Lee LeFever, over at commoncraft, does us a great service--value added. He has created a series of very short, fast-paced, informative little videos that play in your browser. The videos he has produced in the commoncraft show explain in plain English, as he says, various Web 2.0 concepts: social bookmarking, RSS, wikis, and social networking. The best part? He freely shares his creations to help us all and welcomes our including them on our blogs. They all use a common presentation style that is fun and informative. Here's his movie, Social Bookmarking in Plain English. Check out the other great movies. Thanks Lee, for sharing!

Click To Play

If we, as educators, as professionals, are to protect some of what we value most in our country, the education of all children to participate as informed citizens in our democracy, we must move beyond the inferiority complex foisted upon us by politicians and media with private agenda and exert significant influence in the political process to protect our nation's public schools.

We must demand that politicians and media peel away this facade of failure and instead celebrate the successes of one of the few public institutions in this nation that is still functioning rather well all in all, working in ernest to meet the needs of America's citizens and immigrants with absurdly limited resources and no recognition of success.

Gutting the funding of our public schools is not our patriotic duty. Labeling the hard work of our teachers and students in our public schools as a "failure" is not our patriotic duty. Demanding our public schools spend vast resources of precious time and little money on a growing testing agenda used to diminish their hard work is not our patriotic duty. Forcing teachers to focus on students learning level level fact-only information for a standardized test instead of welcoming them into critical thought and the art of problem solving, participation, and contribution is not our patriotic duty.

If you want an interesting, even important read, may I suggest:

"The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools" (David C. Berliner, Bruce J. Biddle)

Educators are held fully accountable for that over which they may have no control whatsoever. I say to every educator in our country: It's past time to hold politicians accountable for that over which they have full control: setting and adequately funding education policy that genuinely fosters the well being of all of our public school children to maximize their learning. NCLB is not such a policy.

Schools reflect the communities they serve. Schools that have significant issues and deficiencies are reflecting communities, real people, real human beings that have real, substantive, and often complex needs that are going unmet. Simple castigation does not a complex need meet.

Difficult though it is, I am trying hard not to express specific political views related to parties, specific politicians, or candidates. I'm trying to speak to larger issues. And the great issue breaking my heart today is the growing gap between those that have and those who, despite their best efforts, are in serious need. The continuation of this trend threatens the fundamental health of our democracy.

I have known Wesley Fryer for about three of years. This young man is bright, articulate, and provides a substantive amount of quality content for educators to inform practice. I've asked him if he ever sleeps! He is prolific: podcasting, posting, and presenting continually.

Yesterday he has posted a "must-read" for all educators: A Contrary View of Education and NCLB. I rarely issue "Must-Read" alerts. But, in these days, this is one such alert. His post is thought-provoking and timely. Rather than adding anything to what he has said, I think it stands as is. I encourage you to click, read, think, act.

Math isn't about the numbers. Music isn't about notes. Literature isn't about letters. Is school really about grades?!

Research indicates that our minds crave novelty and motion--seeing the world in a different way: creatively connecting what was previously disconnected.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that everything is really about pattern recognition. And while our very physical survival depends on pattern recognition, our souls need it even more, and at higher levels, to thrive. And thrive we must! We love to discern patterns in our life experiences, connecting the unlikely to make more sense of the mundane, to find more meaningfulness, to discover that which resonates more deeply in our souls.

Additionally, I think that human nature wants to overlay a fresh, more satisfying emotional context to otherwise ordinary life experience--yes, even to the parts and pieces of distilled, disconnected, fact-based curriculum. Contextualize. Bend perspective. Reshape, perhaps break rules. Connect. Disconnect. Re-connect. Find the patterns. Build new meaningful, more elegant patterns. Discern relationships.

We call all of this beauty. Being more alive. Learning. Art. Joy. Life. It's all the same!

As I've said for many years, I believe deeply that we don't know what we like. We only like what we know. And the more we know, the more patterns we discover thus making our lives and our contributions richer and more satisfying in every way.

