Fortnightly Mailing

Learning Light, Sheffield - Jane Hart and Vaughan Waller move on

Vaughan Waller and Jane Hart

I've reported occasionally about Learning Light, a publicly funded not-for-profit company in Sheffield that describes itself as "a centre of excellence in the use of learning technologies (e-Learning) in the workplace and organisational learning best practice"*. Last year, Learning Light recruited Jane Hart (previously Jane Knight) as its Head of Research Services, and acquired Jane's e-learning centre web site. Later in the year, Vaughan Waller joined Learning Light as Head of Membership Services. Until recently, Vaughan was Chair of the UK e-learning network, where Fortnightly Mailing is syndicated. Jane and Vaughan have now left Learning Light and set up a consultancy called WallerHart - Learning Architects.

* Disclosure. PA Consulting had the contract for getting Learning Light established, procuring a web site for it, and commissioning some research reports for Learning Light to subsequently provide to users of its services. I wrote two of these with David Jennings and David Kay, Camilla Umar, and Liz Wallis of Sero Ltd.

Teenage use of social networking sites

Via Jane Hart's excellent E-Learning Pick of the Day I came across the latest report - actually a 10 page "data memo" rather than a full report - in the Pew Internet and American Life Project, under the Family Friends and Community topic: Social Networking Websites and Teens. The survey, conducted by telephone between October 23 and November 19 2006 among a national sample of 935 youths ages 12 to 17, asked about the ways that teenagers use these sites and their reasons for doing so. 55% make use of such sites, use of which "rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users".  For a well informed commentary on the survey, including some interesting points about the Pew research methods, read this piece by dana boyd.

If any readers know of current UK data on the use of social networking sites, please post a comment below.

"Search Wikia", an eventual alternative to Google or Yahoo?

Updated 6 January 2007

There has been extensive coverage of Wikia Inc.'s project to develop a "new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot".  (Wikia Inc. is a for-profit company co-founded by Jimmy Wales, that lives alongside, but is discrete from, Wikipedia.) This updatable list of links to some of the stories, annotated by Wikia Inc., provides the flavour, and this 23 December 2006 statement by Jimmy Wales summarise the Search Wikia vision.  You can also join a mailing list (busy, with plenty of high level contributions, but there is a digest option) about the project, from where you can find, for example, this more detailed and sceptical assessment of the prospects for the project, by Danny Sullivan, or this lucid 3 January 2007 piece by Jimmy Wales summarising his views on how the project might take shape. Currently (6/1/2007) there is interest in an Open Source "distributed peer-to-peer web-indexing application" called Yacy. If I were Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, would I be worried? Not yet. But I think people who use search for primarily narrow intellectual pursuits rather than in areas where there is a lot of active commerce, are maybe unaware of the extent to which spam and porn on the web damage the value of conventionally obtained search results. Search Wikia would, amongst other things, aim to solve this problem.

See also this 1 February 2007 link to, and extract from a New Scientist interview with Jimmy Wales.

Grid computing, Facebook, and YouTube (and other technologies) summarised in useful EDUCAUSE 2 page guides

Last year I wrote a short piece about the excellent EDUCAUSE 7 things you should know about... series, each of which provides a practical 2 page overview of a particular learning technology, summarising how it works, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning.

Since then, EDUCAUSE has published several more in the series. As with similar "how to" guides I think there is a case for publishing them in wiki format so that the community can weigh in and update them, and I wonder if EDUCAUSE considered this approach. Here is a complete list, current on 5 January 2007:

• November 2006 E-Books;
• October 2006 Google Earth;
• September 2006 YouTube;
• August 2006 Facebook;
• July 2006 Mapping Mashups;
• June 2006 Virtual Worlds;
• May 2006 Google Jockeying (!);
• April 2006 Remote Instrumentation;
• March 2006 Screencasting;
• February 2006 Virtual Meetings;
• January 2006 Grid Computing;
• December 2005 Collaborative Editing;
• November 2005 Instant Messaging;
• September 2005 Augmented Reality;
• August 2005 Blogs;
• August 2005 Video Blogging;
• July 2005 Wikis;
• June 2005 Podcasting;
• May 2005 Clickers;
• May 2005 Social Bookmarking.

Comparison of CMS, Course Materials Life Cycle, and Related Costs

Thanks to Mark van Harmelen for sending me this link to Scott Leslie's recent posting about a July 2006 report for MIT [444 kB PDF] by Scott, Bruce Landon, and Russ Poulin. Scott writes:

"My colleagues Bruce Landon and Russ Poulin were commissioned last year by MIT to produce a report which compared the CMS practices and costs, as well as the life cycle of course materials, at 'peer' institutions in an effort to provide a benchmark for future decision making. I was just informed that MIT has generously made the report more widely available online at the above location. In addition to MIT itself, the peer institutions surveyed included Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard (College of Arts and Sciences), University of Chicago, Middlebury, University of Texas at Austin, Princeton and Yale."

BBC Music web resources updated and integrated

Useful short piece by David Jennings, who recently emerged from book-writing purdah (and with whom I've collaborated in the past on several commercial projects), summarising changes in the way the BBC organises its online music resources and pointing out that the BBC is now linking extensively to Wikipedia entries about music and musicians:

"There have been previous cases of online sites like GoFish and Upto11.net placing their trust in Wikipedia instead of licensing commercial sources like Muze or AMG, but is the BBC the first large traditional media corporation to do so?"

Poking about on the BBC 6 web site I see that the BBC is also now freely linking to search-returns from MySpace and YouTube.  See, for example, the "across the web" links on the right hand side of this page about Bob Dylan's (excellent) Theme Time Radio Hour, which sadly seems only to be available in archive form if you have a UK IP address.

A walk in the software patent forest - with an interesting "concept map" - by Derek Morrison

Longish essay by Derek Morrison (whose long-running Auricle web log has been quiet of late) examining the implications of software patents on e-learning, from a UK/European perspective, followed on by Part 2, which contains this interesting active concept map [225 kB JPG], but is about the use of concept mapping tools rather than about software patents.

Google Earth - new version available, and details of GE's high resolution coverage

A new version of Google Earth is available for download - for Windows 2000/XP, MAC OS 10.3.9 +, and Linux - with an improved user interface (or so it seemed to me). The extent of Google Earth's high resolution coverage (you can see individual buildings and cars at high resolution) is gradually increasing, though there are wide variations, with Iraq, for example, rather better covered than much of Europe, as the thumbnails above indicate.

$100 laptop could reach users by July 2007

According to this 2 January 2007 story on the BBC web site, the first batch of so called "XO" computers built for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project could reach users by July this year, with test machines to be issued in February. The BBC piece quotes Nicholas Negroponte, whose brainchild the OLPC laptop is, as follows:

"I have to laugh when people refer to XO as a weak or crippled machine and how kids should get a 'real' one. Trust me, I will give up my real one very soon and use only XO. It will be far better, in many new and important ways."

"In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools."

Plenty of pictures and commentary (some of it snide) here at engadget, and these previous posts from Fortnightly Mailing may also be of interest:

• One laptop per child - further information and progress. 29 November 2006 link to piece by David Weinberger;
• What would you install on one laptop per child? 17 October 2006 Guest Contribution by Steve Ryan from talk at LSE by Jonathan Zittrain;
• The "One Laptop Per Child" wiki. 1 August 2006 posting which includes a video of a working prototype of the laptop.