Open-Content

http://opencontent.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/lights1.jpg

http://opencontent.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/pucker.jpg

Our Microlibrary project got a nice write-up in the Salt Lake Tribune today. Obviously there are other projects using similar technology, but I love our focus on elementary school-age kids. Our “Bound to Read” program takes the Microlibrary out to rural schools to teach kids about the history of writing and printing, to teach them how books are made and bound, and gives each child a book of their choosing. We’ve given away over 100 books since October, and have a goal to give away 5000 books to 4th and 5th graders in rural schools in Northern Utah next year. ...

Steve Jobs gets it right in his recent thoughts on music. In a nutshell: DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. So why bother will all the expense, pain, and interoperability nightmares? (C.f. Engadget’s related post in which they point out that “The only way for DRM to be successful is if it’s painless and seamless, and we get tons of emails from consumers complaining about how hard it is to get Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music Unlimited, etc. tracks on to their players, or, god forbid, Macs.”) DRM SIMPLY DOESN’T WORK. ...

This cartoon really is great… Just had to share on a Saturday night.

Every year thousands of music majors graduate from universities around the world. The path to a music degree is a surprisingly difficult road for many. The academic study of music is merciless, annually exposing hundreds of blond-haired, blue-eyed, Andrew Lloyd Webber-loving sopranos to the mathematics of music theory. This introduction is a rather rude awakening for the young girls who just last summer laid in beds with their Les Mis CDs and dreamed of majoring in karaoke. In many ways, university music departments each fall semester are much like exercise clubs in early January. It was always somewhat entertaining to watch the newcomers pop energetically through the door each morning, knowing that in just a few weeks’ time most of them would have stopped coming altogether. Five romps per week through melodic dictation and perfect fifths at 7:00 am are just more than most would-be musicians bargained for. ...

Well…. the day is finally here. I’m happy to finally announce the official alpha launch of COSL’s http://ozmozr.com/. It’s a microformat-aware aggregator / resource sharing / social site that I would love your feedback on. Of course, it’s alpha software, so expect the usual early lumps. One of the cool and, so far as I know, unique, things the site does is make use of microformatted information it finds in feeds or bookmarked pages in the following way: any event information found in feeds or on pages is pulled out, aggregated into a dynamically generated ICAL feed, and this can then be harvested into compliant applications. So right now, I have a calendar in my Google Calendar which is built dynamically out of the microformatted event data parsed from the hundreds of RSS feeds I subscribe to. Each individual event can also be added to Google Calendar individually, etc. ...

New Frameworks for International Sharing and Distribution of Digital Learning Resources: Sustainability and its Constraints Theme: OERs, sharing, distribution, sustainability Begins: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 at 1:00 PM Ends: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 at 5:00 PM Location: National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation Tokyo Japan Registration fee: Free Last date for registration: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 Last date for paper submission: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 Link: Seminar Homepage On 16-17th February 2005, NIME had the first GLOBE-NIME international seminar in order to disseminate the concept of GLOBE and to clarify common issues in the sharing and reuse of digital learning resources with Japanese and overseas partners. On 15-16th February 2006, NIME had the second seminar which focused on the technical issues toward building the new international services. ...

Great article over on readwriteweb about how microformats are changing the game, and how the next version of Firefox may leverage them. If you still don’t get what the deal is with microformats, give this article a read. (Hint: ever wondered what would become the next RSS?) This is particularly interesting to me because microformats are the basis of much of the coolness in our Oz project, which I’ll be saying more about soon…