Good News for Older Learners

I have always been a dedicated life-long learner. I went back to college full-time for two years at the age of 53 to work on an Associates degree in Business Computer Information Systems after losing a job I had for 30 years. I must not be completely brain dead, because I took 21 classes in two years and made 20 As and 1 B. In 1998 I enrolled in the master's degree program in Instructional Technology at the University of Texas at Austin and graduated with my M.Ed. in 2002. I am more than halfway through an online Certificate in Distance Education program at the University of Wisconsin. Next summer I hope to begin work toward an online MS in Psychology. Someday, I hope to begin work on a Ph.D in cognitive science.

This week I read two articles that should make us older learners feel better. One of them was about a 75-year-old Canadian named Frank Sarton who has just received his third degree, a BA in women's studies, and is currently pursuing a master's degree in medical ethics through Athabasca University.

The other article is by Deborah Halber of the MIT News Office. The title is, "MIT Provides First Evidence for Learning Mechanism." The theme of the article is that MIT has found evidence that certain key connections among neurons get stronger as we age. The information in this article is quite technical, so I won't bother trying to explain it. If you would like to read this article, you may accesss it at: MIT article.

Text Mining

Definition of text-mining – “The discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information by automatically extracting information from different written resources.” – Hearst, M. What is Text Mining?; www.berkeley.edu/~hearst/textmining.html.

Wikipedia Definition: “Text mining, also known as intelligent text analysis, text data mining , unstructured data management, or knowledge discovery in text (KDT), refers generally to the process of extracting interesting and non-trivial information and knowledge (usually converted to metadata elements) from unstructured text (i.e. free text) stored in electronic form. This can be achieved either through added markup in XML, Atom or RDF formats or though the analysis of common phraseologies indicating certain relationships.”

Text mining is similar to data mining, but it can handle unstructured, as well as structured data. Examples of unstructured data: email, full-text documents, and HTML files.

Humans find it easy to handle unstructured communications because we can distinguish and apply linguistic patterns to them, enabling us to handle slang, spelling variations, and to extract the context from text. Computers cannot do this, but they can process data at much higher speed than we can. For data mining to be successful, applications that combine a human being’s linguistic capabilities with the speed and accuracy of a computer must be created.

How a text mining program works:
1. The program starts with a collection of documents.
2. It retrieves one of the documents.
3. It analyzes the text, and may use information extraction, or clustering, or summarization, or other tools.
4. It may place the information in a management information system.
5. The system yields useful knowledge.

We are now teaching computers our natural language using natural language processing, which may utilize these technologies:
1. Information extraction
2. Topic tracking
3. Summarization
4. Categorization
5. Clustering
6. Concept Linkage
7. Information visualization
8. Question answering

Topic Tracking

You set up a profile at a site such as Yahoo Alerts, and the tool uses the documents you search for to predict other documents you may be interested in retrieving.

Summarization

Text summarization reduces the length of a document, but retains its main ideas and overall meaning. It is difficult to train computers to analyze semantics and interpret meaning. Microsoft Word has a summarization tool built into it that uses the strategy of sentence extraction.

Categorization

Categorization involves identifying the main themes of a document, without attempting to process the actual information. It counts the words that appear, and uses the counts to identify the main topics in the document. Categorization tools often rely upon a thesaurus which has predetermined the topics and relationships among the terms it categorizes.

Clustering

Clustering tools group similar documents on the fly. For example, I went to the Clusty search engine and typed “HCI degrees” in the search box. The information displayed on the right side of the page followed the usual format search results are displayed in by most search engines. The top 183 of at least 51,055 hits were


displayed. On the left side of the page, however, Clusty clustered 187 results by topics:
Human-Computer (187)
Masters (19) – Masters degrees, not limited to HCI degrees
Stanford (12) – HCI-related degrees from Stanford University
Research (17) – Links to schools and other organizations that have done research on HCI
Several other categories I will not bother to list

Another clustering search engine is Vivisimo. If you go to the home page of this search engine and type “HCI degrees” in the search box, the clustered results are very similar to those retrieved by Clusty. On the left side of the page, one sees the following categories:
Human, Computer Interaction (45)
Computer Science (19)
Master’s Degrees (16)
Stanford (12)
Several more I will not list

Concept Linkage
Concept linkage encourages browsing for information rather than searching for it. These tools connect related documents by identifying their shared concepts. The Yahoo Directory is a good example of a search engine that helps you search through related categories when you are not sure what you need to type in the search box.

