Blogs

The May issue of Mac|Life provides a great explanation of digital video formats.

In short, digital video is made of "containers" or "wrappers" which contain separate video and audio file formats - which explains the problem of having a video file that seems to have no audio. The most common containers are MOV (Apple QuickTime, which can use H.264 for video and AAC or MP3 for audio), FLV (Adobe Flash), AVI (very popular Microsoft container, unfortunately, not very efficient), and WMV (Microsoft, again, which can be played using Flip4Mac and QuickTime on your Mac).

These containers can play a number of different audio and video formats.

Here's a great chart from the Mac|Life article:

My unscientific, but practical experience-generated recommendation is stick to H.264 MOV files. Properly encoded, these files can be played on almost anything with an Apple logo. For example, the Export feature of the new iMovie '08 gives a good chart showing possibilities at different sizes:

As always, the king of all Mac video conversion, VisualHub, is the way to go in virtually any situation. Just drag your video file into the window, click "Optimize for: All Devices" under the "iTunes" tab, and you'll never lose sleep over video formats again.

If you are having difficulty converting teaching resources in the .bin and .cue format, Kevin Donahue offers a great posting on How to Convert bin/cue files to mp4 for video iPod.

The technique involves the free VCDGearX:

For the second step of his instructions, I used my copy of VisualHub (the later incarnation of iSquint): a $25 application I cannot recommend enough if you'd like to avoid having a million different applications on your Mac to convert video files.

Life would be so much simpler if everyone just used H.264 mp4. Sigh.

Remember, only two industries refer to their customers as users.

Eric W. Sink

In America, the International Society for Technology in Education and the American Association of School Librarians have "competing" standards.

The American Association of School Librarians' Standards for the 21st Century Learner 2007 are grouped into four main categories:

The International Society for Technology in Educational Standards for Students 2007 are grouped into six broad categories:

In short, and not surprisingly, the Librarians focus on literacy and the technologists have more of an emphasis on technology. Both documents are worth reading.

Spoiler alert: the ISTE diagram is prettier, and Simon would hate both of them - but he hates everything.

There are only 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Eric W. Sink

First of all, if you aren't subscribed already, subscribe to the TEDTalks video podcast. If you haven't heard of TED, it's the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, for "ideas worth spreading." Particularly interesting is the section of presentations on the theme of "How We Learn". (A "big up" to my friend Mark Battley, who turned me on to this fantastic resource.) If you do click on the links just provided, you may as well go and get yourself a tall cool drink right now, because your going be glued to the site for quite a while. Maybe a few drinks, actually.

Dean Ornish, in a presentation of Feb. 2008, points out that four elements can increase our brain functioning: love, healthy eating, exercise, and managing stress. He also lists specific items that have been shown to increase brain brain cells (see above). And yes, rasta, "cannabinoids" are what you think they are! In short, "lifestyle" can affect learning.

Second, you may find SIr Ken Robinson's presentation "Do Schools Kill CreativityDo Schools Kill Creativity" a frighteningly astute argument for the idea that "if you're not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original", and that schools are presently employed the task of deliberately discouraging creativity, the one skill we have that may still save our species. But don't hold your breath that we'll ever change... especially by using a set Scandinavian cantilevered purple toboggans in a bowl of jello.