Interestingly, these three pictures, from different projects by different people, defy motion and break existing patterns in some very unexpected ways (adding a new dimension to the research findings?) and thereby arrest our attention and invite deeper pattern exploration! (Each photograph is a link to different pictures of the same.)

How do we, as educators, as moms and dads, arrest children's attention to welcome them more deeply into that irresistible world of learning, of contribution, of discerning and connecting new patterns to better make sense of the old?

We talk a lot in educational circles, and especially those of us who are technology enthusiasts, about global literacy, global competitiveness, global awareness, global warming, connect, connect, connect. It's a big world out there. Blah, blah, blah.

But in this video from TED, Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, highlights the irony that in a time when we have the capacity to know more about our world than ever in the history of human kind, we actually know less.

Americans are fed a steady diet of superficial because, according to Alisa, it's simply cheaper to do. I have long decried the sad state of journalism in our country. Listen to her short (about 4 minutes) talk from TED. Then go hug a Social Studies teacher. Then you and the Social Studies teacher subscribe to TED. Watching those presentations will enrich your life!

Click here to subscribe to TED. Click here to go to the TED website.

Creative expression as amusement? Creative expression as contribution? Creative expression as manipulation? Creative expression as effective communication strategy? Creative expression to make a point? Creative expression as sheer entertainment? Creative expression to provoke thinking and evaluation? Creative expression as distraction? Creative expression to nourish the soul? Creative expression as self-indulgent noise? Creative expression as an act of problem solving? Creative expression as art?

How do you use your creative expression?

As our culture barrels ahead with this new capacity for the masses to inexpensively create and distribute slick digital media content, how will we evaluate quality? (Or will we even bother?) In the last century we had editors who earned respect among their peers and in the public eye for their skillful execution of craft, for their dedication to excellence and quality. They took care of the difficult and demanding work of crafting artistic standard. Now that everyone can create and distribute, who will pay attention to quality, to a shared, valued sense of worth?

So much of our life is already bombarded with commercial interests and just plane noise. How are we going to collectively learn about artistic expression through our own new-found acts of creation--a capacity reserved for only a few "talented" people in the past.

Will YouTube continue to be flooded with noise and self-indulgent, low quality products that only amuse and distract us from our true potential for higher levels of significance? Or will we have a growing body of greater contribution because people of all ages are now able to enlighten the human condition through this amazing YouTube distribution system? (Don't misunderstand, I think we need some amusement in our lives.) Will adults, will educators, look in amazement at student-created digital media products that required little skill but look slick because of the technology affordances we as adults don't really even understand?

I guess the main point of this post is that we need to raise the bar on what we expect our students to contribute. Just because it looks amazing (and we haven't a clue how it was done) doesn't mean it actually is amazing. The package isn't the content. Perhaps one reason educators need to better understand the digital ecosystem is not to confuse the form with the substance.

And, by the way, what actually is creativity and creative expression anyway? Want to offer some ideas? Click comment. Comments are now open.

And with that, I offer this little video, which many of you probably have already clicked on before reading this entire post (smile)! We do love our packaging! This 30 second clip took just a couple of minutes to create using animoto: upload some pictures, select some music, click create--three easy steps. This would be a great way to share students learning in your schools! (I mean really, what child wouldn't want to attend this school?!) Yet, substance this is not.

I get this question a lot in workshops: "How did you get that YouTube (or any) video to play in your blog post?" It's easy. I'll tell you how in this post. But have you noticed that often the quality of a YouTube video is, well, just yucky?! I'm going to also tell you how to force YouTube to play the highest quality version of a video that it can play.

If you read my earlier post about LinkToApp, you have at least some vague idea about embedding HTML code for links into a blog post. Embedding a video is very similar. The most obvious difference is that instead of the HTML code showing your readers text that functions as a link to another place, the HTML code now will show your readers a video that must be sitting on some server someplace, in this case, sitting on YouTube's servers. It doesn't have to be a video you uploaded. It doesn't have to be a video you made. Many people share videos, including teachers. So, to include a video, like a link, we must embed some HTML code into our blog or webpage. Where do we get the code?