Information Visualization

A good example of search engine based on information visualization is the KartOO metasearch engine When I searched for HCI degrees in KartOO, the left side of the screen displayed categories of information much as did Vivisimo and Clusty. On the right side of the screen, however, the links are shown in map format. When you move the mouse over a link, the program draws lines to other related web pages.

Question Answering

Some search engines, such as Ask.com , formerly Ask Jeeves, let the user type a question in the search box and display the ten sites it considers have the most relevant information. These tools utilize multiple techniques, such as information extraction and question categorization.

Sources:

Fan, W., Wallace, L., Rich, S., Zhang, Z. Tapping the power of test mining. In Communications of the ACM 49, 9 (Sept. 2006), 73-82.

Wikipedia. Text Mining. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mining. Accessed: August 28, 2006.

Resources on World Wide Web:

Text-Mining.org
http://www.text-mining.org/index.jsp

Data Mining Conferences
http://www.kmining.com/info_conferences.html

Text Mining: Science Digs Deeper
http://www.firstauthor.org/research_tools.html#TextMining

Text Mining Tools:

Ultimate Research Assistant
http://www.hoskinson.net/ultimate.research.assistant/

Inxight
http://www.inxight.com/

ClearForest
http://www.clearforest.com/


Convera
http://www.convera.com/

Megaputer
http://www.megaputer.com/


Search Engines and Web Tools

KartOO
http://www.kartoo.com/

Clusty
http://clusty.com/

Vivisimo
http://vivisimo.com/

Yahoo Alerts
www.alerts.yahoo.com

The Personal Computer and HCI

Today I read a very intersting article titled "The Future of Human-Computer Interaction," by John Canny, who is a Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In his article he discusses the design of the Star computer, by Don Massaro and Xerox's Office Products division in 1976. This was the first computer with a WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interface), and although the Star was not a commercial success, it had a huge influence on the development of the first Apple Macintosh.

The designers of the Star computer utiltized correct principles of HCI design so successfully that their design process has influenced personal computer design for the past thirty years. The features they used in the development of this computer included task analysis, scenario development, rapid prototyping, and users' conceptual models.

Intel has just reorganized itself to meet the needs of four major market sectors: office, home, medical, and mobile. In his article Dr. Canny discusses the idea of "contect awareness," and presents the scenario of a hungry visitor to a city being able to locate a nearby restaurant using a cell phone.

He also discusses speech-based interfaces for mobile computing devices, social media, and privacy issues.

If you are interested in reading more about Professor John Canny, his home page is at this address: John Canny's Home Page

Resources for HCI:

Wikipedia

User-Centered Design

HCI International Conference Series

ACM Computer Human Interaction Special Interest Group

CHI 2007

CHI 2006

List of Human-Computer Interaction Topics from Wikipedia

List of HCI Sites

HCI Lab at University of Maryland

Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University

The Last of the 10 Clark Children

I have only one surviving aunt. Her name is Ima Smith, and she is 93 years old. My Aunt Ima was the tenth and last child born to James Arthur (1870-1943) and Martha Clark. All ten children lived to reach their 60s or older, and several lived into their 80s and 90s. My father, Amos Clark, was the fourth child of James and Martha. He was born in 1900 and passed away in 1990.

The Sabine-Newton County Clarks have a long history in East Texas. I consider William F. Clark the patriarch of the Clark clan because I have not been able to find out who his parents were. He was born in 1790 in South Carolina and died in Sabine County in 1856. He is buried in the Clark-Dickey-Smith Cemetery in Sabine County. A few years ago the state erected a historical marker there. William moved to Amitie County, Mississippi, at an early age and served in the Mississippi Militia in the War of 1812. He moved to East Texas in 1821 just after Mexico won its independence from Spain. He purchased a league of land (in those days a league of land, 4428 acres cost only $100 American) but could never obtain a clear title to it until after Texas became independent from Mexico.

William married his first wife, Elizabeth, while he was still living in Mississippi. According to local legend, she was a full-blood Choctaw. The 1835 census of Sabine County lists the names of their ten children. When the Texas War of Independence started, William, who was in his middle forties, enlisted in Sam Houston's army and fought for our independence from Santa Anna. Elizabeth stayed at their home in Sabine County. Santa Anna's army moved up into this area, and the people fled to avoid his army. They fought a series of skirmishes with the Mexican army which are now called the "Runaway Scrape." She died trying to give birth to her eleventh child. William was not able to return to their home until after her death.

