Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

I was surprised to a new little button in iTunes a few days ago called iTunes Match.  I have not heard much of this other than it being an add-on to the iCloud offering. I have not been one to jump on the bandwagon of storing music in the cloud, so that is probably why I have not paid much attention to it.  However, I have been sufficiently impressed with iCloud except that I did not read a warning message and deleted a bunch of my contacts by accident.  Luckily, I know most numbers and addresses so I was able to rebuild it.  That aside, the idea of syncing my music with iTunes quality, DRM-free tracks is appealing.

Back Story

The bulk of my music collection represents CDs we have ripped, most of which were not ripped all in the same month or year, let alone in the same format or bit rate.  In fact, we would do a song here or there, a whole album here, another song there and so on.  It’s also possible that it was done on multiple computers at different encodings and with different formats.  For instance, one song on an album may be AAC, while another is MP3, and yet another may be (shudder) WMA.  For quite some time we were a mixed OS household – a couple of Windows XP machines and Ubuntu.  It didn’t start out being on portable players, it was more of having a song available as we sat at the computer and didn’t want to hunt for a CD.

The same goes for purchased music.  Through the years I have purchased music from a variety of sources online.  Some has been shackled with DRM and some in mp3 format, again, all in different bit rates and volumes.

Through the past few years, we have been through a variety of mobile devices and eventually became a strictly iPod and Apple household.

The Apple Household

We are completely Apple, right down to an Apple TV and a pair of iPhones.  I know that some do not like the complete integration of everything media-related into iTunes, but I actually find it very useful.  In my past computing experience with other devices, it was a multi step process to get media onto the device. One of the aspects of iTunes that I love is that I can plug any of my devices into it and it will sync what I tell it to do.  Everything is in one place and I find that simple and wonderful.

The Conversion

I took some time to prep my library and made sure that everything was what I wanted to match and available in the cloud.  There were some tracks that I had downloaded from free samples, artist mailing lists and various other (legal) sources.  Some of those tracks are very good and I would like to have them available in iCloud, but not all.  If nothing else, this prompted me to clean out the junk in my iTunes library.

The experience of scanning my library was pretty simple and took only a few minutes.  It went through about 3100 songs and matched all but about 250.  Some of those were just not available in iTunes, but some of them did have corresponding tracks in the iTunes store.  I hit Google and found a variety of solutions, but this one in the Apple community forums offered the solution that worked for me for the majority of my match problems.  On the second page is a suggestion to convert to AAC for those that are simply not fixed by deleting and re-adding.

One thing that I noticed is that the meta tags seemed to make a difference in the matching.  From what I read on various sources before I started this, it seemed as though they didn’t make a difference so I didn’t pay a lot of attention.  However,  I had one album that just would not match and I realized that there was a typo in the album name.  Once I fixed that and added to iCloud again, it worked like a charm.

Getting back to my hodgepodge of track bit rate and format, I was particularly excited about the ability to re-download music in the higher bit rate in the AAC format.  It brings me back to the first time I was burned by DRM.  I can’t even remember which service it was – it’s long gone now – but it was in some Windows Media DRM format.  Long story short, I got an e-mail that my music was going to stop working unless I burned it to a CD.  So I did, and then re-ripped it to mp3.  As you can imagine, the tracks sounded like crap.  As luck would have it, this particular album was one that I could match and download in the original quality in DRM free AAC format.

I have a couple of CDs that were in 128 bit encoding, but I cannot re-rip them because the original disks have been damaged in one of our moves.  It’s not music I listen to frequently, so really not worth re-purchasing.  Again, this is going to be great to make the format of my music library more consistent and high quality.  That alone is worth the annual price and the time.  I am sure I will also appreciate it at work or when we are traveling to have access to our entire iTunes collection from our mobile devices.

All in all, I think this is a great service and will be sharing my thoughts as I use it more.

Here are some handy tips for those schools that do not have dedicated staff.

“Don’t:”

1. Trust salespeople.  About anything.  Ever.  If you remember none of these rules, write this one down and never forget it.
2. Buy a complete, all in one, web 2.0, interactive, fully intuitive, interactive learning and blah, blah blah from a company promising it for your web solution.  You can have a web site up and running for around $20 a month that will look professional and just about anyone can do it.
3. Buy hosted e-mail.  Google Apps for Education is Free.  7+GB of mail, hundreds of users.  Plus you get access to all of the other amazing features of Google Apps, too.
4. Care about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – see Rule 1.  You can help your search engine rankings in ways that won’t cost anything.