Three Ways to Get the HTML Code
At the end of every YouTube movie you see, the video screen changes to display two sets of HTML code: URL code, for linking to the video on the YouTube site; and embed code, for making the YouTube video itself appear on your blog or website. You don't have to watch the entire video to get to the code presented at the end. If you mouse over the up arrow (pictured below in the top video), on the bottom right of the time line, under every YouTube video, and click on the icon that appears with three small boxes in it, the two sets of code immediately appear. Both snippets of the HTML code also appear near the top right of every YouTube webpage (second picture below) for each movie on the You Tube site. Click on each image below to see the large version if needed.

[TeacherTube offers several version of embed codes: large versions, versions with and without video search fields, and versions for specific blog clients.]

What to Do with the HTML Code
If you want to link to the video on the YouTube site without showing the video in your blog or web page, you use the code labeled: URL. Below, in red, is that URL code for the video of Matt dancing with people all over the world. All I have to do is include the HTML link code, in blue, around that URL, just like we did in the post about linking to items at the iTunes Store.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&eurl=http://drtimtyson.com/blog/&feature=player_embedded" >Click here to watch this video on YouTube's site!</a>

Remember the quotation marks, in blue, are critical. And remember that, if you forget to do this in your HTML edit mode for your blog, you will probably see exactly what I posted above instead of this: Click here to watch this video on YouTube's site! And finally, the text I italicized in the code above is completely arbitrary. You can type anything there you think will make good sense to your readers.

Now, if you want to embed the video itself in your blog or website, you use the embed code. Simply copy it and paste into the HTML editor for your blog. That's it. When you publish, the video should appear on your site. Be sure you have the legal authority to publish someone's video before you post in on your blog. Many people allow their work to be distributed by others.

When You Want the High Quality Version...
Well, first, YouTube must have one on their server. If the person who uploaded it only uploaded the low resolution, highly compressed video, that's all you will get. But by simply adding a little bit of code, if a high quality version is available, that's what you will get. It makes a noticable difference.

Simply add this code, "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" without the quotation marks to two specific places in the embed code. Below is the low quality version of the embed code without the additional higher quality code followed by the higher quality version of the embed code to show you the two places where you must add the additional code shown above. The web address portion of the embed code, in green below, is different for each movie, so that will always vary from movie to movie. In these two examples it remains the same because it links to the same movie, just one regular quality and one higher quality. The only difference between the two is the added higher quality code shown in red.

Shown Below: The regular, highly compressed embed code YouTube typically provides
<object width="425" height="344">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" />
    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
    <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
    <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344" /></embed>
</object>

Shown Below: The high quality embed code is added in two places to the embed code YouTube typically provides
  <object width="425" height="344">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" />
    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
    <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
    <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344" /></embed>
  </object>

When you embed these into your post, I suspect you will see little of no difference in these two examples because YouTube is using this particular video, which is wildly popular, to highlight their higher quality "feature" player and no longer has the lower quality version online. If you check this link to the video on their website, you will see what a drastic improvement it is from their typical player.

I forget where I first read about this little tip, or I would credit the source. I think, but am not sure, it was over at iLounge.

I posted earlier about creating links to items at the iTunes Store, which, through iTunes U and podcasts, contains significant rich media content for learning: k-16 and beyond. However, I just learned about Apple's own iTunes Link Maker. Give it a shot. It works well and easily and creates a nice little graphic for the link--like this one to MabryOnline.org's Podcast Central:

I've used CoolIris since way back when. In fact, when I first discovered it, it wasn't compatible with Safari and had far less functionality than it has today. Even then, it was cool. The 3D wall is elegant and impressive. I started to download the PicLens Publisher (CoolIris was originally named PicLens, and the PicLens Publisher still carries than name.) and enable my site, but... Well, for different reasons, not the least of which was not completely understanding the site implementation process at the time, the implementation didn't happen then.