The new Republic of Texas gave William another league of land as a reward for fighting for Texas Independence. He gave his first league to his children and moved with his new wife, Mahalia Graham Clark, onto the new league which was in the Sandy Creek area of Sabine County. In 1845 he and Mahalia had a son they named William Barnett Clark. They had six children in all. William Barnett had a son named James Arthur. James was my grandfather. I was born in 1943 to Amos and Ruby Martin Clark, and as of the date of this blog, am still among the living. I am only a fifth generation Texan because Willam F. sired my great-grandfather when he was 55 years old and my father was 42 years old when I was born.

I never really thought I would be one of the oldest members of the Clark family, but I am about to become numbered among the oldest generation of the Clark family. Oh well, c-est la vie!!

Weird Dreams- Part II

"Alice," said the Queen of Hearts, "A nightmare is like a bit of code written by the worst computer programmer who ever lived."

"But Your Majesty, stammered Alice, "This is the nineteenth century. The computer won't be invented for another 100 years."

"I'm the Queen, child," replied the Queen of Hearts. If I say a thing is so, then it's so."

Last night I dreamed that a neighbor I had when I was growing up in Southeast Texas, but never knew really well, came over to my house. In the dream I was living where I live know, in the Texas Hill Country. He began to berate me about the overgrown state of the field of blackberries I had behind my house. He said that his blackberries had not made very well because I had not kept the grass cut in my field. That part of the dream is easy to understand because at work the other day someone was talking about going to a farm and picking blackberries, and I do need to mow my place. Then the dream got really weird.

My neighbor morphed into his wife. Let's call her Inez. I have not seen this woman or even thought about her for decades, and I never considered her a friend. She was not young, or good-looking, or sexy, and I have never had a reason to think about her. She began to fuss at me about something; I can't remember what about, but that is not important.

Why did I have this strange dream about people I never think about and who were never important to me? I went to this website, Dream Moods, and tried to find the answer. The only clue I could find that might explain this dream said that I was facing a humiliation.

This is about all I know about dreams, based on what I have read. We have some dreams, not very many, I call "big" dreams because they are about important things that happen in our lives. Most of my dreams I call "small" dreams. They serve an important function to help us maintain our sanity. Throughout the day our minds are bombarded with hundreds of sensory impressions that we never process. Often we are not even aware of them. When we dream, most of our dreams serve as a clearing mechanism to flush these sensory impressions out of our minds. Our preconscious or unconsicous (not sure which term is correct) cannot handle these sensory impulses until I attaches some sort of image to them. We dream in visual images. It selects the image that seems to fit and we have a strange dream such as the one I had last night. I can't explain why so often I dream about people I have not seen for decades and don't even want to think about. Any ideas?

Friends of Ed - Great Online Bookstore

For years I have been searching for the perfect Flash book. I have bought and studied over a dozen of them, but never found a book I could really learn Flash from. The textbook my college uses for its beginning Flash course is Foundation Flash 8, by Bhangal and Besley. The book is published by Friends of Ed, which is part of the Apress organization.

The website is www.friendsofed.com .
It's a very interesting site with lots of titles I would love to own. At this point I should issue this disclaimer: "I not an employee of Friends of Ed, or affiliated with it in any way. No person I know is an employee of this company. I will receive no compensation or free merchandise, or anything else, for this blog. This blog should not be construed as an advertisement or recommendation for Friends of Ed. It is for informational purposes only."

Resources for Cognitive Scientists and Psychologists

Two of my many interests are cognitive science and psychology. I just found some interesting resources for these topics on the Web. If you are interested in cognitive science or psychology, you might want to subscribe to these free RSS feeds:

Cognitive Science Blog, the Cognitive Daily.

Mixing Memory

Developing Intelligence

Miscellaneous Resources on the Web

These are some links to interesting sites I found in a magazine article and in a newspaper article.

Free mind-mapping software from FreeMind

Memory training system from Mind Palace

Visual Thesaurus

Find the cheapest air fares at Kayak.com

Information architect Peter Morville offers ideas on how search engines will change the way we think in his book Ambient Findability .

Want to try a search engine that utilizes a different concept. Try Clusty.

