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From the Associated Press, here’s a report that more high school students are using MP3 files provided by textbook publishers. Listening to Spanish lessons on an iPod beats sitting in a language lab, and it seems that students might spend more time on the lessons. According to a 2006 marketing survey, half of all US teenagers own a digital audio player. At some schools, students can borrow players to listen to lessons.
The article also notes that several universities have partnered with Apple to offer branded iTunes stores. These stores can integrate with a university’s web sites, including WebCT, to provide free hosting of MP3 files for college courses. The university receives an affiliate fee for any iTunes audio and video sold through the store.

As reported in today’s New York Times and BoingBoing, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has apparently changed his company’s strategy regarding digital music. He’s done it in a very public fashion - with an article on the Apple web site. (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/)

The iTunes Store sells digital music files that are copy protected, using a form of digital rights management (DRM). DRM is a set of rules developed by publishers and enforced by software that limit how a digital file can be used. Apple’s FairPlay DRM makes it difficult to move music purchased on iTunes from one computer to another.

Jobs proposes two alternatives - the status quo and an industry-wide adoption of FairPlay - before recommending a third choice: selling digital without DRM, most likely in the popular MP3 format that almost every digital music player supports.

iTunes biggest legal competitor, eMusic, has sold 100 million songs without DRM. Jobs also provides calculations that indicate Aple has sold only 22 songs to the average iPod user, even though many iPods are “full”.

If the record companies really are selling 20 billion songs a year without any DRM at all, as Jobs claims, then the current iTunes model has to change.

Several European countries have sued Apple over the DRM used in iTunes. Last week, the major music publishers held a summit to discuss selling music without DRM. Jobs is telling these countries that Apple isn’t the impediment - it’s the music publishers that wanted Apple to use DRM in the first place. Of course, there’s more than one side to every story.

In my previous post, I mentioned .org domain names.

Domain names are organized into a few hundred TLDs or top level domains, such as .com, .us, .gov, .eu, and various codes for individual countries.

I had never heard of the .um TLD until I saw an article about its demise in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The .um TLD was intended for the United States’ minor outlying islands but hasn’t been used. So .um has been abolished.

According to the Associated Press, South Korean hackers attacked the DNS (Domain Name System) computers that handle the .org addresses. These three computers are part of the 13 root DNS servers that map numeric IP addresses (like 216.106.112.135) to the more-familiar domain names that users have come to rely upon (like yahoo.com).

Most ISPs and large companies operate their own DNS servers, which at some point copy updated information from the root servers.

Domain names are discussed in chapter 9 of the IS 6100 text on p 341.

The attack was similar to an October 2002 attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

I’ve graded Paper 1 for the IS-6100 E Thursday evening course, and I’ve started grading the papers for my online IS 6100 and IS 7010 students. I plan on finishing these by Wednesday night. I don’t have everyone’s grades posted yet, but I will be working hard over the next 60 hours to get them done.

I’m using TurnItIn.com’s GradeMark feature. This allows me to mark and comment student papers in my web browser without downloading the papers. This means that I don’t have to upload or download papers to WebCT or e-mail. WebCT has some usability and reliability issues of its own.

There’s no guarantee that students might receive my e-mails, and vice versa. I’ll discuss this point in a future blog post.
So I use TurnItIn.com to handle assignments. I like this system a lot.

TurnItIn.com displays a tiny red-and-black icon when my GradeMark comments are available to each student. As students in last Thursday night’s class discovered, this icon can be very hard to find in your class portfolio page.
Here’s the icon at actual size:

Yes, that was actual size!

Here’s an enlarged version of the icon.

Here’s how the icon might appear in your portfolio page in TurnItIn.com. The icon is underneath a cursor or pointer in this example. That’s the page in our class where you can see your assignment grades.

To view my comments, click on the GradeMark icon once and be patient. It may take up to one minute for the paper to load in your browser. Clicking multiple times on the icon will only restart the downloading process and increase your wait.

Also, it’s a good idea to allow your browser to open pop-up windows from TurnItIn.com. Check your browser’s menu and options.
If you look at the menu in the GradeMark view, you can find options to print all of my comments to a DOC or PDF file. That might be the most convenient way to view and save my comments.

For more information, see the student TurnItIn.com guide, starting at page 15 of http://www.turnitin.com/static/pdf/tii_student_guide.pdf

Students who need help finding their comments should let me know via e-mail. Again, I won’t have all of the comments posted for another couple of days.