have a Flash player, a link click will start the 4 minute piece. Right click for saving options.

You can also see that the artists have paid attention to more than their music. The image below is the (reduced/cropped) cover art for the song.

All the songs at the site are released using the Creative Commons “by share-alike” license.

Go take a longer look and listen.

What other music resources do you recommend?

 

Escaping “The Vault”

Big Buck Bunny is free! He has escaped being assigned to “The Vault” where so many of his type have been locked away behind the formidable firewalls of their corporate masters.

Enjoy this short celebration of his freedom to expression.
[Click that triangular arrowhead covering one of his handsome cheeks to start the show.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4-Ddumty4mk

Speak out. SOPA protests were a good beginning. It is time to tell the legislators of this planet that the copyright laws are not benefiting the citizens (unless their personhood is incorporated). Let copyright monopoly expire in time for our children to enjoy more of the work now trapped in “The Vault.”

 

Format Futures

(Updated)

EPUB or ePub, whichever way you capitalize it, is an open standard ebook format for publishing.

It is possible to lock it down with DRM (ugh!).

Still, the more companies that embrace common standards, the better.

Among those who have embraced ePub is Apple.

It is, therefore, disturbing to read that the new Apple iBooks 2.0 will attach proprietary elements to the ePub format. According to an article by Ed Bott:

Apple is deliberately sabotaging this format. The new iBooks 2.0 format adds CSS extensions that are not documented as part of the W3C standard. It uses a closed, proprietary Apple XML namespace. The experts I’ve consulted think it deliberately breaks the open standard.

Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols also weighs in on the topic in his recent article.

Apple’s author end-user license agreement (EULA) seems to forbid you to sell any formatted book created with iBook Author except through Apple. In other words, Apple iBooks are a closed shop for publishers and author as well as for would-be users.

What’s your take on the issue?

• Wait and see
• I love Apple and its products (can do no wrong)
• Who cares, I use a Kindle (which has a different file format)
• I’m stuck. My school just bought umpty million iPads
• iPad, you’re gone. I’m buying a Nook (ePub format)

 

Holiday Spirit

I don’t know what took me so long.

I finally joined the Free Software Foundation. You know, the GNU people who gave us the basis for Linux by creating a license, the General Public License (GPL). It is the legal basis for expecting programmers to guarantee software freedom, not allowing people to enclose the public good. You cannot modify the software and distribute it in a locked down version. Software using GPL code must be reissued with the same terms.

Free-as-in-freedom software is a present I’ve been enjoying for a long time.

I’m feeling a little bit of extra Christmas spirit.

Is today the day you give yourself (and benefiting everybody) the present that I gave myself?

 

Solstice

December 21st is the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the pace of software freedom. Programmers have been working steadily to release a new office suite called Calligra, a part of the KDE software selection. KDE itself is continuing to innovate with a rework of Plasma that will run on touch interface computers like a smartphone or tablet.

Gnome is moving ahead to improve the 3.x experience of Gnome Shell and the Ubuntu coders are busy making improvements to the capabilities of Unity.

MOSS SIG itself did encounter a winter solstice effect. This blog has low traffic anyway, but the solstice impact was real.

If you look closely, you will see that there were zero visitors on the 21st. Everyone must have been off having a celebration, right?

Well, I won’t be a grinch about it. Merry Christmas to some of you. Happy Chanukha to some more. Happy Holidays to everybody.

I’m going to celebrate every way I can because software freedom has been very good to me this year.

 

Opportunity?

Tablets are popular. Just look at the iPad. Though I don’t need one, I’m always looking at the specs and the ads.

What will Microsoft do to compete?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/impending-crisis-for-microsoft-office-tablet-pricing/5769

What does this mean for tablet versions of LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org and the upcoming Calligra suite?

Do they, priced as open source stuff typically is, have a real opportunity to catch peoples’ interest? And, could that tablet experience lead back to the desktop?

 

Behind – Ahead

Sometimes I feel like I’m ahead.

Sometimes I’m certain that I’m way behind.

Have you watched this RSA Animate video? As of this Thanksgiving morning, the Youtube video has been watched 6,070,127 times.

The video was made from a speech given by Sir Ken Robinson in 2008. That’s three years ago. I think today was my first time watching it. In “Internet years“, I am somewhere between 21 and 30 years late watching the video. Behind!

By contrast, I’ve been involved with free software since the 1980s. Back then, it was called public domain or freeware (mixed in with shareware). Some of it wasn’t really as open as we see today. The GNU General Public License (GPL) has formalized and supported a movement to make software a core element of an open society. (Note the geek-friendly numbering.)

