Fortnightly Mailing

Using your browser off-line with "Google Gears" - the shape of things to come

If you use Google Reader for your RSS feeds, you may have noticed that you can access the content behind the feeds when you are off-line. This is a (rare) example of a web application working off-line inside your browser; and for users of laptops and other mobile devices who are frequently away from a good (or any!) internet connect, this kind of functionality makes a real difference.

Yesterday Google launched Google Gears, for Mac, Windows, and Linux, in very early "beta", aiming at developers wanting to make web applications that will work off-line.

There is an explanation of what Google has in mind in this description by Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson. At the moment the development is not that relevant to "ordinary users", and this piece is mainly pointing out the way things may be moving. But even now, if you install Google Gears, you seem to get some additional functions within Google Reader. Don't ask me what they are yet......

Are US teachers being left behind?

Participants at Blackboard's "Educational Leadership Forum"

On 16/5/2007 Blackboard Inc. hosted an "Educational Leadership Forum" at the National Press Club in Washington DC. Blackboard's Peter Segall introduced a panel of 4 US experts in technology enabled learning, which was moderated by Adam Newman of Eduventures, in front of a small invited audience. Like Desire2Learn at its Personalisation and innovation in education "round table" at the UK Education Show on 22/3/2007, there was no "sell" of any kind. Panel members were:

• Susan Patrick (who has been Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education);
• Ken Kay (President, Partnership for 21st Century Education);
• Don Knezek (CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education);
• Debra Sprague (Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education, George Mason University).

The panel's focus was on how America's school, college, and university students are faring in today's global economy.

I found it helpful to listen (rather than watch) the whole 90 minute panel discussion - below as a Google video - partly because it shows how much overlap there is between US and UK policy concerns, and how insularly we examine these. (You'd put money on none of the panel members having read the UK 2020 Gilbert Review - [216 kB PDF].) Take particular note of Sprague and Knezek's comments (about 33 minutes into the video below) on the impending teacher crisis, and on the importance of close integration between schools and universities on teacher training; and on the discussion between Kay and Sprague (about 47 minutes in) about the (ill?)preparedness of long serving staff in university teacher training departments to prepare trainee teachers to use technology in pedagogically effective ways.  The discussion of the globalisation of teaching (about 52 minutes in), and about the failure of schools to build on the digital skills that learners have (about 100 minutes in) are also interesting.

With thanks to Jim Farmer who was at the session, for telling me about it.

Learning research: how much grasp of it do you have?

I'll not tell you whether I did better or worse than the average blind monkey on Will Thalheimer's quiz on learning research, (which I found via Donald Clark's link to Thalheimer's excellent People remember 10%, 20%... Oh Really?), but I learnt quite a lot from doing the quiz, despite its slightly frustrating questions, and then reviewing the discussion about the quiz on Thalheimer's blog.

A free source of real random numbers from Mads Haahr

Maximinus - Bronze/Silver Tetradrachm from RANDOM.ORG web site

Mads Haahr from the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin has since 1988 run RANDOM.ORG, a site providing anyone on the Internet with a source of true random numbers, generated from atmospheric noise via a radio receiver rather than "pseudo-randomly" by a computer algorithm. The earliest version of the generator is shown below - there is a reason for the bottles - and if this kind of thing interests you, you can find out more on the site's history page. From the site you can do things like flip coins (with a classy selection of coins from which to choose), roll dice, and generate random numbers for several different state lotteries.

Version 1 of RANDOM.ORG, 1998-2001

How much longer for Andy Duncan, Chief Executive of Channel 4?

