Fortnightly Mailing

Events in the pipeline

A clutch of forthcoming events.

1. 17 May, Brussels. Citizen Connect. The concluding event of the URBACT Information Society Network, which concerns how technology can connect citizens, combat social exclusion, stimulate economic local development, and put the citizen at the heart of the democratic process. (Thanks to reader Martine Tommis for this.)
2. 24 May - 9 June, online.  Identifying Successful Business Strategies for Online Programs.  An online workshop with Steve Schiffman, Chris Geith, and Karen Vignare, organised by the Sloan Consortium. "This workshop marks our most ambitious effort to date to map the business models of the online industry and present them in a context that will actually help to improve the success of your online programs. This workshop includes ongoing research that has been collected over the course of the past two years from top institutions and has included the input and work of several top researchers in this area. And as with all of our workshops, it is provided in a way that adapts to your busy schedule. If you are a top level administrator in an online program, you don’t want to miss this workshop." (Workshops like this one have in the past produced very useful outputs, for example Effective Workload Management Strategies for the Online Environment [84 kB PDF].)
3. 2 June, London. ‘blog.ac.uk’, the UK's "first educational blogging conference bringing together practitioner and research based expertise to explore cutting edge issues surrounding the educational use of weblogs and weblogging software". With keynote contributions from Stephen Downes and Barbara Ganley.
4. 6-7 July, York. 6th International Meeting of JISC and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). With keynote speeches from: Reg Carr, Director of University Library Services at Oxford University; Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC; Derek Law, Librarian and Head of Information Resources, University of Strathclyde; Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, CNI; Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, CNI; David Nicholas, University College London. (If I was not going to be on holiday at that time I would stump up the £350 residential fee for this event.)
5. 5-7 September, Edinburgh. ALT-C 2006 - the next generation. Keynote speeches from: Stephen Heppell; Diana Oblinger, Vice-president of EDUCAUSE; Tim O'Shea, Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Theme speakers: Terry Anderson, Athabasca University; Phil Candy, UK National Health Service; Gilly Salmon, University of Leicester; Chris Yapp, Microsoft. (I work half time for ALT as its Executive Secretary.)
   

Hiraki Sawa's "Certain Places" - exhibition in Colchester until 6/5/2006

I posted an item about Dwelling, an animation by Hiraki Sawa, on 6/4/2006. If you are within striking distance of Colchester in Essex, Certain Places, an exhibition devoted entirely to Sawa's work will run there until 6/5/2006.

Hut-to-hut skiing in Tafjordfjella, Norway, April 2006

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Last year's reader-survey told me to go easy on the ski-touring photos. Hence just this one from  Tafjordfjella, in western Norway, which amazingly is only about 10 miles from the sea at the Eastern tip of Tafjord. The continuation post contains a few more in a 1 minute Flickr slideshow.

Remote-controlled sharks

According to this 2/3/2006 BBC summary of a report in the New Scientist, Pentagon scientists are planning to turn sharks into "stealth spies" capable of tracking vessels undetected. The same technology may be used to keep farmed tuna fish in one place, without needing to pen them in, apparently.

FE White Paper - the personalisation virus is spreading

March 2016 - some dead links, I am afraid. Seb.

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Readers in England with an interest in FE will know that on 27/3/2006 the Government published a White Paper on the reform of the Further Education sector. There are links to the White Paper and various associated documents on the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) web site, and the Trades Union Congress has published a balanced assessment of/briefing about the White Paper.

I had a look at the White Paper from the point of view of e-learning. The term "blended learning" is absent: hopefully it is drifting out of use. But "personalisation" is in with a vengeance, with almost all of the White Paper's references to e-learning made in the context of personalisation. This is not surprising given the way that the term permeates UK Government educational thinking at present, with one of the four strands of the DfES Technology Group now led by a "Programme Director for Personalised Content". Maybe as a result of having co-written a report on personalisation in presentation services for JISC a couple of years ago I am sceptical about the current policy emphasis.

