Unknown Artist: Last Leg (Jeff Iwanski of Honey Stump)

I've recently been getting some correspondence from friends in Nebraska about some of the bands who play the area. I went to Doane College in the early seventies and as a freshman taking an education course was promptly put into the Crete Public Schools as a teacher's aide. The practice was to immerse education students in public schools early to see if the freshman student was in fact had any real interest in pursuing a career in education.

So I was placed in a high school art class with Larry Boehmer the art teacher at the time. Larry was a University of Nebraska fine arts painter who had one of his pieces set up in the classroom. It was a painting of a woman farming and in the semester I was an aide it never received another stroke of refinement. Larry played the Layla album every day, every class period for the semester - he was hooked on blues.

Larry quit teaching that year and bought The Zoo, a bar in Lincoln where he invited Chicago Blues musicians to entertain the largely University f Nebraska art crowd. Later, when I took advanced art courses at the University I would make an occasional beer run.

All of which gave me a great perspective on the music that rocks the Midwest.

All of which is prelude to a freely downloadable masterwork by Jeff Iwanski recording as Last Leg. The last time I heard music this honest and whole is when Michelle Shocked released the Texas Campfire Tapes.

The Last Leg EP songs are gray, post-modern country-narratives. And as such they are stark, refreshing reminders that loneliness is busy with impersonal socializing. These songs are not a vampiric restyling of Woody Guthrie, Dylan, or Buffalo Springsteen. Here you will listen to the dark wonder of nothingness that Cormic McCarthy writes about in The Pretty Horses Trilogy. In the digital age, emptiness may feel warm as well as cold, pointless but exhausting for the blurring motion.

Today's prairie traveler has no horse but very well may have some fries to sing about. And breakfast may not be the same without your latest flame. These songs will remind you of Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, and Johnny Cash even though they'll offer completely different takes on similar subject matter.

There are sonic echoes of Eno's ambient sound experiments at play here as well. The spare instrumentation creates the mythic darkness at the edge of town that no longer exists in the megalopolises of American experience.

This is singles bar music like the one David Byrne described so many years ago, "Heaven - heaven is a bar - where nothing, nothing ever happens."

Free Curriculum Resources

At Tuesday's Board of Education meeting, Bob Kremer handed me a flyer about Scott McNealy's Curriki open source k-12 curriculum wiki.

Now this is an idea everyone seems to love. That is eliminating the expensive textbooks and operating off of a common curriculum backbone that teachers can customize to suit their students. Wow. I've been advocating thi skind of thing for a while now and it looks like McNealy may make it happen.

In District Administration Magazine McNealy had this to say;

My point is that we'd be better off giving teachers the electronic building blocks to assemble a curriculum that works for the students in their classrooms. That's what they're good at. That's what we pay them for. In fact, when we move curriculum online, we should take the money we're spending on updating books, and pay the teachers more.

In the technology business, we understand the importance of standards. They give everyone the opportunity to participate equally. We also understand the importance of innovating around those standards. That's how things get better.

So we must give teachers the flexibility to innovate around our educational standards, so education can get better.

That's the idea behind the nonprofit Global Education and Learning Community, or GELC-provide teachers around the world with free, "open source" content that they can add to and localize. What this community is about, basically, is opening up a new way to develop, distribute, and evaluate curriculum (based on achievement) at low or no cost.

Free access to open content will allow teachers to address more styles of learning-visual, auditory, hands on, project based, whatever works best. If you look at material prepared against a standard set by a state, it assumes a linear path of learning as opposed to the zigzag path or dynamic path that most students like to take.

Of course it's more difficult to evaluate nonlinear media, more challenging to assess a model that's designed to be constructed and explored, but that's where the network comes into play. With the global reach of the Internet and a growing online community of teachers sharing content and best practices, we could be approaching a real change in education-a change ensuring that no teacher is held back.

Amen!

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Free - Carry Your Windows Apps on a Thumbdrive

The Portable Apps site offers a free set of Windows applications that fit on most any portable drive. They're all free. Many are great and what a nice way for schools to off load responsibility for desktop maintenance of applications.

