Chris Betcher

It seems like it wasn't that long ago that the music industry was still resisting any attempt at allowing consumers to access music in any way other that buying CDs. So many other industries have been disrupted by digital technology, and while a few notable ones stuck doggedly to their "principles" until they literally vanished (I'm looking at you Kodak and Blockbuster), most industries either embraced the disruption or eventually waved the white flag and gave in. One of the industries that probably should have most logically embraced the opportunities of being digital was the music business. After all, with a product that is essentially just a collection of digital bits, the decision to move those bits directly to consumers via the Internet should have been a no brainer. Yet the record company cartels fought the inevitable digital transition for years.  Rarely have I seen such a group of people with so little vision for the future be so obstinate about protecting the...

A couple of years ago, I coauthored a book about teaching and learning with interactive whiteboards. I'm not going to debate the pros and cons of IWBs here, but believe me when I say I can see both sides of the arguments for and against them. Regardless of your opinions about the worth of IWBs, I was pleased that the book was able to focus on the importance of quality teaching, and I think we made a pretty solid point in the book that any classroom technology is only as good as the pedagogical expertise being applied to its use. It was an interesting exercise, as I'd never written an actual book before. As this type of niche book goes, it's been reasonably successful. It sold out of its first, and then second editions, and has now been reprinted several times. It got some excellent reviews. The company that published it, ACER Press , tells us that it's actually their number one selling book, so it's rather nice to know that it's been well received by so many pe...

There is a backstory on this video, but to be honest, it probably doesn't really matter all that much.  It was made by Matt Harding , the famous " wherethehellismat t" guy from YouTube. The real point for me is that life is for living and that people all over the world want basically the same things - to be loved, to feel happy and to enjoy life. Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo . I look at that video and love seeing the sheer joy on people's faces that comes from just being happy. Enjoy.  I'm off to dance!

I once worked with a very nice Vice Principal. He was a charming fellow and I enjoyed working with him. In his role as VP however, he was required to be pretty strict with the kids... and he did a great job of it. His role was to uphold the rules and policies of the school and he did it with a certain authoritarian gruffness and bulldog-like tenacity. He seemed to work on the idea that if you repeated the rules often enough then the kids would eventually do the right thing (or at least have no excuse for not knowing what the right thing was!) Every morning, he would get on the school's PA system and reiterate the rules to the kids. And he would always, always, always finish his PA address with the phrase "Have a great day and remember to treat everyone with equity, dignity and respect". It was something of a catchphrase for him. The thing about this approach to repeating the rules so often is that the kids start to just tune out. I asked them one morning in homero...

This is too funny... Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably noticed that YouTube has become quite the phenomenon over the last year. If you've spent anytime at all browsing YouTube, you've probably seen some of the more popular videos stored there... It's amazing the way they tend to bubble up to the top in popularity. It seems that the Barenaked Ladies have been watching YouTube too. Barenaked Ladies are a Canadian band based in Toronto and I must confess to have become particularly fond of their music when I lived there. I think they are very clever, both lyrically and conceptually, and I really enjoy their insightful wit. BNL's latest video clip is a real testament to this cleverness. They contacted many of the "stars" of YouTube - the Evolution of Dance guy, the two guys from Diet Coke and Mentos experiment, Where the Hell is Matt, and even Geriatric1927 among others. They managed to get these people to lip-sync to their latest s...

Yes, the school I teach at has a talent night each semester, and somehow or other a group of teachers at school put a little group together to play a couple of songs.  While I can't truly claim to have any great musical talent, I can wield a bass guitar well enough to hold the rhythm section together, especially with a great drummer like Charlie.  The rest of the band was Rob, Darrell, Alanna and Kevin, all wonderfully dedicated and talented teachers who don't mind getting up and showing their wild side in front of the kids.  The kids seem to really enjoy seeing their teachers get up and "give it a go", and it's that spirit that make schools such wonderfully human  places... So for anyone brave enough to take a peek, here is a YouTube video of two songs we performed on the night... the sound quality isn't great and the camera work is a bit shaky, but it just goes to show what can be done when a kid in the crowd just happens to capture something like this on hi...

There's a lot of talk in the music industry about how to protect music from copyright infringement and illegal use. Record companies as a whole were fairly slow to give in to the whole music download idea because they see it as a threat to their empires... for years the record companies had an exclusive stronghold on the production and distribution of music. As the world has gotten flatter and the gap between an idea in a musician's head and the release of that musical idea to a waiting public has gotten smaller, cheaper and easier, the role of the record company has shrunk in importance. So as we've witnessed the rise of digital music across the Internet, we've also seen the record companies fight tooth and nail to hang on their ivory towers. They've used their legal muscle to crush filesharing services like Napster and Morpheus, while others such as Limewire have so far somehow managed to avoid being taken down. The reasoning goes that if people are allowed to...

Just as a follow on to that last post, it's interesting to compare the marketing strategies of Microsoft and Apple, especially when it comes to the release of new products. Microsoft takes the hype-it-up-early approach - witness such products as Origami, Vista and Zune. Apple on the other hand are very tight-lipped about new products and essentially say nothing until a new product is announced by His Steveness at an event like MacWorld or WWDC. This latter approach by Apple always seems to cause the rumour mills to work overtime with speculation and guessing at just what might emerge, but the actual product releases often exceed consumer expectation, or at least are still full of surprises. On the other hand, Microsoft's hype-in-advance approach seems to build enormous consumer expectation around their products but it is often dissapointingly not met when the crunch comes. With both Vista and Zune still out on the horizon somewhere, it will be interesting to watch and see jus...