Firstly, where is the evidence that (whatever the term means) personalisation will improve the efficacy of public education? Secondly, there is a lot of vagueness about the meaning of the term, with definitions varying from the (perfectly acceptable, general) "the antithesis of impersonal", to the more technically focused "automatically structured to meet the needs of the learner".

Although the White Paper uses the term overall mainly in the former sense, it also uses it in the second sense, making the assumption that e-learning has a major role to play in providing a personalised experience. Developing a clear framework which explains what is meant by "personalised" in the context of educational policy would help, and it would go some way to reduce the risk of absurd/naive "snake oil" claims being made for this or that online content's (or this or that technical system's) capacity to make learning personalised.

[I showed a draft of this post to David Jennings, whom I've worked with on various projects, including writing the Draft for Public Comment for British Standard BS8426 - A code of practice for e-support in e-learning systems (8-page handout - 150 kB PDF), and whose web log I sometimes link to. He made the following point about personalisation, which I agree with. "The idea that technology can second-guess the needs of learners is superficially attractive but riddled with problems; I've never seen evidence of it being done effectively and with consistent accuracy; if it's done inaccurately it just undermines the transparency of the system and the users' control, which makes things worse."]

Was Gordon Brown right to scrap Home Computer Initiative?

Probably, but perhaps not so suddenly.

The Home Computing Initiative (HCI), which is said to have made it much easier for people in employment to get hold of a PC, got scrapped without notice in last week's Budget. During its two years of operation around 0.5 million people from over 1000 individual employers - spread acorss the public and private sectors - had taken advantage of the scheme, with high levels of take up in organisations like the Post Office, and with HCI playing a role in some workplace e-learning strategies. The links below provide a round-up of reactions to the decision, which have caught the businesses that have been making money from the scheme on the hop. The underlying issues seems to have been that:

• HCI schemes could not be accessed by workers on the national minimum wage, because it is unlawful to operate a salary sacrifice scheme that takes an employee's hourly rate below the national minimum wage;
• the scheme is alleged to have been abused, with people using it to purchase games consoles or second PCs;
• vendors were able to operate with better margins on their sales than in the open market;
• larger organisations claimed to gain large business benefits from the improvements in ICT fluency which the scheme brought about, at the tax-payer's expense.

Links

• Confederation of British Industry press release;
• Save HCI campaign web site, run by a company whose business has been associated with the supply of HCI PCs;
• BBC coverage;
• HCI Alliance, comprising Intel, Microsoft, and BT;
  
• Articles in the Register, generally taking the line that business has taken advantage of the scheme. "Anyone can get a cheap PC made in China, marketed from Texas, on similar terms to the government scheme anyway, except that with interest free credit, it's theirs to own. How much of the benefit of this subsidy was going to the participating multinationals who don't need any help improving their grip on the British market?" MPs botch HCI rescue (28/3/2006).  HCI admits failing poor (28/3/2006).  HCI traders fight for the right to PC tax breaks (27/3/2006).

World Economic Forum - Interview on the Global Information Technology Report 2005-2006

The World Economic Forum (the one that brings political and business leaders together in Davos each year and claims simultaneously to be impartial and non-partisan, but committed to entrepreneurship) has just published its Global Information Technology Report. This shows that the US, Canada, and Taiwan have jumped several places up a "Network Readiness" ranking based on an assessment of:

• the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community;
• the readiness of the community's key stakeholders - individuals, business and governments;
• the usage of ICT among these stakeholders.

The UK has risen from 12th to 10th place.

The full report costs £65, and is available from Palgrave Macmillan, but you can read its summary [66 kB PDF], as well as a transcript of an informative interview with Augusto Lopez Claros, who is one of the report's authors. [20060917 - link broken - intend to fix it.]

Just for the hell of it, and in less than 30 seconds, I used irows, which I described in Fortnightly Mailing 20060324, to create an HTML version of the ranking, and this appears in the continuation post below.

