JABET

Continuing the theme of ‘learning addiction’ I have been developing (1, 2, 3, 4), it is interesting to see medical science furthering our understanding of why our brains are wired for that (Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous). I guess it should be no surprise that it is essentially a survival instinct called ’seeking’. Accidentally discovered in 1954, the seeking stimulus is triggered by learning, and even more so by learning unexpected things (aka discovery?). Interestingly, the seeking stimulus is not a pleasure like sex or eating chocolate, but rather a kind of excitement that triggers the release of dopamine and the desire to do more seeking. It is no wonder then that when the barrier to successful seeking becomes lower (e.g. Google, Twitter, and texting), people can get stuck in an addictive feedback loop.

The original article goes into far more interesting detail (learning addicted beware), but I have also quoted an ‘abridged’ version below from SDR News (because I could not link to it directly):

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous. Basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls. They at first thought they had found the pleasure center but this supposed pleasure center didn’t look very much like it was producing pleasure. It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.” It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing. The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we’re restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a “CrackBerry.”

Reddit also has some interesting (and some hilarious) comments.

In some ways this makes it even more astonishing that many children can have the love of learning beaten out of them at school. In some cases it is displaced by more stimulating activities (e.g. talking, texting), but in many cases it only leaves boredom and apathy. On a more positive note, at least it helps provide scientific evidence of the benefit of allowing “self directed learning”, as is encouraged in some schools like Discovery 1 (1, 2).

In a recent series of blog posts (1, 2, 3) I talked about the concept of ‘learning addiction’, and that for some people, it can be very tempting to continue acquiring vast quantities of knowlege far and beyond any practical abaility to apply it.

Unfortunately, I guess this hilights a problem with podcasts – there is very little navigational control one you are in a ‘chunk’ of audio. Thus it is much harder (than with a newspaper or internet article) to:

• skip to the next topic,
• read a topic heading and decide if it is relevant to you,
• skim through a topic of minimal interest,
• bookmark a topic to look into further later,
• or jump to the references and read about that item in more depth.

It can even be a pain finding a list of the topics in a particular audio file in order to decide if it is worth listening to. Of course there is no technical reasons that these forms of navigation are not possible, so given time we are likely (hopefully) to see them become more widely available. QuickTime’s ‘enhanced podcasts’ are making some progress in this area, but there is still a lot more work to do.

But in the here and now, this still poses a problem, in that the system generally makes us consume more information than we need to – possibly causing, but at the least, supporting ‘learning addiction’.

It is intersting to see how this differs across different media forms. TV and radio are similar to podcasts and vodcasts, in that you get, e.g. a 1 hour chunk of news with the topics chosen by someone else, and minimal navigational control, although with TV and radio it is arguably slightly easier to change the channel. Newspapers and print media offers a lot more navigational control which, if used with dicipline can make you a lot more efficient, however, it is still a big ‘chunk’ (10’s of pages) of topics chosen by someone else, and because they are so readily available and have such tantalising headlines, people can still be easily tempted to feed their learning addiction. Online news probably has the best navigational control, but the concept of ‘chunking’ gets a little gray. A chunk could be interpreted as what story is on the page, what stories are linked to from this page, all the stories on the site, or all the stories on the internet. Thus the contribution to learning addiction is quite variable. I wonder if artificially increasing the time to load a new page might actually help curb learning addiction by increasing the cost in the cost:benefit ratio, and thus making the decision to read it more consciously “is this information valuable or just entertaining – am I going to apply it?”.