By standardizing on free applications parents don't have to buy school software, students take it all with themselves, and the schools merely offer a generic and inexpensive computer to host the student's drive on.

Sweet.

Free Audiobook Podcasts

The Open Culture link is a wonderful source of podcast audio books for everyone. Here's a sampling;

# A Christmas Tale, Charles Dickens (iTunes)
# A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (iTunes)
# Aesop’s Fables, Aesop (mp3 download)
# Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (mp3 download)
# Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen (mp3 download)
# Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche (mp3 download)'
# Beyond Lies the Wub, Philip K. Dick (iTunes)
# Call of the Wild, Jack London (mp3 download)
# Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (mp3 download)
# Chamber Music, James Joyce (mp3 download)
# Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (iTunes)
# Common Sense, Thomas Paine (mp3 download)
# Discourse on Method, Rene Descartes (mp3 download)
# Dracula, Bram Stoker (Just an fyi, this is not the best reading I've ever heard.) (iTunes)
# Emma, Jane Austen (mp3 download)
# Frankenstein - A 1938 radio broadcast that is faithful to Mary Shelley's text. (iTunes)
# Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln (mp3 download)

And this is just the beginning of the listing.

Enjoy.

Free Software: tinySpell

This product performs spell checking in any Windows application you or your son or daughter may be using. See if it makes sense for you:

tinySpell
Version 1.3

Occasionally you need to check the spelling of words in an application that does not include a spelling checker and you don't want to launch your word processor just for that. This is when tinySpell becomes handy. It is a small utility that allows you to easily and quickly check the spelling of words in any Windows application. tinySpell monitors your typing on the fly and alerts you whenever it detects a misspelled word. It also checks the spelling of every word you copy to the clipboard.
tinySpell installs itself in the system tray for easy access. It comes with an American-English dictionary containing more than 110,000 words.

The title link points to previously noted free software titles.

More Free Software: SketchUp

This is a very heavyweight freebie announced just recently by Google. Adults and children can model (in 3-D solids) just about anything they like. Maybe you want to design a new deck, a shed, or a rocketship - click on this link here.

The title links always point back to other free software titles.

If the schools aren't smart enough to use this in classes - well, I just don't know what to say.

A Teacher - Parent - Student Web-based Portal

Okay the big downside to this is that it's absolutely free to students. This means the State Department of Education will immediately start a five-year plan to build it for millions.

The actual cost from the chalksite.com website specifies;

How much does it cost?
Chalksite is available in 5 different plans ranging from a completely FREE plan to pay plans ranging from only $4.95/month - $19.95/month. There is also school pricing available with discounts up to 35% off.

Check it out (from the title link);

While attending college, the student control panel was the one thing that I always felt my educational system just could not get right. Every student was given access to a control panel that had been built to help students keep track of schedules, important dates, finances, email, and announcements, and I am sure the average college provides students with this as well. This is great, although I personally found it confusing, horribly crafted, and pointless (I really didn’t like the control panels during my college education). So, what were these systems lacking? I feel they were mostly lacking student/teacher communication. Whether I had to catch up on missing assignments, ask a question, keep up with grades, or whatever the case may have been, I had to email the teacher. Now, the problem with this is that I had to wait for a reply, the teachers had to put time and effort into making a reply, and not to mention teacher email accounts were built into the control panels as well, which teachers weren’t too fond of either (funny). What I am getting at is communicating was a handful and had always seemed to be more troublesome then it should have been in an educational system.

Chalksite solves this communication problem by providing teachers with an easy to use central point where they can communicate with students and parents, post assignments and grades, send messages to each other, and even manage a website for their courses. However, so there is no confusion, Chalksite is not a learning system like Nuvvo. It is more of a system to organize and communicate rather then a full-fledged system for teaching. This is what I like about it though and it definitely is a service that I would have absolutely loved to use back when I was attending college.

Free MP3s; Too tired for anything else today

I spent too much time working on sculptures today. So I'm sore and ornery.

But earlier in the day I discovered a Salon MP3 site that has a lot of wonderful free MP3s. What better thing to do on April 1?

