Fortnightly Mailing

Using open source tools for performance testing

Picture by Adewale Oshineye, licensed under CC.

Some readers will undoubtedly enjoy this 8/9/2006 hour-long talk by Google's Goranka Bjedov, about performance testing of big ICT systems. In fact one, who runs a large-scale e-learning delivery infrastructure, and to whom I sent the link just after writing this post said:

"Yes, just watched half of it, she hits all my hot spots, such a nice person, very interesting to hear that Google has similar issues to every other organisation regarding performance, capacity and testing. I love some of her stories and I liked her delivery style."

Sloan-C Effective Practices web site. Redesigned as a full-blown Wiki.

The US Sloan Consortium's previously featured Excellent Practices site, which contains numerous thorough case-studies on online learning in an institutional context, has been rebuilt, painstakingly, as a full-blown Wiki. Anyone can create an account and make changes.

For a typical example of the sort of thing it contains, and to access the site, see Using Cohorts to Build an Online Learning Community.

Impressive work by the UK's AoC NILTA on learning platform requirements and on e-portfolios

AoC NILTA describes itself as the "voice of the Further Education sector for ICT and e-learning in the UK". With a new team at the top, including Josie Fraser (from Wyggeston & Queen Elizabeth I sixth-form College), and Sally-Anne Saull (from RM plc), AoC NILTA has altered the way it disseminates its views. Gone are the unweildy and infrequent PDF Newsletters, and the rather bizarre web site. In comes a nice simple web site, with a blog as the main communication vehicle. Most importantly some strong thought has gone into recent AoC NILTA statements. Here are two interesing examples, both issued on 13 September 2006:

Privacy and self-disclosure on-line

This week's Times Higher Educational Supplement had what struck me as a slightly overegged feature by Adam Joinson "Does your VLE virtually undress its users?" with the lead-in:

"Few educators are aware of how online learning tools can betray the privacy of individual users and stifle their learning experience."

Joinson's article [120 kB PDF] made me wonder whether VLE using organisations ever have a policy of explicitly telling users what aspects of their behaviour on line can be and, more importantly, are monitored through the VLE, and what they tell users about how long they retain data of this kind, and what use they put it to.

I wonder if Government has fully considered privacy and data-security issues in its enthusiastic promotion, for education, of personalisation, unique learner numbers, personalised learning spaces, and e-portfolios.

Certainly this kind of issue can sometimes be taken exceptionally seriously by users, with plenty of scope for reputational damage.  For more on this see dana boyd's excellent 8 September 2006 essay Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama. (Facebook is a several million member  university-oriented US social networking rather like My Space.)

Joinson's own web site has links to some very interesting material, including a 40-slide powerpoint presentation from 2005 - Who's watching you? Power, personalization and on-line compliance" [1.35 MB PPT] - which reports on fascinating research on what leads people to part with personal information when asked to by management or (in the case of students) by their institution.  Joinson's site led me to the ESRC funded Open University project Privacy and Self-Disclosure Online Project (PRISD) which is summarised thus:

"Disclosure of personal, often sensitive, information is critical to the development of trust and understanding in human relations. Increasingly, we will also need to disclose such information to relative strangers and information systems.

The PRISD project examines the determinants of people’s willingness to disclose personal information to Internet-based systems, the limits of that disclosure, and the consequences for the design of systems.

Uniquely, the focus of the project is on both the technology used to request personal information, and the social context in which the information is sought. The project uses experimental social psychology methodology and psychometrics to investigate people’s willingness to disclose personal information."

Other related posts of potential interest:

• Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture.
• When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?
• Anonymity online as the default.
• Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical?
• Privacy, trust, disclosure and the Internet.

5/10/2006. Added forward link to Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical? 11/10/2006. Added forward link to Privacy, trust, disclosure and the Internet.

DHL in the NHS - "the spirit of can do and the experience of know how"

DHL advertisement in the 16/9/2006 Economist

So the UK's National Health Service logistics network, which delivers medical supplies across the whole of the NHS, is to be put in the hands of DHL, something the public sector union UNISON is fiercely disputing, with the first national strike in the NHS for many years due to take place on 21/9/2006. The caption to the advert includes the ghastly:

"We think the best way to help your business is to know it as well as ours. It's the spirit of can do and the experience of know how. We call it Do How."

3 year agreement reached on LSC funding for JISC

On 6/9/2006 JISC made the exceptionally welcome announcement that it has reached agreement with the Learning and Skills Councils (LSC) on the LSC’s contribution to the JISC budget. This seems to bring to a pragmatic end the hiatus caused by last year's sudden cut in LSC funding to JISC.

"The agreement means that the following will be available to those institutions funded by the LSC for the next three years, including Specialist Colleges:

• JANET connections;
• support from the Regional Support Centres;
• membership of the UK Access Management Federation;
• all JISC’s advisory services;
• delivery services at data centres;
• membership of the new JISC Collections content company;
• access to all current content under existing licensing agreements."

There is a comprehensive questions and answers page on the JISC web site.

A fund to transform education, workforce training, and lifelong learning

Shades of the UK's digitisation programme in this US campaign to establish a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT), to be funded by revenues from the auction of publicly owned telecommunications spectrum:

"DO IT’s goal is no less than to transform America’s education, workplace training, and lifelong learning through the development and use of the revolutionary advanced information technologies comparable to those that have already transformed the nation’s economy, its communications system, media, and the daily lives of its people."

Articles in eLearn Magazine by Michael Feldstein, Lisa Neal, and Ken Korman. I. II.

Lawrence Lessig: the Free Culture movement, and the support it needs from Free Software

Lawrence Lessig, who is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and one of the key people behind the "Creative Commons" license, gave a keynote speech at last August's Linux World conference.

"In this talk, Professor Lessig describes the Free Culture movement, and the support it needs from Free Software. The struggles and the threats are largely parallel. The solutions need to be parallel as well."

Link to page with embedded video of his 15 August talk.

BBC seeks rival for MySpace

Rafat Ali reports that BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, is looking to buy an internet-based social networking site similar to MySpace. According to a senior BBC source quoted in a 10 September 2006 article in the Daily Mail's ThisIsMoney (sic):

"These sites are definitely of interest to us. They are growing at a fantastic rate. They allow users to produce their own content and, above all, they are incredibly attractive to younger people, mostly between the ages of 13 and 24, with whom broadcasters have the biggest problems. If you lose them at 12 or 13, getting them back at 25 is not easy."

Benchmarking e-learning - Wikipedia

This new page about benchmarking e-learning has plenty of links to different benchmarking frameworks in the English-speaking world.  It is an example of "day-to-day" stuff which might easily be (indeed is already) posted on an agency web site, in this case the Higher Education Academy's, being put into Wikipedia where it might be expected to:

• gain input from the wider community;
• be found by many more people.

See Should organisations now put public knowledge and knowhow on Wikipedia instead of publishing it themselves? for more on this.