Labor saving toys

It's been pretty busy around here with one project or another. I have been designing an online course ---best exemplified by the term "the devil's in the details". Life has been made much easier by my coming across a tool that lets you build online classes that can drop into any course management system that will accept them. It is a product out of Canada called UDUTU and it is amazingly enough-- free.

It's not open source, as the company will charge to host by the page (or screen) ,but they are very helpful as you learn the process. In the end you can export your course as a SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) that you can drop into a course management system such as Moodle or Blackboard. Of course I haven't developed it to that stage yet but the interface is easy enough to learn and the help forum has been very responsive to my questions. It suits my learning style which requires an overview of the larger picture to keep my perspective.

Of course to mitigate the intensity of developing this level of instruction it is helpful to be able to divert the mind as one thinks so the other tool that has proven invaluable in those moments is a web site called Pandora . It uses some magical algorithm to take a musician or song you name and search the web for similar sounds. I plugged in Alex Di Grassi and have been mellowing out to the guitar music as I design. I tried "Jeff Lorber" also but found that that type of jazz was too harsh to think around. Sadly it didn't seem to recognize "Leahy" a family of Celtic fiddlers out of Canada but one can't have everthing, at least for free.

Perhaps I am too naive but I am still astounded by some of the tools being developed. I often feel like a kid in a candy factory (or a geek in a software factory).