May I recommenfd Billy Bragg's "The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie" and Bush War Blues".

Free eBooks

This will become my free eBook links master list.

Here's a site that is beginning to get recognition on the Web. It has hundreds of titles, academic and otherwise.

Instructors working on Curriculum development should take note and save the schools and pupils money by taking advantage of online editions for at least part of their courses.

Project Gutenburg - Updated 06/15/06

Free General Software Update

I added Paint.net - A free image processing program from the Washington State University (heavy duty Windows OS required)to the Free General Software compilation.

New Free Web Editing Tool

I added a new post dedicated to Free web tools students can use at home and at school. Click the link.

Free Software update

I just added two new free software links to the list (click the title link);

Google's free software pack (includes Norton anti-virus trial and a spam product)

Software for Starving Students (it's a humorous title) - a collection of great open source materials

Free Web Software Tools

Here's a Free HTML editor that offers a graphic interface called First Page 2006 3 A very nice tool for creating school papers, web pages, and whatnot.

Learning Software Tools - Java, Web

Software development techniques and languages for too long have been monopolized by insiders. If you're a Java student here are two useful downloads.

You and your child can freely download rich, industrial strength tools to learn with. You'll need a computer with a few gigabytes of disk space for everything but most newer home computers will suffice.

The Java Software Development Kit (J2SE 5.0) is available as a separate bundle here. Just download the separate bundle and follow the easy instructions. It will install itself on your machine so that you can use it to compile Java code into your own programs.

Next, get a copy of Eclipse, an open source Java Interactive Development (IDE) tool. This too will download and install itself by simply following the easy instructions.

(NoteToMyself: Finish this masterlist, add link to tutorials)

Free MP3/Podcast sites

This list will be updated from time to time. Use the leftmost permanent menu link to check it.

Here's my masterlist of legally free music sites. The caveat here is that these are largely new bands, songwriters, and who-not who may not necessarily be tasteful or sensitive to your cultural hot buttons. On the other hand, many songs found on these sites are topical, excellent, and very worthwhile. The blurbs explain the genres. Sample at your own risk but to the degree that these sites can guarantee; everything available is legal.

Soundclick Artists offering wonderful free music

Pitchfork Media from Northampton, MA

InSound from New York City

Rhino Podcasts - Rhino music samplers

Worthwhile Free General Software

This list will get updated from time to time and is a hot link on the permanent menu to the left. My masterlist of recommendations (use your own judgement, please) -

OpenOffice - a free office suite supported by SUN engineers and others

Firefox - some say this is the best browser available

AVG - anti-virus or AVAST

Google - Google offers a rich set of Software tools many of which I use and recommend highly

GIMP - an open source image processing program

Paint.net - A free image processing program from the Washington State University (heavy duty Windows OS required).

A free 3-D solid shapes modeler; SketchUp.

Free MP3 site

One of my favorite sites for finding contemporary music of all kinds (and plenty of international bands) is Pitchfork Media. They offer bands an opprtunity to get exposed in one of the nation's best music news web sites.

Now, I have to warn everyone - your mileage will vary with anything I recommend (it's a very mixed bag of pot luck genres). Our family votes whether to keep songs going on our jukebox player with Mom having the final edit. Our boys are guided and expected to make intelligent decisions without too much interference with their own developing tastes.

In any case, an inexpensive way to sample and enjoy new bands - click the title.

Free Browser: Firefox 1.5 is out

Highly recommended. Go get the latest copy. It's as good as it gets for browsing.

Free Computer Anti-Virus Software

In an article called "Two More Ways to Fight Viruses, for Free" in the Washington Post, Sunday, November 27, 2005; Page F07, Rob Pegoraro reviews two freeware anti-virus products.

You are welcome to use your own judgement about these things but I present the information to let everyone know that it's there. For anyone on a budget it probably makes sense to give it a try.

