My friends know I am addicted to podcast listening on my iPod, and they sometimes ask what are my favorite ones to listen to. I recently saw a great blog post from someone who listed his top 10 podcasts for helping him learn. I have misplaced who this person is so I can’t link to him here,  but I’ll still follow his lead and post my favorite podcasts here. Enjoy! And if you have some great ones to add to the list, I’d love to hear them, so please add them to the comments.

1. LDS General Conference

Friends sometimes wonder where they can get the most recent conference talks. Wonder no more.

2.  LDS Voices

If you are LDS, this podcast is wonderful. It pulls new and old talks from the BYUBroadcasting.org database, so one day you might hear our modern prophet and the next day you might hear a talk from a prophet living 50 years ago. Nothing like hearing Matthew Cowley’s famous “Miracles” devotional in his own voice.

3. TED Talks

This is one cool conference that I’ll never be cool enough to attend, but I’m glad to have the presentations on my iPod. Great social, political, scientific, and educational commentary by some of the most interesting thinkers in our country.

4.  The New Yorker

The New Yorker has a couple of podcasts I enjoy. One is the Comment podcast, which is an interview with a writer of one of their weekly feature articles. Always in-depth and interesting. Second, I love the speeches from their annual conference, which is in a separate feed.

5. NPR’s Story of the Day

My style is not to buy every song an artist every recorded, but the “Best Hits” album only. I want to just get the best from many different voices. Similarly, I don’t want to listen to all of NPR’s reports, but only their best, which is why I love this podcast.

6. IT Conversations

A must, I think, for people in the Instructional Design profession, although the quality has dropped off of late. Still, there are great presentations and interviews with technology leaders. If you are not into the technology part of it so much, Moira Gunn’s episodes are pretty interesting.

7. This American Life

This one is hit and miss for me. Some episodes are really interesting, and some get deleted after about 10 minutes. Worth a try, though, every week.

8. Grammar Girl

GG makes grammar interesting and easy to learn about with pop culture references and fun metaphors and anecdotes.

9. 60 Second Psych

Gotta love a quick bit of scientific trivia and learning in only 60 seconds from Scientific American!

10. Stuff You Should Know

This one is hit and miss too. It gets a little tedious listening sometimes, and I wish they would chit-chat less and stay on topic more, but they pick darn interesting topics. Who doesn’t want to know whether the CIA really experimented on humans with heroin? Or who Delta Force is? Or how body armor works? Or whatever happened to Einstein’s brain?

11. Sounds of the Sabbath

A great gospel teacher shares a story that all Christians can relate to and learn from, followed by music. Very uplifting.

12. All in the Mind

Creepy intro music and sometimes disturbing topics. But sometimes it’s pretty interesting.

13. Best of YouTube.

Just subscribe and thank me later. You’re welcome. And by the way, not all of the ones shown on the website are funny or interesting, but the ones that get voted into the podcast feed usually are.

Well, those are some of my favorites. What are yours? Particularly I’m looking for a good history one, because I enjoy learning about history. Or one that did biographies about famous historical people?

A little over a week ago, I proposed a 16-team playoff system for college football, just for argument’s sake. It was fun today to read Peter Schrager of Fox Sports arguing for exactly the same thing. I believe this would be a win-win for nearly everyone, including mid-majors, BCS schools, and TV channels. He goes a step further to play out a hypothetical scenario, showing how awesome the matchups would be and declaring “sensory overload”.

Yeah. Why can everyone see that this is the best option for college football except the NCAA itself?

This is completely off topic for this blog, but please indulge me. Let’s talk sports, specifically college football. I’m a former sports reporter, so I have always loved sports debates, and this one’s a doozy. I want to weigh in with my two cents, and leave comments about your opinion!

 Why we need a college football championship

Right now, few schools actually make money off of their football programs. Basically, the BCS schools, and that’s about it. There is REAL big money involved here, as evidenced by the multimillion coaches’ salaries. The crime is that these millions are locked up in the hands of only a handful of schools. Those programs who have established themselves as football powers soak up the BCS millions and turn around and use the BCS to entice the best high school athletes and college coaches. Then the best programs get better and the others grow more and more less likely to ever get a slice of the pie. Because conferences get payouts from BCS bowls too, a low-tier school lucky enough to be in the SEC, for example, might net $1 million dollars for not even playing in the post season! Just because they are lucky enough to be in a BCS conference.

That’s just not right. Besides, without a playoff, a BCS championship is hollow because you don’t really know if the champ really is the best team—or just the one that convinced the most voters.