On 18/1/2007 Andy Duncan, boss of public service TV company Channel 4, issued a defence of "Celebrity Big Brother" against allegations of racism. Here is the URL for a BBC TV recording of Duncan's statement. For a more extended view of a man with his heels dug in, see this searching 29/1/2007 20 minute Channel 4 News interview by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, in which (in relation to the remark "I think she should fuck off home....  She can’t even speak English properly anyway") Duncan asserts  that Channel 4 "could not be certain the intent was racist". 20 weeks later Ofcom published its heavily critical report of its Content Sanctions Committee's investigation in Big Brother  [250 kB PDF] investigation.   Paragraphs 8.1 to 8.39 are the ones to read to get a palpable sense of the absurdity of Duncan's defence.  It is hard to see how Duncan, whose basic salary, according to the BBC, was £622k, including a performance-related bonus, and who will also be in line for a £450k long service bonus later this year,  will last much longer at the head of Channel 4.

Learning Technologist of the Year Award - open to individuals and teams

ALT, for which I work part time, has launched the inaugural Learning Technologist of the Year Award. The Award is open to individual members of ALT and to individuals and teams based in ALT member organisations worldwide.

The Award's overall purpose is to celebrate and reward excellent practice and outstanding achievement in the learning technology field.

The award will be judged by a panel chaired by Gilly Salmon, Professor of E-learning & Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester, and presented in Nottingham at the ALT conference on 5 September 2007, by Dr Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.

Prizes will be as follows: 1st prize £1000; 2nd prize £600; 3rd prize £300.

The closing date for applications is 20 June 2007. Short-listed applicants will be interviewed (in person, by phone, or using web-conferencing) on 19 or 20 July 2007, and will be informed of this, if required for interview, by email on 29 June 2007.

Full details of the award are in the Rubric [15 kB PDF] and the Application Form [35 kB DOC]. Closing date 17.00 UK time on 20/6/2007.

Educause software patents resource centre

Educause has a US-oriented Patent Resource Centre which I came across via Michael Feldstein's e-Literate. The Resource Centre links to a wide range of mostly US-oriented resources, including the regularly amended wikipedia page on software patents, which has helpful links that differentiate nicely between US and UK patent law.

Ecolanguage - combining ideas from economics and from ecology in the same animated diagrams

Lee Arnold sent me a link to 13 YouTube videos of presentations made using "Ecolanguage", an  animated graphic language that provides a standard way of combining economics and ecology in the same image, using 25 symbols, organised into 6 categories. Below is a video that explains the language:

Workshop on 29 August about Open Source software in libraries

Last year I did some work in a commission from JISC as part of a team that included Eric Lease Morgan, Head of Digital Access and Information Architecture at Notre Dame University in the US.  Eric will be running a 90 minute workshop about Open Source software in libraries as part of Digital Libraries à la Carte 2007, a modular 5 day course that "prepares librarians for the future" at Tilburg University in the Netherlands during the last week of August 2007.  According to Eric,

"Workshops in the course are designed for any type of person who works in a library. They will help you learn about the current and immediate future of computing in libraries. The workshop have something to offer everybody. They are not strictly designed for computer types. The only prerequisites are an open mind and the desire to learn."

 

Lorcan Dempsey on Google's "Universal Search"

You may have noticed that Google's search results have looked different from earlier this month, especially if you are searching in English, using google.com, with results returned across its major services from a single search.

Here, for example is the result for searching on mount everest, with links to web, maps (useless actually!), and images, all from the one search result.

Lorcan Dempsey, who used to work for JISC and is now Chief Strategist for OCLC (a giant worldwide library cooperative), has written a thoughtful piece about Universal Search, which is what the new development is being called, albeit not by Google. (Take particular note of some of the experimental features that can now be reviewed in Google Labs.)

One angle on these changes concerns user training. Conventional wisdom has it (had it?) that users need training on new software. An alternative approach - as in this case - which avoid the hassle of having to maintain help files or other documentation, is to change what is already superficially very intuitive software gently and incrementally, and assume that users will find out how to use the new features more-or-less of their own accord, helping each other out if they get stuck.  Of course that option was not really open when software was distributed and installed locally by the user. Once software is hosted "up in the sky somewhere" then it is: and my guess is that most readers will not have even noticed what is, behind the scenes, a very big change to how Google works. If they've not noticed, they definitely did not need any training.