If you're unfamiliar with CoolIris, this is definitely worth a look-see! I blogged about the CoolIris iPhone app back in December. The plug in, which works with Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox, makes the presentation of multimedia on a large display nothing less than awesome. I can see lots of potential here and suspect that this company has some very interesting ideas in development as I type!

Today, Alan Levine piqued my curiosity more deeply about using CoolIris' browser plugin as a presentation platform. The thought had crossed my mind "back in the day", but I knew that, at the time, I would never be able to figure out how to get it to work or if it even could. Well, Alan has. And I love it!

I've gone to dabbling and now have my site CoolIris enabled. I was surprised at how easy it was to do really. (Still a bit puzzled about adding YouTube video to the 3D wall. Wonder if it must be downloaded onto the desktop and uploaded onto your server to make that work. If you figure out a way to get it to link to the YouTube site and play in your 3D wall, let me know how you did it!)

Below is a screen shot of all of the photos on my blog in the full screen 3D wall. (I've noticed I need to use more file formats that support transparency and less jpg compression.) Nothing really spectacular here unless my site were a photo gallery, or my YouTube channel, or a school-based curriculum site with teacher- and student-created instructional multimedia content. And I won't start describing the features of the plugin because there are many.

And, as you can see below, you can embed your media.rss file directly into your blog or web site for an interactive user experience. The basic embed just appears as a boring, flat blob. Ahhh, but try any and all of the bulleted suggestions below...

• Click and drag on the black wall below to scroll through all of the pictures I've uploaded on my site in the last couple of years.
• Want to drill down onto a specific picture? Just click on it specifically.
• Want to embed my blog's latest 3D photo wall on your site? Click on the <e> at the bottom of the window.
• OK, just go insane and click on the "Go Full Screen" button in the far bottom right hand side of the embed below..

But, by far, the coolest thing to me is Alan Levine's leveraging this presentation platform as a tool for presenting live to an audience. By tweaking the media.rss file, as he describes in his post, you can have your presentation images "on the big screen" serve as links to websites or files on your hard drive. This tool, unlike Keynote or PowerPoint, makes non-linear presentation a delightful eye candy experience, affording the presenter the luxury of being able to seamlessly and elegantly jump wherever the "moment in audience" make take him or her. And, remember, the brain craves novelty and motion. This provides both while not distracting from content but rather welcoming the audience to become more involved in the content.

I'm really eager to give this a try!

File conversion... that necessary added layer of unwanted complexity. Most computer users are aware of the fact that our computer programs create their own file types (and compatibility issues) when we save documents. Microsoft Word creates the .doc document file type. The newer version of MS Word creates the .docx file type. Adobe Acrobat creates the .pdf file type. Web pages are in the .html file format, and so forth.

When you get into audio and video files, you come into a whole world of file formats: .mp3, .aiff, .mov, .mp4, .m4v, .avi, and on and on and on. Depending on the file format, some users may not be able to even open your file to read it, or listen to it, or watch it on their computer because their computer program may not work with the file type you created.

Creating audio podcasts for the web is a good example that's easy to get our head around: many programs create .wav audio files or .aiff files--like the ones on the older CDs that would only hold a small number of music files. But to stream audio over the internet, .aiff files are much too large. The mp3 file format is typically used for streaming audio over the internet as you can attain a much smaller file size and still maintain good sound quality.

But how would you get your giant audio .aiff file into the smaller .mp3 file format? Naturally, a number of solutions exist. Zamzar is one such solution--an online, web-based solution. You upload your file, choose the new file format you want, and Zamzar does the magic. You then download your new file format.

But the magic doesn't stop there. This month Zamzar added a new twist. Now you can mix and match seemingly unrelated file formats. For example: you can now upload a word processing file and have Zamzar create an audio .mp3 file from it. Yes, you got the idea: Zamzar will read your text out loud and convert that sound file into an .mp3 file format for the internet.

