learningIT

iTunes 8.1 has been released. A new addition is “iTunes DJ”. Imagine the Party Shuffle option but now, people with iPhones can request, and cue up songs remotely to the “DJ” using iTunes.

Read more from MacWorld and  Wired. And,

Google has added a new feature to Google Reader: the ability to comment on shared items. The new feature lets you comment on posts that your Google Reader friends have shared using the RSS feed reader, and they will be able to do the same with your content. [full story here]

Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.

Podcasted lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.

full story here…

Happy New Year!

Plenty of educational bloggers are writing about new year resolutions and new commitments and promises to teaching for 2009. Well my new year starts in August. I made those promises already. Instead, I am cleaning, transferring and organising hundreds of files. Are you tired of messy iTunes files? Missing album art and/or track titles etc? Check TuneUp out. Now available for Mac.

Mozilla are also working on Songbird, which is an open source media player that is about music discovery as well as playback. Watch out iTunes?

From NME: Apple could shut down its iTunes music store this week, if a verdict from the US Copyright Royalty Board forces the company to pay higher royalty rates.

The association wants to increase rates by 66 per cent, from nine cents to 15 cents per track, whereas Apple wants a decrease to 4.8 cents per track, reports CNN (full story here).