63-Year-Old Wins 5K Race

Yesterday afternoon I dreamed that I entered a 5K race and was the overall winner. That would be highly unlikely for many reasons, starting with the fact that I am sixty-three years old and have not done any running for almost fifteen years. I entered several races during the 1980s, and my highest finish in a race was third in my age group. I did finish first overall in a 5K walk about fifteen years ago.

Freud says in his book on dreams that the dream is wishfullment. I suppose this dream is a case in point. Often when I go to sleep and get too hot I have weird dreams. I wonder if anyone has ever done any research on this? This morning when I woke up I was dreaming that I was at some sort of public event and had forgotten to wear my pants. I believe that dreams like this are pretty common.

If you want to learn more about dreams, you can follow these links:

Wikipedia

Sigmund Freud on Dreams

Lucid Dreaming

Nightmares

Languages of the Wild Wild Web

In 1999 I took a series of workshops in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the language web pages are written in. If you use an editor such as Dreamweaver or Go Live or FrontPage, it writes the HTML code for you. I have always been glad I learned to create web pages in HTML because from my first experiences in web design I understood everything that was happening as I built my web pages. A few years later I took three online courses in XHTML, the standard currently supported by the World Wide Web Consortium. I am not going to explain the differences between HTML and XHTML in this posting, but you can learn more about them by following this link I took two online courses in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) at the same college. (X)HTML describes to the browser how the information on a web page will be presented (formatting, fonts, colors, etc.); XML describes the content that will be presented on a web page, and allows your to create your own sets of tags for your online store, to describe musical notation, etc. If you would like to learn more about XML, follow this link.

I spent almost every day during the summer of 1999 working my way through a 1000-page book on JavaScript. Okay- It was a slow summer, but I'm a dorky-geeky-nerd! JavaScript is a fairly easy to learn web scripting language that makes your web pages more interactive for the user. If, for example, a message box appears on your computer screen when you click a button on the web page, there is a good chance the programmer used JavaScript to create it. I know you're dying to learn more about JavaScript, so follow this link.

A few years ago I took an online course in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) at the college where I work. CSS gives the web designer much greater control over the way information is displayed on a web page. Macromedia has some excellent free tutorials on CSS at this site.
The web programming languages I have described above (HTML, XHTML, XML, JavaScript, and CSS) all have one thing in common: they are all client-side scripting languages, or they make things happen on your computer or in a web browser when someone opens your page on the Web. What if you want to enable the user's computer to communicate with your web server when he/she is viewing your page on the Web? For instance, the user opens an order form on your site, fills, it out and sends it to the server. Then, you need to use a server-side scripting language such as PHP /,ASP , Ruby, Perl, VBScript,or CFML. I have started studying server-side scripting languages in the past year or so. Last year I took a course in PHP; this Fall I intend to take a course in Perl.

There are web programming tools that let a web programmer use any combination of these tools when designing and maintaining a web site. One of them is Ajax , which I have lately been studying; another is Ruby on Rails . I hope this brief overview helps you understand the basics of programming languages for the Web and encourages you to check out the links on this blog.

Are 27 billion Things Too Many To Be Interested In?

I have always had too many interests. At last count I was interested in approximately 27,000,000,00 things, give or take a few hundred million. My current interests include: instructional design, learning theory, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, music (almost every genre except rap), architectural drawing, shooting and editing video, and recording and editing audio. In my job as an instructional designer I work with many software programs, so I am also interested in web design, graphics design, digital photo editing, and learning web scripting languages. At this time I am learning the Ajax programming techniques and I have registered for an online class in Perl.

Fortunately, I have the only job in the world that encompasses all these interests. When I am at home doing my drawings, even then, I am sharpening skills I can use in the projects I design for the college I work for. Are there things I am not interested in? Yes, I have never been able to discover an interest in German cooking, cock fighting, or chemistry. Would it help if Congress passed a law declaring that henceforth each day would have 30 hours instead of 24? Probably not. A forty-hour day might help though.

Using Wikis in Education

I am an instructional designer at a community college in Central Texas. It is difficult, but I do my best to stay informed about the latest trends in educational technology. My current interests are the use of podcasts, blogs, and wikis in education. There is a very comprehensive list of resources for wikis in the current issue of the online newsletter "WWWools for Education." It is found at: .

Some other links on wikis are:


Christopher Sessum's wiki, "onewisdom":

Stewart Mader, "Using Wiki in Education,":

Old Slippers

My ancient house slippers are tan deer hide, lined with thick dirty fur of an uncertain origin. Many years ago I ordered them from a catalog the Deerskin Trading Post mailed me. Remember when we got catalogs in the mail - what we now call "snail mail?" I don't know when I ordered them, but I think it was in the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was President.

