Running with Scissors

I spent last Friday in my daughters’ elementary school as a presenter for Career Day. I was representing the “instructional technologist” occupation – one that I get a lot of practice explaining since most adults don’t know what I do either.

I brought a video projector and some of our iClicker student response systems to show the kids in kindergarten and 3rd and 4th grade. Kindergartners got to vote on “What is the BEST color” (red and blue were very popular), while I had the older kids choosing a favorite between SpongeBob, Harry Potter or Jack Black (SpongeBob and Jack Black were the winners here). After a few fun questions like this I told them about how we can use the clickers to test what students understand. So, the last question I had for them was “What does an instructional technologist do?” Most of them got the answer that I taught them – “Help students and faculty use technology to make their teaching and learning better.”
I also had a good number of kids who preferred a different answer that I had as an option – “Plays video games better than anyone else” – what they wanted my job to be.

Either way, they loved it. They liked the voting and I had no problems with the technology the 11 times I went through it. And my presentation held their attention, even among the police cruisers and firetrucks that other presenters brought, so that was good too. And as a bonus, there are a group of kids in elementary school who know more about what an instructional technologist does than their parents do. :)

When I was in high school in the late 70′s early 80′s I had an obsession with music. I had a music collection of vinyl, but I recorded it all to cassette tapes. I had a portable cassette player that I would carry around with this weird external speaker hook up that I rigged together from left over pieces of an old stereo because it sounded good. I had cases and cases of cassettes that I would lug around too. It was important to have the right music for any occasion.

In this day of iPod, where you can carry your whole collection everywhere, you might not realize the mad dedication it took to have the right music for any occasion – I mean, after all, you could only carry so much stuff around. Thus, my workaround became the mix tape. Mixes of songs that could meet the need on the fly. I loved making them. I loved mixing them. I loved how cool it could be if you found that nice combo of songs that clicked together perfectly.

Needless to say, when I heard about Boomshuffle, a new web service that allows you to create your own mixes for free, I just had to look into it.

All you have to do is create an account, then start mixing. You choose from Boomshuffle’s large library of songs (not everything, but a good collection) and create a mix of full length songs that can be streamed over the web. You can also invite your friends in to add songs to your mixes if you like (I’m not sure I’m mentally prepared to share the creation of my mixes – I’ll need to make some serious steps in the personal growth area before this happens).

So, of course, the question is how is this legal? Boomshuffle works within legal parameters that exist for internet radio services to stay legit. To comply, mixes need to have a minimum of 15 different songs by different artists to hear the full songs, they have to be streamed in a random order, and the listener can only skip a certain number of tracks per hour. A bit of a downer, but you know how reasonable the RIAA and record companies tend to be about this sort of thing.

I tried it out, liked it, and here is my first mix to share with you. Mostly, at trip through the 80′s – with a few newer things sprinkled in there. Hope you like it.

Thanks to taurusaficionado on Flickr for the cassette deck image.