The currently supported text file formats you can convert to spoken audio in the mp3 file format are:

• doc - Microsoft Word Document
• docx - Microsoft Word 2007 Document
• odt - OpenDocument Text Document
• pdf - Portable Document Format
• pub - Microsoft Publisher
• txt - Plain Text document
• wpd - Wordperfect Document
• wps - Microsoft Works Document

Unfortunately .html (web pages) are not currently supported as URLs; so, I can't enter a web link and have that webpage returned as an audio podcast. But, hopefully, that functionality is in the works.

Talkr, however, does that. Sheer awesomeness. Click the "Listen to this article" link at the end of this post for an example of Talkr reading this post to you. Talkr works by generating the speech synthesis "on the fly." You can actually create an audio podcast series of your favorite text blogs if they use Talkr. To subscribe to a Talkr generated audio only podcast of my blog, click on this link. Talkr is free. Set up your own blog to use the Talkr speech engine for free. As you can hear, she sounds rather natural!

But, back to Zamzar... I could cut and paste the text of this post into a text file and upload the file at Zamzar, as I did to get this mp3 file: Click here to listen to Zamzar read this post. For Mac users who have grown accustomed to listening to Alex read text on your Mac, the Zamzar voice is a bit mechanical sounding.

And for those Mac users who aren't yet aware: your Mac can read just about any text you have displayed on your screen. If you can highlight it, your Mac can read it to you. (Windows will do a similar thing.)

On the Mac: Highlight the text you want to hear. Go up to the name of the application in the menu bar. In the "Services" menu, select "Speech" and then "Start Speaking Text." Alex takes a breath and starts reading. Yes, if you listen carefully, you can literally hear Alex breathe between sentences. I think Alex is one of the most realistic computer generated voices I've ever heard!

I use Alex reading text to me a lot while I multitask; for example: having Alex read me a longer blog post while I skim through my RSS feeds. I don't feel like I'm being rude when not paying complete attention to my computer while it talks to me. :o) In fact, I use Alex reading to me so often, I've assigned a keyboard shortcut to the "Start Speaking Text" command. (You can do that under System Preferences, --> Keyboard & Mouse, --> Keyboard Shortcuts.)

You can listen to an mp3 recording of Alex reading this post at this link.

The full list of file types with which Zamzar currently works are listed on the right. Zamzar offers a free service with file size limits and paid plans for larger file sizes along with additional features.

AT&T and the Ma Bell monopoly... Hmm...

I recall the difficulty my grandmother had attaining her phone service after my grandfather died, and she moved into a maintenance-free apartment. The newly split up phone company set the stage for innovation but confused and frustrated her simple efforts to get a phone. In the days of divesting upheaval, she bemoaned the difficultly of just getting a physical phone, a phone line, a wiring service plan, deciding on the calling feature set, picking a calling plan... I recall seeing in her face how difficult this was for her at that time in her life.

I dabble a lot in the digital world, but I suspect that the changes I will be forced to confront when I am the age my grandmother was when she was trying to wrangle with new phone service, will be far more daunting. I already find myself more frequently and more intensely annoyed by the onslaught of digital noise in my life, by the rapid upgrade and update paths, by the latest digital ventures, by the pace of change. I seem to spend increasing amounts of my energy abating distractions. The younger crowd finds this all so energizing. I am increasingly annoyed. I guess I'm getting old?!

This morning (or would you call it tonight) I read this thought-provoking and well-written article in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Johnson. For those who love to read physical books, this digital transition may well put you in a completely different world from everyone else. Will the world of the digitized book be a better world of greater clarity, insight, and meaningful possibility or just more overload, more fragmentation, and more disengagement? Will this inevitable transition bring greater wisdom or simply the micro-monetization of the word. Yes.

Hopefully these little citations will entice you to read the entire article, linked at the bottom.

...the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels ...

Every word in that library will be searchable. ... the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. ... Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet. ...

[With the eBook reader] the bookstore is now following you around. ...

... an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and ... the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for... attention.

... print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading [thinking??].

... when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against ... distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

The Kindle [an eBook reader] in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has no dedicated client for email or texting... No doubt future iterations ... will make it ... easy to jump online...

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. ...

Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter ... You'll read a puzzling passage ... then instantly browse ... comments from readers ... annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning. ...

Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote ...

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked...

... citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. ... will undoubtedly change the way books are written ...

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. ...

For centuries, we've had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down ... The Kindle doesn't even have page numbers ... because the pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose to read. ...

Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters. ...

[Source: How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com]

As a musician who actually initially became interested in technology so I could compose, print, produce, and record music as a young twenty-something right out of college, I am just astounded at how much technology has advanced since those days! I could go on and on about what it was like to record my first project back in the day, but today's post highlights something vastly more fascinating: the band, The 88, has recorded a new single using a $10 app, FourTrack, on the iPhone! I bought FourTrack when it was first released. Even in its first iteration the program was really novel and functional.

Now, I typically find a lot of today's pop music rather aweful, I'm just getting old I guess, but their iPhone recorded song, Love Is the Thing, is indeed catchy. Their novel idea for recording it is will get them a lot of media attention. You can read the details of the recording project, with lots of pictures, at this post on their website. Very clever guys! And you can buy their single at the iTunes store for .99. Why not?! (I include the links to their single wishing them huge success!)

As I've said so many times, the world can now be anything we can imagine. The hard part is the imagining, which requires creativity, which we are killing off in our schools at the very time in our history it would serve humanity best ...

Warning: I'm in a mood! Brace yourself. (And I haven't even read Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell yet!)

In our food diet, in our creative expression, in general purchasing decisions, in our quarterly return on investments we demand more, more, more. We are quick to make an acceptable level of sacrifice in quality to get a better deal. But the constant small sacrifices all add up. We have begun deceiving ourselves into believing we don't ever have to pay what something really actually costs over both the life of the product and our life expectancy and that of our children's. In fact, I'm not so sure we even consider what the actual cost of anything really is. We believe the lie: we can have everything we ever wanted faster and cheaper than ever before.

We fail to see the connection between the billions we pump into Walmart sales and the loss of manufacturing jobs in our country as well as the devastating human and environmental impact these purchases have on the other side of our ever shrinking world. We have substituted true freedom for freedom of choice on the discount rack. We listen to a steady diet of in today/out tomorrow tripe and wonder why creative artistic expression and careful deliberation that requires attention to nuance and inflection/reflection is dead. Well, we're probably too busy looking for the next big sale or must have hit to even notice the downward spiral massive consumption is really costing us financially, culturally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically. Are our souls so bankrupt?

I have also observed a profound shift in our definition of and practice of faith as well, but I'll avoid this topic on my professional blog.

And I fear our current technology use is no exception. Distilling everything down to binary choices is just craziness: on or off circuits on a circuit board billions of times per second does not adequately represent the substance of soul I consider to be the breath of humanity. And I am an advocate for technology--technology well used to enhance the quality of the human experience, not dilute life with more facsimile, more "good enough" coming at us so fast we don't even notice we are accumulating a whole lot of nothing thinking we have more of something.

I had a great conversation with a university professor and department chair on Monday that was somewhat similar to this. True human connection will, in my humble opinion, never be replaced or adequately approximated by an electronic equivalent. I do not particularly like the direction our culture is rushing without much open, honest, principled thought or discussion.

Perhaps the American Indians understand something our culture completely has missed: Maybe, just maybe, every time you take a picture of someone, you really have stolen just a bit of his or her soul. The approximation is never adequate, but at how many megapixels do we consider it good enough?

The Digital Revolution Killed Quality
By Rick Aristotle Munarriz
August 18, 2009

We owe our senses an apology. In the mad dash for digital convergence, we have made compromises that are cheating our ears and our eyes. We put up with "near" CD and DVD quality, just for the sake of snappy downloads or greater variety from compressed content. Now, quality hounds are about to lose another battle.

Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone is overtaking Canon's (NYSE: CAJ) high-end EOS Rebel XTi as the most popular source for snapshot uploads to Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr.

According to Flick's perpetually updated "camera finder" graph, the iPhone and Rebel XTi are neck-and-neck when it comes to populating the site with imagery.