These comparisons can’t be limited just to different media forms – within a single media (e.g. podcasts) there can be different uses of the media (a news show, a panel discussion, a seminar or interview, or a novel etc). Interestingly, the same Audible interview with Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card as referred to in a recent post talked about the advantages of audio books (some audio books are also released as podcasts, or at the least downloaded in segments, so the distinction is blurred) because they had limited navigational control. They liked that story is delivered at the pace and in the detail the author had envisaged – it is very hard to skip ahead or skim over certain parts. In one anecdote, Orson (I think) had started listening to a long book which started quite slow – if he had been reading it he would have skimmed throught the start, but as he was listening he didn’t, and his opinion was that this resulted in a much more pleasurable and fulfilling experience. In this case, I don’t think it contributes to learning addiction, as the entire novel is on a single topic that the listener chose ahead of time, and it is more a form of entertainment and relaxation, which may not need to be ‘applied’ to anything more than that.

I think I can now shed a little light on part of a quote from this previous post (from a Time Magazine article):

…students remember just 20% of the content of class lectures a week later…

It seems that research has revealed that multitasking makes you dumb. Once you have read the quotes below, you might wonder, as I do, why educational institutions, especially Universities, expect you to simultaneously: listen to the lecturer, comprehend what they are saying, compile it into an abbreviated form, and write that in your notes. If that isn’t multitasking, I don’t know what is.

The quote comes by way of SDRNews, inspired by the following summary from Slashdot of an article in The Atlantic:

…in which Walter Kirn talks about the scientific results that support his claim and his own experiences with multitasking: that it destroys our ability to focus.

“Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on… studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.”

Interestingly, a couple of years earlier, Digg also mentioned coverage in ArsTechnica of a Time Magazine cover story:

…entitled “Too Wired For Their Own Good?”, condemns the youth of the nation as gadget-obsessed, perennially multitasking, social failures who can’t really get into anything important or even relax. The article brings up example upon example of dysfunctional teenagers and their equally disjointed families.

It is good to see scientific evidence can now substantiate and explain this. Who knows – given that the research was released two years after the Time article, it may have even been in response to it.

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of ‘learning addiction’:

…with the continual increase in knowledge (and technology) production, and such ready access to it (via the internet etc), I am seeing a form of ‘learning addiction’ arise, for example, in people that are subscribed to 600 blogs, or in my case, a ‘healthy’ number of podcasts. 

This reminds me of the ancient Greek concepts of knowledge. They had three different terms to describe different aspects of knowledge:

1. The aquisition of knowledge. Learning, and applying rules.
2. The application of knowledge. Trades and crafts.
3. The ‘being’ of knowledge. Experts that are so familiar with a topic they do not have to think about it.

Understandably, thhis is also a progression from the most basic form of knowledge to the most complex and revered form. (As an aside, this inability to describe knowledge fully in English has been blamed for not being able to fully comprehend and therefore deal with knowledge, and has thus been blamed for failures of large knowledge management systems).

This is all very interesting, but what has it got to do with ‘learning addiction’? It seems to me that ‘learning addiction’ is solely based in the ‘aquisition of knowledge’. I find it helpful to regularly ask myself if my dealings with knowledge are purely aqusition, or if they are moving towards application and being. Sure, some will always be for entertainment and I don’t think that is a bad thing (in moderation), but if you read the morning newspaper etc, how much of that do you think you will be able to apply to your life or your work?

I just listened to a free Audible interview with Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card, in which something interesting bubbled up that seemed relevant to my last post.

A third party had made the comment that Science Fiction is “a fringe genre read only be teens and techo-nerds”, which prompted the question “do you think the (SciFi) art form is becoming acceptable to more mainstream book lovers?”, to which Orson Scott Card replied (amongst other replies):

The demographics have been done on who reads science fiction: our readers are smarter than the readers of any other genre (on average). They are also people who embrace the idea of taking themselves out of the present reality, and going through the process that every two year old can do (but then we stop doing it), which is learning the world through finding, discovering, noticing new things and making rules out of them. And our readers do that routinely – that is what they read for – to have that same excitement of being in a new world, that most human beings only get between the ages of birth and three or four. So we are writing something that duplicates the experience of children, but it is the most intellectually productive time in a human life.