A Proposed Solution

I think every conference needs a potential path to the championship and the BCS. There should be the vision, that if you play hard enough as a team, you can go all the way. That option does not exist now. Yes, non-BCS schools can “bust” a BCS bowl game, but only one a year (what about poor undefeated Ball State this year, stuck behind Utah and Boise State?), and with zero chance of playing for the championship (how come Utah is not being considered for the championship game if Texas Tech loses today?). No! Every team needs to have the goal that if they play hard enough, they could go all the way. It makes for good sports movies. It makes for high interest among fans. It’s the American way.

So I think they should go with a 16-team playoff. Each of the 11 Division 1 conferences gets an automatic berth (so winning your conference matters), and 5 at-large teams can earn their way in through a combination of human polls/computer rankings. This adds four games to the schedule, which is a lot, so teams will have their preseasons shortened by one game. Then only 8 teams in the end really have to play extra games (and I’m sure they’re not going to complain). The first round will be played at lower-tier bowl sites, while the final three rounds would be played in BCS bowls.

That’s my choice, but if some argue that it adds too many games to the schedule, you could also do a 12-team playoff with 11 automatic berths and 1 at-large berth. The top four teams according to the rankings earn a bye (since they’ll most likely have to play to the end anyway). The remaining 8 play the first round for the right to join the top 4 in the quarterfinals. This would also mercifully eliminate the patsy teams before they get embarrassed by the elite teams, but it still gives the opportunity for a solid, well-coached, mid-major school to go all the way.

Why this would work

This system would benefit the mid-majors by giving them something to play for. If they win their conference, they get the chance to play for the national championship. They can’t ask for or expect more. It benefits the current BCS schools by allowing 11 of their teams to get berths (6 conference champions + 5 likely at-large berths). It also benefits them because each of their teams has the chance to win the championship without argument. That will make them happy.

This also benefits the NCAA and the television executives. Basketball is not nearly (not even close!) as popular as college football, and yet March Madness draws in legions of television and live-ticketed fans. College football would rake in the dough through a playoff system. And the bowls would be unharmed.

This is so obvious, why don’t they do it? And now especially with ESPN’s new contract with BCS, we have no chance of changing this soon.  Unless Barak Obama is serious about making this a presidential issue, although I don’t agree that 8 teams is enough for a playoff because the same inequalities would exist and some conferences would still be left out.

I just uploaded the audio and handout from my 2008 AECT presentation. You can listen to it, or download the mp3, on my presentations page. I’m sorry the audio is not the greatest. I have definitely become a believer that conferences should have a podcast team handling the recording, if possible (I know student volunteers are limited). It is tough for me to remember to make a good recording when I’m already thinking about giving the presentation to the people there live. I’ll continue to try and make these recordings more of the regular routine when I present and work to improve the audio.

[Note, this is a presentation of the ETRD paper that I blogged about yesterday]

I have had The Walmart Effect on my “to-read” list for a while, because I think it is interesting to understand how Walmart has changed–completely–our economy and society in positive and negative ways. So I enjoyed today listening to the author, Charles Fishman, present about the book. It’s a great listen, and helped move the book a little higher up my to-read list for me! It reinforced for me how things that you think are very positive–such as cars and low prices–can also have negative effects. There is always a cost to progress that we should understand as we continually innovate and invent.

My cousin-in-law (which doesn’t seem to be the right word! That sounds so unfamiliar when in reality I know well and am good friends with Tim) recently commented on my posting about the lack of creativity in modern schools. In my post, I reflect on the predictions of JP Guilford in 1950 when he predicted that computers would eliminate the need for knowledge experts and elevate creativity and problem solving as the necessary skills of the future.

Guilford was exactly right. Tim agrees and gives a great perspective from the medical education sector, where med students who can memorize information progress in the system faster than problem solving doctors. Tim wonders, and I agree, which would YOU prefer to have working for you? I would much rather have the problem solving doctor, who has enough knowledge to know where to find the information he needs, but can still think progressively about how to serve me.

Thanks, Tim for the great comments!

I don’t think I’ve linked yet to a great presentation on this topic by Sir Ken Robinson at the TED conference, where he presents a very funny and entertaining (and persuasive) talk on how schools are killing creativity. Thanks to Clif Mims for pointing me to that video.