The iPhone doesn't have a bad camera -- it's just not a very good one, relatively speaking. The new iPhone 3GS introduced autofocus and bumped up the megapixel count from two to three. However, there's no flash. There's no zoom. The quality pales when pitted against Canon's 10.1-megapixel workhorse.

The iPhone's camera may be good enough, but that doesn't mean that it's good.

Regression to compression
We settle for the sake of immediacy and ad-supported freebies. Social networking sites will take your treasured photographs and put the squeeze on their quality for bandwidth's sake. Don't even get me started on the grainy mobile uploads!

We haven't been any kinder to moving pictures. "Instant watching titles are available in multiple levels of video quality," explains Netflix's (Nasdaq: NFLX) website. "Netflix automatically determines the level you receive by analyzing your current Internet speed. You can't select the video quality level yourself, and the level will change from time to time depending on actual network conditions."

It's hard to look a gift stream in the mouth, because Netflix offers digital playback at no additional cost to subscribers of its unlimited DVD plans. However, sometimes you pay and still have to settle for less than the original.

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) doesn't sell movie downloads in high-def. It offers television shows in HD, but it will only spit out temporary rentals if you crave high definition. And only recently did Apple begin selling HD movies through iTunes.

Oh my bleeding earbuds
Audiophiles are suffering, too. Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) began charging most of its subscribers for online access earlier this year, in exchange for the promise of higher audio standards.

"The upgrading of this service allows for customers to listen at near CD-quality sound (128k) for a better listening experience," reads the site's FAQ.

It's definitely better than the original streams, but will folks really pay between $3 and $13 a month for "near" CD quality?

Then again, the sonic quality of satellite radio itself has long come under fire. "Don't get me wrong, I love Sirius' programming, but I hate the sound," wrote Steve Guttenberg in CNET's The Audiophiliac column last year. "It's grungy, harsh, with no actual high frequencies and muddy bass. The music's dynamics are squashed flat as Kansas so it sounds like a low bit MP3. Digital smigital, Sirius sounds awful, way worse than FM radio."

I'm not hating on satellite radio, because I too can't get enough of Sirius. I've been a subscriber for five years. However, championing quality on satellite radio is often a losing battle. Subscribers want more programming, yet broadening the channel list comes at the expense of crummier compression.

Sure, bitrates have improved over the past year. Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Zune offers MP3 files as high as 320k. That's a far cry from the 128k standard that most online stores were promoting just two years ago. Still, the MP3 format remains all about compression, even if a smaller subset of the audience notices.

The younger generation may not care. They've grown up jamming on their muddled iPods and watching grainy YouTube videos. They will never know the joys of vinyl wax, clean air, and Crystal Pepsi.

Consumers chose quantity over quality. Until a tech company can deliver both, I say the digital revolution is a failure.

link: The Digital Revolution Killed Quality

What a time for awesome learning, breaking existing ideas about what a classroom is! I've worked with some great school systems over the past two years that certainly should have some of their older students and younger teachers explore this program.

Thanks to the ever amazing Lucy Gray for the tip!

I hope you take the time to explore the Digital Nation web site before the upcoming special on February 2, 2010. I'll be traveling then but have already set the TiVo to record this. If the web site sample videos are any indication, this program will be informative as the producers explore the impact of technology on our minds, our relationships, warfare, learning and virtual worlds. They discuss many complicated issues about how technology is embedded in our daily lives as well as how it may impact our futures. I've eager to see this.

The fact that this can be done, in total, from storyboard (if they had chosen to) all the way to upload to YouTube, on a $299 device, the iPhone 4, that also happens to make phone calls, is astounding. When Apple makes this all possible on an iPod Touch and the iPad, they will rock in the education market!

I really think that the accessibility of these powerful tools will demonstrate an increased need for creativity and empowering message.  Since virtually anyone can now create stunning rich media, what is so important that you are compelled to say it with tools that can render your message so powerfully as to compel global action?

We live in a very different time than just a few years ago...

Be sure to watch it in full screen.