They are easily the most comfortable shoes I have ever owned. I have constantly sore and aching feet and a painful bunion on my right foot, so comfortable shoes are important to me. I wish I could wear them for the rest of my life, but only souls are immortable, not soles. Both shoes are tearing apart at the soles. Sometimes when I walk across my living room my shoes trap dog toys, pencils I have dropped, and various other objects that usually don't find their way into your shoes.

Someday I will have to have to thow them away and buy a new pair of slippers. Perhaps I should bury them in an old shoe box and erect a marker. "My house shoes, born 1988, deceased 200?", but I will probably just toss them into a garbage can. I love my old shoes, but I'm not that sentimental!!

2500 Ways to Say "Hello World"

Time-honored convention demands that the first thing a student of a new programming language learns is to write a command that makes the greeting "Hello World" appear on the computer screen. Bill Kinnersley of the University of Kansas has made a list of about 2500 programming languages, all of which were developed between about 1954 and right now. Does anyone remember Fortran, which is still being used?

Some of the programming and web scripting languages I have studied are: Basic, Visual Basic, Visual Basic.net, C++, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, XHTML, and XML. I should point out the only one of these languages I can claim real expertise in is XHTML. Currently I am studying the Ajax programming technique, which uses XHTML, JavaScript, PHP, and XML.

In some of the languages I have studied, "Hello World" is coded as:

C++

// Hello World in C++

#include

main()
{
cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
return 0;
}


BASIC

10 REM Hello World in BASIC
20 PRINT "Hello World!"


VisualBasic

REM Hello World in Visual Basic for Windows

VERSION 2.00
Begin Form Form1
Caption = "Form1"
ClientHeight = 6096
ClientLeft = 936
ClientTop = 1572
ClientWidth = 6468
Height = 6540
Left = 876
LinkTopic = "Form1"
ScaleHeight = 6096
ScaleWidth = 6468
Top = 1188
Width = 6588
Begin Label Label1
Caption = "Hello World!"
Height = 372
Left = 2760
TabIndex = 0
Top = 2880
Width = 972
End
End
Option Explicit


VisualBasic.NET

'Hello World in Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET)

Imports System.Console

Class HelloWorld

Public Shared Sub Main()
WriteLine("Hello, world!")
End Sub

End Class


PHP

// Hello World in PHP
echo 'Hello World!';
?>





At this very moment a sixteen-year-old in Boston, a computer scientist at Stanford, or a professor of HCI at RPI is sitting before a text editor writing the perfect computer language. When this language is published and adopted by programmers we will all realize that there will never be a need to develop another language. Don't count on it!! Someday I am sure there will be over 10,000 programming languages, none of which will serve every progammer and developer's needs.

The World's Most Creative People

I am trying to make a list of the people I consider the most creative people in history, without regard to their field of endeavor. I am sure that my list will include authors, artists, architects, scientists, composers, computer people, and maybe even a politican or two (Lincoln, Jefferson?). I am not going to list any names in this posting because I would like to read your comments. If enough people reply, I will make out a list weighted by popular vote. So, who are your 25 most creative people of all time?

What can an Instructional Designer Learn from Frank Lloyd Wright?

I am an instructional designer at a community college in central Texas. I am also a student in the Distance Education Certificate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last week I attended the annual Distance Learning Conference which UW-Madison holds at the Monona Terrace Conference Center. America's most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was born in nearby Richland, Wisconsin. Many photographs of Wright and his designs are hung on the walls of the center. The conference center also has a gift shop that sells all sorts of Wright memorabilia.

I bought a couple of books about him and several other souvenirs and spent a lot of time studying the photographs of structures he designed. As I studied FLW's creations I became to think about what I as an instructional designer could learn from this master architect, who was designing homes 100 years ago that I would love to live in if I could afford one. I am not going to try to answer my own question in this posting, but I would love to know how my readers would answer this question:

"What can an instructional designer learn from Frank Lloyd Wright?"

Last Post from Madison

I attended three keynote addresses and eight workhshops at the Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wisconsin. In this blog I am only going to report on the best ones.

On Wednesday I attended a half-day workshop on blogging and podcasting. That is when I set up this blog. This workshop reinforced my desire to learn more about these two technologies so I can assist faculty who want to use them. I am so enthusiastic about podcasting that I plan to buy a video iPod as soon as I can afford to.

