Today we lost a jazz lion, Freddie Hubbard. I’ve spent countless hours digesting his music and transcribing his solos so his death deeply touches me. His art was a major influence on my jazz vocabulary. If you don’t own Speak No Evil, you’re missing out.

I took one of my handwritten transcriptions and put it in the Logic Studio score editor this afternoon to give you a taste of his genius. I hope you enjoy it.

Original Recording:

Download the transcription: Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum by Freddie Hubbard

Not all people are fans of roundup posts, as Dan Spiewak mentioned before his useful roundup on learning the scala language, but here's a summary of some resources for educational researchers and developers posted here and on the Ed Tech & Learning Sciences group:

• Places to find ed tech jobs - academic positions as well as instructional technology positions in industry
• Educational research journals with RSS feeds - I really think every education/psych grad student and researcher should be using this resource, although it still sucks that most of the journals are not open access yet.
• If you are interested in learning to develop applications on the java platform, I have some links to resources on my syllabus and handbook pages.
• How to build and setup your own server.
• Resources for research project evaluation
• Resources about improving college teaching
• A list of research blogs, which Richard Hake expanded to 32 and then over 60 blogs.
• And a few of the noticeable outside things from this past year:
  • Educational Designer, an interesting new free online journal, with an article comparing engineering design and instructional/educational design.
  • Full Circle Magazine - a free online magazine about Ubuntu.
  • Is Google Making Us Stupid?, an article that spawned a lot of discussion and responses. See also, ironically, the Let me google that for you site. You might just as well ask if not knowing Google is making us stupid.
  • Marc Prensky's article Programming: The New Literacy spawned a lot of discussion, including here and more recently by Karin Dalziel who argued why even every Library Science student should learn programming.
  • Modeling and Simulation of Dynamic Systems, a course with a great set of resources by Neville Hogan. See his paper on the physical basis of analogies between dynamic systems (i.e., capacitor & spring, inductor & mass...) and his concept of nodicity. To actually play with bond graphs there is a free tool called OpenModelica. See also the new engineering courses put online at stanford.
  • Scala has really taken off this past year as a new language for developing for the java platform (see the scala wiki and first steps to scala). One of my favorite things is the 'pimp my library' pattern where you can use scala's implicit conversions, operator methods and the like to greatly simplify existing java apis. See for example wrappers like scalala (numerics), the 2nd example in this post about wrapping JScience, this wrapper for the Pulpcore applet game framework, and various JavaFX-like wrappers including ScalaFX and squib.

I’m not sure of the original source, but I just found these handwritten notes by Thelonious Monk in the Delicious popular feed posted by thescotter. Awesome stuff!

Shinzen Young, professional meditationinstructor and geek-extraordinaire, joins us today to share his uniquejourney as a contemplative.  From discontinuing his PhD studies tobecome a full-time shingon practitioner to taking up Japanese Zen andfinally discovering the mindfulness practices originating fromTheravada Buddhism, Shinzen has gone deep with several contemplativetechniques.  In addition to his training in the contemplativetraditions of the East, Shinzen took time to train himself to become arelatively qualified mathematician and scientist so that he could oneday be poised to bring together the best of the East (contemplativepractice) with the best of the West (the scientific method).  Thehybrid of which, he thinks will yield a comletely unique fusion. Listen in to hear more from this incredibly gifted and incredibly geekymeditation teacher.This is part 1 of a 3-part series.  Listen to part 2, Building a Dharma Successor.