Personally,  I think the current recession may not be the least of our worries in our great nation if we don’t figure out quickly that our current model of education is not right for the 21st Century. We don’t need "knowledge experts" anymore because the info is readily available. We need "problem-solvers." Of course a person needs SOME knowledge to be able to be a problem solver, but still, the creativity/problem solving aspect is terribly overlooked right now in schools.

Since the system isn’t changing quickly enough, I wonder what I can do to at least prepare my own children and develop their creativity/problem solving skills? What can I do to prepare my children for 21st century jobs and lifestyles even though they attend 20th century schools?

Any ideas?

Tags: creativity, schools, educational change, ken robinson

Powered by Qumana

We had a big headache last night finding a hotel with decent wireless, that would be affordable and on the South Harbor strip close to the AECT conference. Our original reserved hotel, Travelodge, had problems, as did the Best Western (although they have kudos for having a great manager trying to fix the problem).

Finally, we’re at the Quality Inn, which we’ve been satisfied with so far.

Why are so many having such problems with wireless? Is it the same contracted provider? One manager told us the fires and wind in this area of CA are the problem. I don’t know if I believe THAT…

We also ran into Stephen Downes yesterday. I’m looking forward to his presentation today. Once again, like I was at the Open Learning conference in 2004, I was impressed with him. Nice guy! I don’t always agree with his blog posts (but do I have anyone that I always agree with? No), but nice guy and he definitely gets the conversation going.

Good luck tonight, Stephen, looking forward to it.

Tags: AECT2007

Powered by Qumana

The Wowio project has me pretty excited. It’s a website offering free downloads of legal pdf versions of books, both old and new. The books are available in 38 different categories. As is the case with all free book projects on the web, the catalogue is pretty limited. But then again, Wowio only kicked off a year ago, and in one year’s time has a pretty impressive group of reads.

Free books are always a good thing, right? Especially when a recent ITConversations presentation interviewed a panel of teenagers on their consumer technology choices and came away with the main finding that teens want things to be free (who knew? :-).

[BTW, I’d link to the ITConversations download, but their website has changed, and I can’t find anything on it anymore, which is too bad because their previous setup was very nice. Maybe it’s financial problems–the downside of free?].

Tags: ITConversations, Wowio, free, books

Powered by Qumana

I’m excited for the AECT 2007 conference this year, maybe because it will be back at the place where it all started for me–my first AECT conference four years ago. Has it been that long? 🙂

Anyway, does anyone have any ideas on which airport I should fly in to? John Wayne is closest, but it’s twice as expensive as Bob Hope, which is 1-2 hours away, depending on traffic. I like saving $200, plus I was more into Bob Hope growing up than John Wayne, anyway 🙂

So my question is, would I be crazy to fly into Bob Hope, rent a car, and then drive to AECT? It would save money, and would give me a car that week. But I’ve never driven in LA. Am I nuts? Or would it not be too bad if I did it during the middle of the day?

In case anyone is interested, here are links to Google Maps of the different airports, to the AECT hotel.

Bob Hope:
LAX
John Wayne

Clif Mims tagged me the other day, with a little game of blogosphere tag. Here’s the rules:

THE RULES

1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose/tag people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.

And here’s a few interesting things about me:

1. I love to run and have completed four marathons.

2. I met my wife when I was dressed as Harry Potter, signing books for kids. That’s a story for another day …

3. I  served a 2-year voluntary church in Ecuador for my church (LDS). I wanted to stay longer, and I still hope to go back and do it again someday. We can learn so much from those wonderful, humble people.

4. My bachelor’s degree was in English, and I wanted to become a professor of American literature from the frontier period (late 1800s). That was, until I was student teaching and heard from another teacher about the field of instructional technology. The rest is history 🙂

5. I worked for several years as a journalist, mostly as a sports reporter. That’s how I paid my way through my undergraduate school. I still sometimes miss the excitement of being “in the know” that comes from working in a newsroom and the thrill of quick interviews and race-to-beat-the-deadline stories.

6. I am horribly addicted to ice cream. That will be my downfall in life :-). There’s a carton of Extreme Moose Tracks in my freezer right now.

7. I am a huge Acapella music fan. I think groups that use only their voices as instruments rock! Some favs are Eclipse, Voice Male, Inside Out, and Vocal Point.

8. I like trying new things. For example, this year my wife and I have been trying out Tae Kwan Do. I’m up to the third level (yellow belt). It’s fun to try something new for a while and have a goal to strive for! Hi-yah!

I also learned in this game that I read a lot of bloggers, but don’t actually know very many bloggers well enough to tag them. But I’ll tag my good buddy Geoff at BYU!