Selections from the article;

-snip-

For several years, two Czech software developers have offered free versions of their anti-virus programs to home users. These no-charge downloads don't offer every feature provided by McAfee Inc. and Symantec Corp., the two security developers whose programs come pre-installed on most Windows PCs. But when put to the same tests as software from the Big Two, they did the job almost as well and with less fuss.

Both of these freebies -- Avast 4 Home Edition, from Prague's Alwil Software, and AVG Free Edition, from Brno-based Grisoft Inc. -- can be installed only on home computers that aren't put to any business or commercial use. (Income from sales to businesses and organizations covers the cost of this exercise in Internet charity.)

These two programs share a few welcome traits. Both are relatively small downloads -- almost 10 megabytes for Avast, just under 15 for AVG -- that tout compatibility with systems as old as Windows 95. And both automatically download updates every day and allow quick manual updates.

-snip-
AVG's interface is in general far cleaner than Avast's, putting all the relevant controls and status indicators in one window.

Neither program's screening was quite as far-reaching as that offered by competitors -- for example, Avast and AVG allowed me to preview a .zip archive containing a virus using Windows XP's Compressed Files tool, while Symantec and McAfee's software denied all access to that .zip file.

Also, neither Avast nor AVG will stop spyware that you choose to download and install on your own -- each pronounced a freebie, spyware-riddled download as safe. So you'll still need a separate anti-spyware utility such as Microsoft's free Anti-Spyware for Windows 2000 and XP.

But if you define an anti-virus utility's job as ensuring that no virus sent your way can run on your computer (as opposed to also ensuring that no virus can even land on your computer), these two programs were just as capable as their pricier competitors. And while I've gotten more reader reports than I can count of PCs immobilized by malfunctioning Symantec and McAfee software, I've yet to hear of such trouble with Avast or AVG.

Whichever virus scanner you use, make sure you keep one other active -- the one that came pre-installed at birth: your brain.

Even the most rigorously updated security software can miss a just-created program that hasn't been entered into virus databases, but any reasonably aware human should still be able to spot a con job when it arrives.

Be as skeptical and smart about strange files as you would any other strange solicitation, and you won't have to rely on somebody else's software as your only line of defense.

The urls are AVG and Avast.

Saving Money: OpenOffice software

OpenOffice is an industry strength software office suite of tools that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, graphics tool and more. It is free for agreeing to the licensing terms.

Click on the title of this post to go there. For families who cannot afford expensive vendor packages or who have reservatons about the investment, this is the way to go. Microsoft Word products can easily be imported. I use this at home.

An especially nice feature is that you can export PDF documents that are far less prone to have embedded virues. One of my pet peeves has always been that I am leery of opening Microsoft Word email attachments from institutional sources (like school) because they can be infected (giving me headaches). PDF attachments carry far less risk.

I would like to see all Region 19 schools give this package a fair evaluation and consider a wholesale migration away from the costly vendor software the schools now pay for to this standard.

Free training videos are available at; http://tinyurl.com/7kvo7

Today, there is considerable impetus by industry to move in this direction;

see: http://tinyurl.com/7rvfp

"OpenDocument format gathers steam
By Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: November 10, 2005, 4:00 AM PT

Big guns in the software industry are massing behind OpenDocument as government customers show more interest in alternatives to Microsoft's desktop software.

IBM and Sun Microsystems convened a meeting in Armonk, N.Y., on Friday to discuss how to boost adoption of the standardized document format for office applications. The ODF Summit brought together representatives from a handful of industry groups and from at least 13 technology companies, including Oracle, Google and Novell.

That stepped-up commitment from major companies comes amid signs that states are showing interest in OpenDocument. Massachusetts in September decided to standardize on OpenDocument for some state agencies.

James Gallt, the associate director for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, said Wednesday that there are a number of other state agencies are exploring the use of the document format standard.

"It's more grassroots, starting small and working its way through individual states and agencies," Gallt said, but did not specify which governments were looking into it.

Those state customers are seeking alternatives to Microsoft Office, while the technology providers are looking to loosen Microsoft's grip on the desktop marketplace, said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk. Those factors are what are fueling the growing momentum for OpenDocument, he said."

The article goes on to present some pros and cons for making such a move.