I personally prefer the term (or is it a genre) ’Speculative Fiction’ rather than ‘Science Fiction’. I often feel that making sense of foreign systems, and considering different ways of doing things (both strong components of Spec Fic) have made me more perceptive and creative. However it is a ‘Chicken and Egg’ situation – alternatively I could have already been strong in those skills and appreciated opportunities to exert them. Either way, I can certainly relate to the excitement of such challenges. In fact, with the continual increase in knowledge (and technology) production, and such ready access to it (via the internet etc), I am seeing a form of ‘learning addiction’ arise, for example, in people that are subscribed to 600 blogs, or in my case, a ‘healthy’ number of podcasts.

Though I stubled upon it completely independently, this Quotation Search tool is of a similar theme, and could have similar application to my previous post.

Wow. That has to be my shortest post ever.

I stumbled upon an interesting Acronym Search tool today that I thought had interesting potential uses in the classroom. I guess I am just one of those (annoying?) guys who likes making acronyms, so seeing what is already out there also has some appeal. But I know that I am not alone and suspect that this could also engage some students in some interesting activities.

As a starter, you can search for acronoms of your name. Who would have thought there were 9 main acronyms of ‘ERIC’ and another 91 less common ones? As these acronyms generally represent organisations or concepts, it is even more astounding to see the huge variety of that these acronyms represent – in my case, from “Educational Research Information Clearinghouse” to “Ervmisbe’s Intelligent Combat-Armour”, although there was a high strangely high proportion of education-related acronyms. Coincidence? Anyway, getting students to do an acronym search for their name, then choosing some of the results to Google and write a summary paragraph on could be an interesting option.

It also told me 14 acronyms had ‘ERIC’ in their meanings. This could provide interesting insight into a project, when the topic has already been set. For example, a search of ‘SHARK’ revealed “White Shark Research Institute (Cape Town, South Africa)” and “Outlaw Shark Digital Interface Unit”.

And for a more creative project, this resource could support students in creating their own acronyms, either on a given topic, or to fit a given word.

In the spirit of the blogosphere philosophy of ‘filtering’ and helping the cream rise to the top, I thought I wanted to mention the podcast discussion on 21st Century Learing #30: Media Literacy. The shownotes describe it as ”A amazing conversation with With Adam Kenner and Sheryl Rivera from Horace Mann School and the Action Coalition for Media Education New York Chapter. This is a must listen for educators and parents in our wired world”.

It covers the following topics (apologies for the formatting – WordPress can’t seem to indent bullet points (without making them blockquotes), so this is the best I can do):

How and why teach Media Literacy to children.
Understanding how you are being manipulated by advertising and marketing.
- Also how this is constantly changing and evolving.
How media changes our view and reactions to world events.
Asking “Who produced this and what benefit do they get from giving it to me?”
- Conflicts of interest. E.g. MSNBC owned by GE – who earns a lot more from Military Defense contracts than their MSNBC news branch.
- None of the media companies are providing news as a public service. They are doing it to make money. Even PBS now.
Research showing excess of ‘mindless media’ results in lack of involvement.
- Results in depressed, anxious, sad, alone.
Bob McCannon (sp?) collecting media literacy research:
- Just teaching media literacy makes children more aware, but does not change attitude or behavoiur.
- Changes behaviour when combined with parental involvement and reduced media diet.
So a three-pronged approach to improving attitudes and behaviour around media:
- Media Literacy Education
- Parental Involvement
- Reduced Media Diet
How to encourage parental involvement.
Reactions of children. They love it. “Why didn’t you tell us about this earlier?”
The hype around online predators.
- 90% of molestations are by people the family personally knows.
- So should be educating people to look out for this.
- So why so much hype / focus on the other 10% (not all of which are online based).
- What does traditional media have to gain by perpetuating this hype?
Implication of larger politcal issues around media.

Its great to see the NECC Conference releasing stuff to the wider world that cannot make it to the conference. In NECC Live 2006 (only 2007 content is currently available), the item called “One Laptop Per Child: Hope or Hype?” had a number of interesting comments that I have transcribed below.