Perceptive comments from Bill Thompson about "Web 2.0"

I thought this 25/3/2006 piece by Bill Thompson, who writes on technology issues for the BBC, provides a thoughtful perspective on how the World Wide Web is changing at the moment, and on why he is gradually losing his scepticism about the importance of the so called "read/write Web", or "Web 2.0", as exemplified by services like Writely, or Flickr, and, increasingly, by Google services such as Page Creator.

An important issue for Thompson is the extent to which users have to but their trust in (i.e. give their personal or other important data to!) the companies that provide  these services. For example I've been quite taken with an interesting and attractive "Web 2.0" service called Box.net, which provides an advertising-free remote back-up service, enabling you to access your stuff from any networked device that runs a browser. So far so good - especially since so many people are so poor at back-up, and could get much better at it using a service of this kind. But this 2/4/2006 extract - emphasis added - from Box.net's Terms of Service makes me a bit wary, even assuming that I was content that my data was safe day-to-day with the company.

Box.net reserves the right to terminate without notice your password, account or use of Box.net service and delete any data within Box.net service if you fail to comply with this Agreement or for cause of any other nature. You may terminate your user account upon notice to Box.net at any time. Upon termination by Box.net or at your direction, you may request a file of your data, which Box.net will make available for a fee. You must make such request at the notification of termination to receive such file within thirty (30) days of termination. Box.net shall have no obligation to maintain any data stored in your account or to forward any data to you or any third party.

Myguide - a "radically simple" way of using the internet

The DfES describes myguide (known also as the Cybrarian Project) as a new online facility to provide a 'radically simple' way of using the Internet... which will ... consist of an uncluttered interface that people can personalise to suit their needs and tastes, an equally simple and intuitive email facility, and support in searching for information and using services of interest to them.

A pilot myguide service is now available. At the time of writing (2/4/2006) and for several days subsequently the account creation process and email system were not functioning, but when I looked in some detail at the service a couple of weeks ago I felt that it was neither uncluttered, nor simple, nor intuitive, nothwithstanding the extensive stakeholder involvement there has been in its development.

HCI and webcasting in Toronto. Guest Contribution from Sara Frank Bristow.

In June 2005 I became the Network Manager for NECTAR, the Canadian Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research. NECTAR links 14 HCI researchers at UBC, Calgary, Saskatchewan, Toronto, Queen's and Dalhousie universities, and is administered from the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) in Toronto. A 5-year project which runs through 2008, NECTAR is part of the government’s Strategic Network Grants Program, and like all networks in the program, it is funded by both the Canadian government (NSERC) and the private sector. In our case, major sponsors are Microsoft and SMART Technologies, though NECTAR has support from a number of other companies too.

Among NECTAR's many goals is to improve communication among our own labs, preferably via technology. Yet we find that without annual network-wide meetings at which our faculty, postdocs, and students can interact face to face, collaboration is less likely to flourish. Last Autumn we tried to improve network synergy via a postgraduate Computer Supported Collaborative Work course, webcast live to all NECTAR sites via an open/community source tool called ePresence (a version is available at SourceForge, and you may also be interested in this podcast about ePresence on the Educause web site). The course attracted students and/or speakers from all six NECTAR universities; built-in text chat, synchronization of audio/video with PowerPoint slides, and experimentation with a new (and pedagogically controversial) Voiceover IP module all contributed to each week’s presentation.

ePresence is one of many projects sponsored by NECTAR, and one of numerous collaborations underway at KMDI. Project Open Source|Open Access (OS|OA) is another: a tri-campus initiative, it seeks to develop a networked community of individuals interested in distributed peer production at the University of Toronto and beyond.

I must admit that I get a bit lonely amidst all of these virtual communities. From Toronto I co-ordinate the activities of researchers up to 3,000 miles away, most of whom I have never met. We keep in touch via Instant Messaging (MSN, Trillium), VoIP (Skype, Google Talk), the telephone and email – lots of email.  But there are no immediate colleagues to celebrate with when, for example, I finish a big project. Perhaps this is one more reason to support HCI research: with an adaptive enough interface, I might not notice the difference.

Contact Sara