The outstanding keynote address was Dr. David Metcalf's talk on "Learning for the new Mobile Society," which reinforced everything covered in the workshop I attended Wednesday.

On Thursday morning I attended Dr. Rod Riegle's workhop "The Learning Guild: MMORPGs as Educational Environments." It reinforced everything I learned about MMORPGs in our recently completed Summer Institute on educational gaming at Austin Community College.

On Friday morning I attended a very interesting workshop on podcasting and other new technologies taught by professors from the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. I also attended a workshop on "Developing Visual Fluency," that was presented by William Horton of William Horton Consulting. Mr. Horton presented it as a series of exercises for the audience to do. He was the best presenter I heard at the conference, he gave us a great handout, and the material he covered will be of great use in my job as an instructional designer. This was the bestg of the forty-five minutes workshops I attended. I suggest you google him and check out his website.

Meeting Old Friends and Making New Ones in Madison

The highlight of my trip to Madison was making several new friends and getting to spend some time with some friends from several campuses in the UT system. One of the first people from UT I saw at the conference was Dr. Darcy Hardy, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Director of the UT TeleCampus. I introduced myself to Darcy that morning, then watched her receive the Wedemeyer Award for Outstanding Practioner in Distance Education. ( Charles Wedemeyer was a professor at UW-Madison and one of the pioneers in using technology in distance education. You can learn more about him at: http://www.ajde.com/Contents/vol13_3.htm#editorial. Darcy Hardy is still a young woman, yet she has already accomplished more than most of us could accomplish in three lifetimes.

Four people from Missouri Southern State University and I rode the hotel van together from the airport to our hotel. We had lots of common interests and instantly became friends. We had breakfast together each morning at the conference. I intend to keep in touch with Al and Betty and Kimberle and Robin.

My old and very good friend Dr. Carolyn Awalt, Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Texas- El Paso( was at the conference. Coco Kishi, Senior Systems Analyst in the Technology Implementation Group, UT-Austin and Dr. Douglas Hale, Director REACH Program Center and Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Texas-Permian Basin were also there. Friday morning Carolyn and Coco and Doug and I had lunch together at the close of the conference. I look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones a the next conference I attend.

Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra

When I was about twelve years old my mother bought me a Hohner chromatic harmonica and an instruction book for it. All the music in the book was by J. S. Bach--no kidding! I spent one summer trying unsuccessfully to coax a decent rendition of the "Tocata and Fugue" from that mistreated instrument. I put the harp back in its box, put the box in my dresser, and decided that I would always hate classical music.

I did not hear any more classical music until I took a speech class at Lamar State College in Beaumont, Texas, in the Spring of 1962. During one class we had a show-and-tell exhibition. I can't remember what I brought to show the class and talk about, but I was smart enough not to attempt to play the "Tocata and Fugue" on my old harmonica, which still lay quietly in its box in my dresser collecting dust. One member of the class brought a record player and a stack of classical records. If you are under forty-five you have never heard of the record-player, or turntable, so go to Wikipedia and look it up. For the first time, I heard classical music played the way it is supposed to sound, and I have loved it ever since. During the past forty-years I have spent thousands of hours listening to classical music on the radio and on LPs, casette tapes, and CDs.

This evening in Madison the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra held one of its free Concerts on the Square (in front of the State Capitol). The concert featured the Queen of the Orchestra - the violin of course. A few people claim they prefer that ridiculous huge boxy thing that has 88 keys and makes those strange tinkling sounds, but their opinion does not count. True classical music fans are loyal subjects of the true daughter of Euterpe, the instrument God himself, in the guise of Andrea Amati, developed in Italy in the sixteenth century. Tonight's program featured these selections:

1. Overture from The Fair Melusina (Mendelssohn)

2. Hungarian Folk Dance Suite, Op. 18, I. Allegro risulto a ben marcato (Leo Weiner)

3. Introduction & Rondo Capriccioso ( Camille Saint-Saens)

4. Overture from Donna Diana ( Nicklaus von Reznicek- I am not familiar with him ahd Wikipedia does not have an article on him )

5. Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor, Op. 7, "La Campanella" (Paganini
)

6. Finlandia (Sibelius)

For me, the highlight of the progam was Saint-Saens "Rondo and Capriccioso," one of my favorite classical works. The sensational American-Icelandic violinist Judith Ingolfsson was the soloist. This lovely young lady has "got game" and she really has her chops on the violin. Classical music lovers can look forward to enjoying her performances for the next several decades.