The three pannelists were:

• Ian Jukes – Travels a lot (consulting), working on 4 books.
• Barry Vercoe – Media Lab – Developer of OLPC, Music and Audio specialist.
• David Thomburg – Thomburg Center, State Dept Advisories, Travels (Brazil, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand), Getting into OS and Linux, New book “When the Best is Free – an educators perspective on Open Source”.

Ian Jukes – We need to transform learning, not just use the new technology in an old way.
David Thomburg – You need both the technology and the staff development to make the most of it.
David Thomburg – The technology can play a very important role if we can get the educators to realise it is learning about learning, not learning about stuff. (There is still a need for some learning about stuff, but not the dominant need).
David Thomburg – I think 1 to 1 is a myth, I don’t think 1 to 1 is a goal. I think 1 to 1 is a waystation on the way toward somwthing else. I think technology needs to be ubiquitous. I don’t operate 1 to 1, I operate 5 (technologies) to 1 (person). The critical issue is that those become useful to the extent that they interoperate. (a lot more work to make devices talk to eachother effortlesslessly).
Ian Jukes – In Singapore … they are truely 1 to 1 there, but you have to ask yourself “what has changed?”. I had a conversation with their Minister of Education two weeks ago where he said “top academic kids in the entire world that couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag if their life depended on it. We are a nation with no natural resources – not even fresh water. We can’t just have people that regurgitate the old, we have to have people that create the new”. And so if you put the technology in there by itself, I say “So what?”. The real issue here is about how you use that technology.
Barry Vercoe – Singapore … are running scared, just as they are in Taiwan, about the industry that has supported their economy for the last 20 years – the economic miracle of those places. …they can’t just stamp out copies any more, they are being undercut by Mainland China. The people in Singapore and Taiwan have to learn to create, have to learn how to invent, have to move higher up in the food chain in order to come up with products, new ways of thinking. So it has to do with how you think about technology, how you use technology to invent and create the economic community.
Ian Jukes – With ‘No Child Left Behind’ (no Superintendent left standing) we end up graduating highly educated, useless people – people who have really good school skills, really good test writing skills, but they arn’t ready for the world out there. … these kids leave the system that has held them up for 16 years and fall flat on their face.
Ian Jukes – So the real issues arn’t hardware issues, the real issues are headware issues. … about how we take the technology and leverage it. This isn’t about teaching powerpoint, it is about teaching kids to be better communicators. This isn’t about teaching Microsoft Word, it is about teaching kids to be better writers. Learning about the technology is nothing but an incidental (but essential) byproduct of that process. The real issue is education is about thinking – the technology is just the vehicle that will allow us to go there.
David Thomburg – (believes US is loosing its creativity. e.g. Motorola Razr Cellphones is designed in Brazil, not because it is cheap (it cost Motorolla a fortune), but because of the creativity of the Brazilian software engineers and their interdiciplinary perspective).
David Thomburg – This (lack of US creativity) is being exaserbated by the NCLB perception that we need to teach to task, that it is about a body of regurgitatable knowledge, as Ian says “the binge and purge model – information bulimia”.
David Thomburg – When did joy leave education? At conference it used to be so much fun … teachers were giving other teachers software they had wrote themselves … now it is all shrinkwrapped, you have al the booth barbies with bodies by Nautilus, brains by Matel. Come on, lets have some fun.
David Thomburg – You take Linux on a little box, you put in some creative stuff, you put that in the hand of some kids and teachers, you sit down in a corner and the next thing you know its Tuesday because your having so much fun with it. Anything that brings that joy back is going to be good for this country (USA).
David Thomburg – When we get all of the children who can celebrate knowledge, celebrate culture – not as a melting pot or soup that is homogenised but like a salad bowl where you get the delight of different flavours … it is not a perspective that supports the concept of (armed) conflict. When you truly understand other people in the world and that this is a planet, how can you fight?
Barry Vercoe – Its the people that have creativity and a natural desire to express themselves, are going to burst there way through whatever technological barriers are there, these are the people that innovate. Innovation occurs when there is a clash of cultures, a clash of ways of thinking, a clash of ways of doing things – the interaction of those people (is where the innovation happens).