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
• Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Our view of education needs to be informed by GPL freedoms, OER and the open channels of the Internet. It will also help if our view of education embraces the four freedoms of the GPL.

• The freedom to use the knowledge of our world for our own purposes
• The freedom to examine the sources of our education and to make improvements which suit us as learners
• The freedom to pass our learning to others, perhaps as teachers who make it a life’s work
• The freedom to engage our communities with the educational changes we think are important and to be unfettered by top-down, one way or the highway thinking making a goal of steady improvement a goal which trumps someone else’s (too often arbitrary) standards

We might also want to ensure the four freedoms from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

Just as Thanksgiving in the United States is a day of gratitude, let us be thankful we can use free software and the open channels of the Internet to express our opinions and to share our excitement and to make contributions to the common wealth.

 

KDE Google Code-In

Kids are creative. Just watch them when they’re given the freedom to do so.

Help give a group of kids the chance to become more than consumers on their technology.

KDE is participating in the Google Code-In this year from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012. Kids from 13 to 18 can participate as coders, videographers, documentation writers and more.

Please pass the word along to teachers who might care and, of course, parents and the kids themselves.

Get more information starting here: http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/19/google-codein-2011-chance-next-generation-join-kde

KDE is a group of enthusiastic free software (free as in freedom) people. This is an opportunity for kids to get a mentored experience being a creative contributor to a real software project.

Will a kid you know be contributing to the next generation of software, or will you just encourage them to consume the next game that comes out?

 

Ubuntu 12.04 Five Year Support

Cannonical has announced that the next Long Term Support Ubuntu release will have five years of security updates and support for five years on the desktop in addition to the server.

In the past, the LTS versions, which come every two years with the April release offered only three years of support. The move is seen as an effort to engage enterprise users whose equipment update cycle is between four and five years. By being able to use a stable, well supported version of Ubuntu’s distribution of GNU/Linux, the hope is that more large organizations will follow the lead of the city of Munich in Germany and corporations like Qualcomm which have made the choice of Ubuntu for their computers.

Will this move influence the K-12 school community to consider Ubuntu?

Public schools have been slow to change their habits. Some are using Macintosh computers, but most are using Windows operating systems. The version may actually be Windows XP, in many cases. XP is a version of Windows which satisfies most working needs, but it is in its end-of-life stage. Microsoft has urged upgrade to Windows 7.

Has your school made the upgrade?

What is the impact of reduced budgets? Can your school afford to upgrade?

Do you realize that a computer with Windows XP is a good candidate for a GNU/Linux install? Current distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc. would run very well on a machine converted from Windows XP. Schools making the switch would make good use of their current hardware.

Tell me your impediments. What’s stopping you?

 

Commons vs. Copyright

TechDirt published an article which discusses the increasing restrictions of copyright done with law changes, which in some cases are putting works already in the public domain, back under copyright restrictions.

To contrast that, the article pointed out the work of others, notably Wikimedia Commons and Flickr which have made created the conditions for and promoted Creative Commons licensing of images.

I’m in the middle of a P2PU course examining the methods of using and remixing Open Education Resources (OER). OER depends on the availability of liberally licensed materials. Making a lesson targeted at a particular grade level involves rewriting text, accumulating images, finding audio and video resources, etc. Teachers do this kind of thing naturally. Teachers are professionals at sharing. Sharing is the primary job of a teacher. What OER provides is a way to go beyond the stale textbooks that the district purchased which are often many years old. OER gives the creative teacher a legal way to make activity packets and worksheets which incorporate up-to-date materials.

OER isn’t on most educators’ radar screens, though.

Maybe some have heard about all the open courseware like the college level courses offered online by MIT, Stanford, and others. But these materials aren’t geared toward third graders or middle school students, maybe not even advanced high school children.

Maybe a few have had students read current events from newspapers or have appropriated materials from YouTube to show in class, but to date, not many have actually participated in the creation of OER materials.

Why should OER for K-12 happen?

Teachers know how to share. OER makes it legal. By contrast, if a teacher takes that current events news story and makes copies of it, the best they can hope for is a “fair use” exception to copyright. Educators can make timely use of such material. The problem happens when the teacher decides to include the same stuff in a second semester, or the next year. That set of copies distributed to a new, later set of students has a far less clear fair use exception to the copyright rules.

What will make teachers, particularly at the K-12 level, embrace OER?

✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111010/09554316284/fighting-back-against-public-domain-erosion-growing-commons.shtml