Fortnightly Mailing

Re-Engineering Assessment Practices (REAP)

The Re-Engineering Assessment Practices Project, funded by the Scottish Funding Council, has got a new web site, from which you can get more information about the project, and, in particular, access a range of research into, and resources about, assessment practices and methods.

New UK study examines the effectiveness of interactive whiteboards

The DfES has just published a new large-scale evaluation of the impact in London schools of interactive whiteboards on pedagogy and pupil performance. The study, which was immediately used by the London Evening Standard as a stick to beat the Government (see How £50m went to waste on a whiteboard), is by Gemma Moss, Carey Jewitt, Ros Levacic, Vicky Armstrong, Alejandra Cardini, and Frances Castle, and was commissioned by the DfES from the Institute of Education. It provides a case-study rich snapshot of practice in London schools, along with an inconclusive statistical analysis of pupil attainment data.  The study can be freely downloaded as a PDF. I include the "findings summary" in the continuation post below, and the "detailed findings" section of the report's 6-page executive summary is worth reading. In short, as you'd expect, interactive whiteboards are no panacea; their novelty soon wears off; used badly they reinforce bad teaching, and may detract from good teaching: and in some circumstances they slow down rather than speed up learning. Are they worth the money? This issue is simply not addressed in the study, which, disappointingly, is devoid of any economic analysis.

Demos publishes "Their Space - Education for a digital generation"

Thanks to Josie Fraser for spotting and reviewing a new Demos report, by Hannah Green and Celia Hannon, Their Space - Education for a digital generation, available as for download as a 300 kB PDF. This ~80 page report, which has its main focus on school-aged learners, is worth reading closely. In particular, it calmly disposes of some of the myths that dominate current thinking about technology and education, for example:

1. The internet is too dangerous for children.
2. Junk culture is poisoning young people and taking over
   their lives.
3. There is an epidemic of internet plagiarism in schools.
4. We're seeing the rise of a generation of passive consumers.
5. All gaming is good.
6. All children are cyberkids.

And the report, whilst avoiding being prescriptive, hits several of the right nails on the head, for example that the Internet, and the freely available tools, ways of working and connecting, and the content that it provides, makes a pretty good (albeit incomplete) learning environment.

The software-sorted society

One of those ideas that makes you jump, by drawing clear attention to something that you already knew, without having appreciated its significance.  Specifically, when you interact with a service online or by phone there may be software in action that mediates how you experience the service: by sorting you.  Live in a high income postcode? Get routed to a sales person more quickly than if your IP address makes you look as if you come from a less promising area.  On record as an awkward customer or "time-waster"? Then wait in the queue.  These issues are being examined by Stephen Graham in a British Academy Readership Project: Rethinking the digital divide: the software-sorted society.

And from the same University of Durham research group is Multispeed cities and the logistics of living in an information age, a project that is examining the differences in how different communities use and interact with technology. 

Dead link removed, 5/6/2011. Link made to Steve Graham's new place of work, 26/11/2012.

World Wind - an Open Source sibling for Google Earth?

Images from the World Wind web site

NASA's World Wind is an Open Source educational tool that "allows users to explore many aspects of the Earth and Moon".  Summary of World Wind's main features. World Wind is a 60 MB programme, and currently only available for Windows XP/2000, although a Linux release is reportedly due in 2007.  As World Wind's own thorough, even-handed, and "Google Earth friendly" comparison between Google Earth and World Wind makes clear, World Wind and Google Earth are in effect complementary siblings, with different purposes.

Mobile phones in Africa: short Economist article on TradeNet, a "simple sort of eBay for agricultural products"

Source: International Telecommunications Union

Africa's surge in mobile phone use (above), which runs hand-in-hand with rapid increases in the  proportion of the population with network coverage, may unleash a dotcom style boost in business energy, of which TradeNet is one potential example, reports the Economist.