Ian Jukes – We live in a media culture that builds things up in order to tear things down. My greatest fear is that the media jumps to a conclusion (like after a team looses one game) that all is lost (before we build enough momentum to reach Gladwells tipping point).
An audience question – “How can we get the same scale of conversation moving (as around the OLPC) about what real rich learning looks like like when it is facilitated by teachers?”
Ian Jukes – Neil Postman said “Children enter school as a question mark and exit as a period. Primary kids like school, high schoolers like lunch. Primary teachers teach children, secondary teachers teach subjects”. I beleive the tipping point is about grade 3, where learning goes from this incredible multimedia experience to being increasingly drudgery.
Ian Jukes – What is the opposite of pro? con? What is the opposite of progress? congress? Many of these people that are making decisions that affect the lives of these kids – their senior year was grade seven, their toughest two years was grade one … and they haven’t been in a classroom for 30 years.
Ian Jukes – We have these incredible tools, but as yogi bearer says “Its deja vu all over again”. What has changed? … My fear is that we are going to take this magnificent tool (OLPC) and instead of letting the children shape the tool, the tool is going to shape the childern and basically it is going to be the same old same old all over again.
Ian Jukes – I think we do a great job in American schools today (2006) of preparing kids for 1950, and I may be being optomistic there.
Barry Vercoe – Our philosophy at the media lab is “tools to think with”.
David Thomburg – This also evokes some fear, some negative fear I have read (about OLPC) is that “oh my god – if this happens, education is going to change. We can’t let that happen”. They will hide this in other ways by saying “the machine is underpowered” etc (but based in this fear).
Barry Vercoe – The $100 laptop is already forcing people to think differently … The Intel $400 knockoff … it looks just like the (MIT) machine, but it costs $400. You have to admit the software systems are just bloated, they are very slow … so the small hardware is going to force the Linux people to come down (to match it).
David Thomburg – … they want something that is reliable, that works, you turn it on and it is there. You are not going to get that with anything that runs software that comes out of Redmond Washington.
David Thomburg – Dell is now releasing a $450 computer … but they are not going to preload it with the kind of software that MIT is doing because they are going to say “out maket doesn’t want that”. You see, focus groups are almost the worst things to have because what people will say what they want is what they already have. If you keep going where you are going you will keep getting what you’ve got. Its time for something new.
David Thomburg – The positive opportunity is that in November 2007, NCLB going to be rewritten. …MIT’s project has made enough noise that I think there will be a seat at the table to talk about what education might look like here. If this country starts to see what other countries are doing and take it seriously, they will realise “we have tennis shoe marks up out back”.
Lindy Mekeuwan (audience) – In working with professional development … I’ve moved my crosshairs of the teacher and have moved it onto the university staff. Anyone who can only run Powerpoint, Word and the Library software can’t possibly prepare a teacher for the kind of world that this machine is going to open up. … I think what you need areound the OLPC is the salvation army of education – the people who will work with the people as the devices arrive and bring the ideas to them. What I have found working with teachers is that they are wonderful, creative, teriffic people – all you have got to do is give them a little bit of time and some great resources and they will do astounding things with them. It is just they are not prepared for that by their faculty or in their graduate programs or the professional development that they are offered – it very targeted to maintaing the status quo. … The concept of a lecture about constructivism is our issue.
Barry Vercoe – The problem in Australia is that Brenda Nelson who was the Minister of Education last year is noe the Minister of Defense. These people are making some of the decisions. … the problem is that the decision making is not put into the hands of the people that have the real experience.
David Thomburg – One of the best instructional TV series is JunkYard Wars (you have to build a machine to fit a challenge with any junk you can find). During the process they go around and interview the teams about the decision making process and their materials testing etc. What you get to see is the most delightful thinking and problem solving. (and you learn the lessons you need in a practical way you will never forget). There is also “Make” Magazine dedicated to this topic. I think that we would be better off if textbooks were more like make magazine and schools were held in junkyards, because that is where people could really build stuff and do stuff. We are human beings, but we are also human doings.