The Cows of Madison

I was fortunate to grow up on a small farm in Southeast Texas. When I was a kid we had a little Jersey cow that produced three or four gallons of milk every day. I will never forget how good the fresh raw sweetmilk and buttermilk tasted and how I used to enjoy churning butter. It was the most wonderful butter I have ever tasted! Jersey milk is extremely high in butter fat. In those days before we were saddled with the food police who tell us that everything that tastes like food will kill us, we didn't know that all those high-fat dairy products would kill us. If I had known that, I am sure I would have had a heart attack and died fifty years ago.


The point of this is that I am at heart a Texas farmboy who loves everything concerning animals of the bovine persuasion (I wanted to say that I love cows, but my readers would have probably misinterpreted that phrasing, although I am not an Aggie). Madison, Wisconsin, is a paradise for those who revel in bovine lore. The sidewalks downtown are decorated with many brightly painted, life-size statues of cows. The cows have names such as Frank Loin Wright, Blue Moooon over Kentucky, and Global Traveler. Below each statue a plaque is inscribed with various bits of trivia informing the reader how many glasses of milk (33,000) is produced every year by each dairy cow in Wisconsin, the yearly value in billions of dollars of the state's dairy industry, etc.

Did you know that each cow in the Badger State urinates 1555 times a year? All those millions of cows constantly searching for flat rocks!

PS - Did you know that a Texas steer named Bevo is the mascot of the team that won the college football championship in 2005?

First Day of the Distance Education Conference

Tuesday evening I registered for the Distance Education Conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at the Monoma Terrace Convention Center in Madison, Wisconsin. I had light refreshements and met some nice people.

Wednesday morning I attended a workshop held on the UW campus on blogging and podcasting. I set up this blog there. The workshop was a good learing experience, but it would have been better if it had been a fullday instead of a halfday workshop. The instructors had us download Audacity (a free audio recording program) and record a podcast. They had evidently forgotten that if you want to export your audio recording in MP3 format you have to download the free LAME plugin, so we were not able to post our podcasts.

This afternoon I visited the vendor exhibits in the Center and picked up tons of great freebies.

Tomorrow I have a full day of workshops at the Convention Center. Stay tuned for tomorrow's report. I will report on the beautiful UW campus in another blog. I was especially delighted to visit it because I am a student in the Distance Education Certificate program there and I am a longtime Badgers football fan.

Madison - First Impressions

Madison, Wisconsin, and Austin, Texas, share several things. First, they are the capitols of their home states and were both built in the 1840s. Second, they are both college towns and centers of government. If you were fortunate to visit the UT "strip" about thirty years ago, you have some idea of the look and feel of the UW campus area, altough the architecture of the buildings is very different. Third, both towns are hilly, though the Austin hills are steeper and more numerous.

If you have even a dilettante's interest in architecture you will enjoy walking around this extremely pedestrian-friendly city, where motorists actually wait for walkers to cross the streets, and rubber-necking its larger structures which exemplify many styles of architecture from various time periods. I think perhaps old builings are never torn down in this town. The original streets of Madison were named after the 39 signers of the US Constitution. Madison of course, was named for the Swiss religious reformer Ulrich Zwingli, but don't mention this in your next conversation with James Madison.

The most famous resident of the Madison area was this country's the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who studied architecture at UW-Madison. His famous residence, Taliesin, is located in the village of Spring Green, a few miles west of Madison. Madison's Monoma Terrace Convention Center was based on a design Wright completed in 1938. Madison's outstanding features are the two big lakes, Monoma and Mendota, which abut the downtown area. The UW campus is bounded by huge Lake Mendota. The beautiful UW campus will be the subject of another blog.

I have only fallen in love at first sight with two towns I have visited. The first was the little town of Lexington, Virginia, the home of Stonewall Jackson and Washington and Lee University. The second is Madison, Wisconsin.

First Impressions - Madison, Wisconsin

Madison is a pedestrian-friendly city. Drivers here apparently do not score points for running over pedestrians. When the "Walk" signal appears it is safe to cross a street! When you visit downtown Madison don't miss the State Street Mall. It is an outdoor mall with hundreds of small shops, including scores of restaurants, designed to be toured on foot.

Madison was the home of America's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. I plan to tour his home, Taliesin, before I leave.