Translation Software For Music Makers : The Record hide captionJace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ Rupture. Xabi Tudela/Courtesy of the artist Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ Rupture. When you hear a song on the radio today, there's a good chance that song was made using a computer. That makes sense, of course, for Western musicians, who are used to things like a 4/4 time signature and a 12-tone scale. A plug-in is a little program that adds abilities to a larger software application, like a video player or a synthesizer. Sufi Plug Ins were created by Jace Clayton, also known as DJ Rupture. "Spain has a really active community of Moroccan musicians, and I was making music with a violinist named Abdelhak Rahal," Clayton says. In addition to rhythm, his software was not compatible with Eastern melodies. "It is a scale insofar as it's a group of notes with a specific tuning, but in a way its more than a scale. One maqam, for example, is used for love songs. "The difference is about two notes," he says. Clayton has a few questions of his own.
50 Little-Known Ways Google Docs Can Help In Education 5 Ways To Be A Better Public Speaker 7.16K Views 0 Likes If you've been asked to speak at a conference or host a seminar, you may be shaking in your boots. My 10 Favorite Learnist Boards Of The Year 2.66K Views 0 Likes I wanted to take a moment and share my favorite Learnist boards from the past year. Questionable company targets NC for virtual charter school The nation’s largest for-profit virtual education company quietly took steps this week to open up an online charter school in North Carolina that would subsist off of public funds and siphon off profits to Wall Street investors. The move comes as the company, K12, Inc., faces mounting questions in others states over the quality of education students receive from the company. A representative of K12, Inc., a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: LRN), attended a Cabarrus County school board meeting Monday to ask if the school system would partner with the company to open up a virtual public charter school that would draw from students statewide. The company first began talks with the school district by having former state Rep. Jeffrey Barnhart, now a lobbyist at the prominent Raleigh law and lobbying firm McGuireWoods, to approach the school district in his home county, according to Cabarrus County Superintendent Barry Shepherd. Booming business As of 11 a.m.
The Good MOOC: A review of Udacity's CS253 - Web Development Following on from Udacity’s successful CS101 course, CS253 - Web development starts from the basics of how the web works and goes through everything necessary to build a blog and scale it to support large numbers of users. Pedagogy The goal of the course is explicit right from the start and CS253 delivers on it. The pedagogy is very ‘hands-on’ and pure Udacity. Professor’s aura Steve Huffman is the co-founder of Reddit and Hipmunk. Quality and availability of teaching staff CS253 was Steve Huffman’s first experience teaching a course and it sometimes showed. As usual, Udacity’s teaching assistant are a very dedicated and energetic bunch. Academic rigor As with all Udacity courses, CS253 is asynchronous and exams can be re-taken at will. Student body Large is the first thing that comes to mind. Corporate sponsors Although CS253 does not have corporate sponsors as such, the course ends with a ‘field trip’, where Steve Huffman shares in more details his experience at Reddit. Interactivity
10 Things in School That Should Be Obsolete Flickr: Corey Leopold By Greg Stack So much about how and where kids learn has changed over the years, but the physical structure of schools has not. 1. At Northern Beaches Christian School students learn everywhere. 2. 3. 4. 5. Corridors at Machias Elementary are used for informal learning 6. 7. 8. Learner Centered Classroom at Riverview Elementary School. 9. 10. Greg Stack is an architect for NAC Architecture and specializes in developing best practices for the planning and design of educational environments.
Crazy Smart: When A Rocker Designs A Mars Lander NASA engineer Adam Steltzner led the team that designed a crazy new approach to landing on Mars. Rachael Porter for NPR hide caption toggle caption Rachael Porter for NPR NASA engineer Adam Steltzner led the team that designed a crazy new approach to landing on Mars. It's called the seven minutes of terror. During those seven minutes, the rover is on its own. The team that invented the EDL system has spent nearly 10 years together, designing, building, testing, tweaking, retesting and retweaking. Because the new Mars rover is five times heavier than its predecessors, NASA had to come up with a totally new landing system. The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft will approach Mars at 13,000 mph. Once the sky crane senses that it's no longer supporting the rover, it releases the cables and flies off to crash-land a safe distance away. So you won't be surprised to learn that this is a rather nerve-wracking time for Adam Steltzner, the EDL team leader. From Rock Star Dreams To Rocket Science
How to Use Google Search More Effectively [INFOGRAPHIC] Among certain circles (my family, some of my coworkers, etc.) I'm known for my Googling skills. I can find anything, anywhere, in no time flat. Sadly, though web searches have become and integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. That search process also included determining when to rely on Google and when to utilize scholarly databases, but on a fundamental level, it appears that many people just don't understand how to best find the information they seek using Google. Thanks to the folks at HackCollege, a number of my "secrets" are out. Infographic via HackCollege Image courtesy of iStockphoto, LICreate
Step-by-step Guide to Beginning Homeschooling in North Carolina Making The Decision Deciding to homeschool your child is an incredibly significant decision, and one that will certainly change your life. People decide to homeschool their children for many different reasons, some of which include: dissatisfaction with the public school system, desire to train their child within a specific religious framework, frustration with their child's current school situation, in order to meet a child’s special learning needs, or wishing to keep a close family bond throughout the early school years. If you live in North Carolina, one or more of the other 33,000 families in the state who have already decided to homeschool one or more of their children may also influence your decision. Following the Laws Homeschooling in North Carolina is not overly regulated, but there are a few edicts that everyone must follow. The most important part of choosing what to teach your child is understanding exactly who your child is. Locating Resources
Online classes can be enlightening, edifying, and engaging — but they're not college The future of higher education online is, at present, clear as mud. Do Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs — college-level classes offered online through a number of corporate providers — offer students better tools for study, increased opportunities at lower cost? Can they provide access to higher education to those who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it? Or do these canned classes portend the selling out of American education to Silicon Valley profiteers? I took the best MOOC I could find over the last several weeks in order to try to answer these questions, as well as the one perhaps too seldom asked: Are even the best of these classes any good, or not? University professors founded or helped to found all the companies that provide online platforms for serving MOOCs, the largest of which (Coursera, Udacity and edX) all have affiliations of one kind or another with Stanford. Then they go on to address an entirely different concern: And another: AS: Well that was the idea.
A Six-Point Checklist for Education Innovators This blog is an excerpt from the book Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World, published June 2012 by Solution Tree. Whether innovators are drumming up new business ideas or hard at work solving community problems, they share certain characteristics. They tend to be action-oriented. If you're a teacher looking for opportunities to bring innovation into the classroom, start by considering your own strengths and weaknesses as an innovator. Are You Action Oriented? Taking action is a hallmark of innovators. In the classroom, a take-action teacher recognizes opportunities. Do You Know How to Network? Educators who are determined to unleash their students' innovative capacities show another common characteristic. Educators who know how to network take part in online and in-person communities to advance their professional learning. Are You Willing to Take Risks? Can You Look Ahead? Here's the tricky part about innovation: it's hard to see it coming.
The timing is realistic but the delays are painful. The technology is ready but the people who have to implement need much more support. Funding for professional learning is critical as we go forward. by toddwright Apr 3