I’m sure almost all of us make backups to CD or DVD – if you don’t you should! And I’m guessing almost all of you hope that data will still be there when you go back to it. If so, you’ll probably appreciate this good blog post on the topic. While it is informative, it is very detailed and technical, so I decided to summarise it, and then write a 4-point summary of the summary for the really really busy people…

Summary:

• Use CD-R or DVD+R, but not DVD-R.
• Use Taiyo Yuden media if possible, which can be sold as TDK or Verbatim brands – see links for genuine sources and a trusted store.
• If you can’t find Taiyo Yuden media, use Verbatim.
• Keep all media out of direct sunlight, in a nice cool dry dark place, in acid-free plastic containers – this will triple the lifetime of any media.

General Guidelines:

• RW Media of any description is not reccommended.
• Only buy media made in Japan or Taiwan. Especially not India (can loose its seal and oxidise).
• CD-R is ok, if you use a good brand (see below).
• DVD-R is not good (the author goes as far as saying it “sucks”) for 3 reasons – inferior error correction, inferior ‘wobble’ tracking, and the fact its data writing methods look like an un-needed halfway point between CD-R and DVD+R.
• DVD+R fixes these 3 problems and also has better power control settings and gives four times more scratch space.
• So DVD+R very strongly reccommended.
• Brand makes a significant difference. The author a dozen different brands and the only ones that have had a 100% success rate is Taiyo Yuden (TY).
• After TY, the next best is Verbatim. Usually, after choosing brand (Verbatim), type (DVD+R) and possibly quantity (e.g. 50-pack), you will only have one choice. If you do have a choice, there are resources available to make that choice an informed one. Verbatim uses various manufacturers and  techniques, so results vary. Links at the bottom of this post may help by collecting user reviews of the different variants.

Where to get Taiyo Yuden Media:

• Can buy TY brand as TY in Japan. In other countries, popular brands such as TDK and Verbatim carry TY media, however not all TDK and Verbatim is TY – the non-TY media is not as reliable.
• See the Taiyo Yuden FAQ by the CD Freaks Forum for a listing of TY media under different brands AND what is fake TY.
• You can also get genuine TY media at SuperMediaStore.com – the only company the author has found that guarantees that their media is actually from Taiyo Yuden and not a fake.

Media Lifetime:

• Unlike ‘pressed’ media, no ‘burnt’ media will last forever.
• The article mentions that good quality CD media (or at least the dye) is stable for at least 70 years. But cannot say for DVD media because the dyes are secret. However it does say that DVDs use similar dyes.
• For the technically minded, five main things effect the quality/lifetime of ‘burnt’ media: Sealing method, reflective layer, organic dye makeup, where it was manufactured, and your storage practices. However, in this article, with DVD, we can’t get much more information – sealing method is fine with Japan and Taiwan manufacturers, this also speaks to the country of manufacture, the dyes used are kept secret, the reflective materials are almost exclusively silver and aluminum alloys which produce similar end results (there are only a couple of gold layer options, which are only of comparable quality to TY and more expensive) and storage practices.
• Keep all media out of direct sunlight, in a nice cool dry dark place, in acid-free plastic containers – this will triple the lifetime of any media.

Finding Good Quality Media:

• www.cdfreaks.com/media – gives a list of tested media, some basic facts and votes/popularity in the CDFreaks community. When faced with many similar choices (even within Verbatim) this can help.
• www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia – a large database of media for sale, searchable by many things, including UPC/ EAN code (i.e. barcode) which some online retailers list so you can buy with more confidence online. Many user reviews so you know how well the media has worked for other people.