Source: TradeNet web site

United States Patent & Trademark Office orders re-examination of Blackboard Patent

Updated 26/1/2007, and 27/1/2007

Earlier today the US Patent and Trade Mark Office assented to the Software Freedom Law Centre's 17/11/2006 ex parte request for the re-examination  of Blackboard Inc.'s Patent Number 6988138.

The odds were that the request would be granted, so little should be read into the decision. The re-examination may now take anything up to 2 years to complete.

You can track progress on Desire2Learn's inter partes re-examination request from this link on the USPTO web site, and you may be interested in this long current perspective on the Blackboard Patent, by Dave Nagel, based on interviews with Blackboard's Matt Small and the Software Freedom Law Centre's Richard Fontana.

Note. Other posts about the Blackboard patent:

• 1 February 2007 - Blackboard issues "Patent Pledge";
• 25 January 2007 - United States Patent & Trademark Office orders re-examination of Blackboard Patent;
• 9 December 2006 - Two contrasting views about software patents. A debate between Eben Moglen and Blackboard's Matt Small;
• 2 December 2006 - Blackboard: two separate re-examination requests to the US Patent and Trade Mark Office; and an application to the Court from Desire2Learn for a stay in proceedings;
• 27 October 2006 - EDUCAUSE on Blackboard: "patenting a community creation is anathema to our culture";
• 16 October 2006 -  John Mayer interviews various lawyers with patent knowhow;
• 10 September 2006 - The new "post-patent" environment for e-learning: a perspective. Guest contribution by Jim Farmer;
• 9 September 2006 - Blackboard's work for IMS;
• 8 August 2006 - Did the US Department of Justice know about the patent when it cleared Blackboard's acquisition of Web CT?;
• 26 July 2006 - Blackboard's US Patent 6988138.

JISC digitisation programme - from cartoons to polar exploration

Scott Polar Research Institute picture of Ernest Shackleton from the Virtual Shackleton site

Here is full list of the current JISC digitisation projects, with several of them newly announced under a £12m extension to the digitisation programme.

• 18th century parliamentary papers;
• 19th century pamphlets online: Phase 1;
• A digital library of core e-resources on Ireland;
• Archival sound recordings 2;
• British Cartoon Archive digitisation project;
• British Governance in the 20th century: Cabinet papers, 1914-1975;
• British Library 19th century newspapers;
• British Library archival sound recordings project;
• British newspapers 1620-1900;
• Digitising five centuries of UK life;
• Electronic ephemera: Digitised selections from the John Johnson collection;
• First World War poetry digital archive;
• Independent Radio News Archive digitisation;
• Medical journal backfiles;
• Modern Welsh journals online;
• NewsFilm online;
• Online historical population reports;
• Portsmouth University: Historic boundaries of Britain;
• Pre-Raphaelite resource site;
• Scott Polar Research Institute: Discovering the Poles – Historic polar images;
• The East London theatre archive;
• UK theses digitisation project;
• Voices: Moving images in the public sphere.

Web Presentation Tools And Technologies: A Mini-Guide

Web Presentation Tools And Technologies: A Mini-Guide (by Robin Good) is up to the long running Kolabora web site's usual high standard.

BBC Radio 4's "The Learning Curve" discusses personalisation

Not sure how long this link will be active, but if it remains so, Libby Purves' 22/1/2007 discussion with Professor Jim Campbell, Professor of Education at the University of Warwick; Dr Dennis Hayes, head of the Centre for Professional Learning, Canterbury Christ Christ University and Richard Westergreen-Thorne, head teacher of Barnwell School Stevenage, is worth listening to. For the first time I heard the terms "shallow personalisation" and "deep personalisation", used by Campbell to contrast superficial attempts to make a service seem "for" its users, with having a service that users can build around their own individual needs. Campbell, who is influential in the provision of education for "gifted and talented" school pupils, was open that deep personalisation is really of value to gifted and talented learners and those who already know, confidently, what their needs and preferences are. Chatting about this with David Jennings he quipped that when people start to qualify buzzwords with terms like shallow and deep, it is a sign that the buzzword is begining to get serious challenge.