“Do”

1. Consider Google Apps for Education
2. Hire a “techie” for questions.  Even if it’s only a couple of hours, you will make much better decisions if you have some knowledge of what those salespeople are trying to sell. (See Rule #1 above)
3. Consider Free/Open Source Software
4. Create social media sites for your school – Facebook and Twitter.  They are a fantastic (and free) way to communicate with your community and students.
5. Look at what other schools are doing.  You can learn a lot from others in your similar situation.  Many times, someone else has already made the mistakes that you are considering making.

So I’ve read several accounts of this story and the outrage that schools are spying on kids in Pennsylvania via the webcam in their Macbooks.  I anyone asked me, which no one will, here is my guess about how the whole thing went down:

Kid takes his Macbook home and is playing around with Photo Booth, which is a program that lets you take photos of yourself using the built-in webcam.  You can make funny faces, put crazy backgrounds, it’s just something everyone with a Mac has done at one point or another.  If you don’t own a Mac, look it up.    So this kid probably took a picture of himself doing something inappropriate.  These photos stay on the computer, unless you delete them.

Along comes system administrator who is required by law (CIPA) to make sure that our little innocent children don’t ever see anything that could be offensive or objectionable.  So sysadmin happens to take a look at the Pictures folder of kid’s computer and notices the inappropriate picture(s).  So why were they looking in the first place?  I can see where it would be reasonable to see what kids are downloading once in a while.  I’ve read of districts that just do random spot checks to make sure people aren’t downloading from peer to peer networks, porn or heaven knows what on computers owned by the school district. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me on the surface.

However, that doesn’t extend to reading through their personal diary just for kicks.  A simple task of opening the Pictures folder and glancing at the thumbnails would do.  Notice that peer to peer sharing software appeared and subsequently a ton of movies or music also appeared?  Since the district is  considered responsible, it’s probably a good thing to have a process to monitor this.  That way, when they are sued because little Sally download bootleg copies of the latest Hollywood release, the district has a process to point to as a defense.  Unfortunately, this is the world we live in.

But I digress, back to the problem.  So, sysadmin tells principal to tell kid to stop acting like an idiot with Photo Booth.  For whatever reason, this gets turned into school district spying on kids in their bedrooms without their knowledge.

I tend to doubt that district staff is spying on kids in their bedroom.  I say this for two reasons.  For one, as a system administrator by trade, everyone assumes that we sit around and watch what people do.  The fact of the matter is that I could care less what you do with your computer.  I could care less what’s in your e-mail or chat sessions or what you look at when you take your computer home.  I realize that I may be the exception, because the sysadmin world is also full of control freaks.  However, time simply does not allow for most of us to sit around randomly activating webcams to see what we can see people doing.

For two, this would be technically difficult.  I understand there was a security system that could take a snapshot using the webcam.  However, the likelihood that this snapshot would capture the exact instant that the kid was doing something wrong is low.  This snapshot process would have to be consistent, repeated and frequent.  Maybe it was and I missed it, but I didn’t see that in any of the stories I read.

I may be completely wrong about this particular incident, but I’ve noticed that the news media, for the most part, does not understand technology.  They were convinced that some staff was spying on the kids, and they will stop at nothing to prove that, or at least give the appearance of it.  That’s sure a lot more of a fun story than my theory.  It sure gets people watching the news, buying papers, and visiting web sites to increase advertising impressions.  I am cynical, I know.

With these types of incidents, technology programs suffer. As you browse comments on news stories, you see “why do they need laptops, anyway” and this kind of stuff.  There is a huge misunderstanding about how much technology can impact and improve education.  Technology is an amazing tool when used appropriately, and I’m pretty sure that this district was on the right track.  I hope there was nothing disgusting or perverted happening there.  But remember, there are countless districts that have these programs throughout the world.   Even if this is one person who went off the deep end, I fear that overreaction will result in yet more laws and regulations that will only hurt everyone that plays by the rules.

I hate this mentality that just one person does something stupid that everyone has to be cast in the same light.  No matter how many laws, regulations, oversight committees, procedures, checks, and forms, problems will still arise.  The overwhelmingly vast majority of people are honorable and ethical.  I think we forget that sometimes.