Fortnightly Mailing

espida - helping you make a business case when there are no immediate financial benefits

Today I heard a brief and fairly convincing overview about "espida" by James Currall of Glasgow University about the espida Project, a recently completed JISC project. According to James, and the espida web site, espida provides a method to "make business cases for proposals that may not necessarily offer immediate financial benefit to an organisation, but rather bring benefit in more intangible spheres". Originally espida was developed to be used within the area of digital resource management; but it has potential for far wider application (decision making, performance measurement, change management), to such an extent that JISC is now requiring the use of espida by bidders in some of its current project calls.

Universities discover Second Life - Guardian article

This article by Jessica Shepherd in today's Guardian picks up on this Friday's Eduserv conference at the TUC in London about the educational use of Second Life.

Previous posts referring to Second Life:

• 9/9/2006 CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion;
• 1/10/2006 Economist feature about Second Life;
• 9/10/2006 The Web is not just a better printing press. Nature's Timo Hannay on what the Web means for science.

David Weinberger interview with Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow's acidly written 2001 Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, is worth revisiting. The seven straw men being:

1. People lie
2. People are lazy
3. People are stupid
4. Mission: Impossible - know thyself
5. Schemas aren't neutral
6. Metrics influence results
7. There's more than one way to describe something

For an update I came across this 1/5/2007 interview with Corry Doctorow by David Weinberger, whose newly published book Everything is Miscellaneous I am reading. There is a full transcript of the interview available from the URL. The section in the interview on implicit metadata is interesting. Here is an excerpt:

"I think that the big difference between Google's implicit inspection of the Internet structure and a folksonomy is that Google only works well when you are implicit.  As soon as you get explicit with Google, it starts to break.  So, search engine optimizers, or link spammers, link farmers, Google bombers, and so on, they all seek to subvert Google by explicitly creating links for Google to find and index.  It's really only the people who naively create links between pages without thinking whether or not Google will index them that produce useful material for Google.  Google goes to some lengths to try and figure out who's making links for its benefit and throw those links away so that it's only examining those accidental links."

OpenID - one reason why single sign-on is risky

Amended 13/5/2007

Intuitively - and this is not a good basis for deciding on such matters - I am a fan of i-names, which I wrote about in December 2004. I use an i-name as the "Contact me" link on this web log - it works well - and you can register your own here.) A small but increasing number of sites that require you to log in now enable you to do this with your i-name (or with any other "OpenID-enabled identity" - if that is the right phrase). All very convenient, you might think, since for any such site you only need to know one user name and password. But there is a catch. Someone can steal (i.e. "phish" for) OpenID user names and passwords by setting up a bogus web site to which naïve (or tricked) users log in with their OpenID enabled identities. The commoner OpenID-enabled sites become, the more value will attach to the theft of users' details. This issue is interestingly discussed on the OpenID web site itself. (With thanks to Victor Grey of 2idi for telling me about this resource.)

13/5/2007. Via Stephen Downes here is a link to a 7/5/2007 news release from Sun announcing its interest in, and support for, OpenID, which it currently sees as "limited to facilitating low-risk transactions such as blog comments", including its plans to explore "what changes and practices are needed to make OpenID applicable to a broader spectrum of business and IT challenges".

Defunct links corrected 5/1/2009

Iconic photo of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness

Source: TimesOnline - 2 May 2007

This picture from The Times of, left to right, Ian Paisley (soon to become First Minister of Northern Ireland), José Manuel Barroso (European Commission President), and Martin McGuinness (soon to become Deputy First Minister), caught my eye. Even 6 months ago, such a picture would have been inconceivable.

The Board of Sheffield's Learning Light resigns en masse

Updated 4/5/2007

Donald Clark reports with anger that the Board of Sheffield's Learning Light a Government-funded not-for-profit company set up with Government and EC funding to serve as a "centre of excellence in the use of learning technologies in the workplace and in organisational learning best practice"  resigned en masse at Learning Light's AGM.* From the tone of Donald's post you might think he was at the AGM: apparently this was not the case. New board members have now been appointed.

See also coverage of:

• Learning Light's March 2006 absorption of Jane Knight's wonderful E-Learning Centre web site;
• Jane Knight and Vaughan Waller's December 2006 departure from Learning Light; 
• the genuinely useful material written for Learning Light by Itiel Dror. (Get it while you can.)

*Disclosure. Prior to the establishment of Learning Light I bid for got some interesting work from PA Consulting to write two "research reports" which formed some of Learning Light's initial resources; and I am now on Learning Light's list of qualified consultants, though no work has come my way as a result.

Globalisation of on-line tutoring

Source: TutorVista

Thanks to Dick Moore for pointing out Bangalore based TutorVista, a flat-monthly-fee service to provide round the clock on-line tutor support mainly for school-aged learners. Not something to contemplate organising other than on a large scale, which clearly is the case given the amount of venture capital that has been raised. And you could imagine quite a lot of money being made out of parents signing up (for less than the cost of 2 hours private tuition per month) because they want to "do something" to up their child's chances, with not that much use of the service then being made by the child. Interestingly, TutorVista also promotes its service as something that businesses might want to buy to then provide their employees as a benefit in kind, alongside, say, private health insurance. The services Faq's (sic) page is worth scrutinising: note its description of 8 hours per day x 6 days per week openings.

If any readers have experience of this or similar services, feel free to comment below, or contact me directly.

The case against the IMF in education

Thanks to Kevin Donovan for sending me details of this April 2007 report by Action Aid .  According to the research by Action Aid in Malawi, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone, "a major factor behind the chronic and severe shortage of teachers is that International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies have required many poor countries to freeze or curtail teacher recruitment".  The report makes the following core recommendations:

• "The IMF should stop attaching specific policy conditions to their lending and surveillance programmes.
• Any advice they give must provide a range of policy options to enable governments and other stakeholders – including parliaments and civil society – to make informed choices about macroeconomic policies, wage bills and the level of social spending.
• Governments should place education and development goals at the centre of their macro-economic planning. They should develop long-term and costed education plans detailing the actual need for teachers and resources for training in order to provide quality learning for all.       
• Donors need to keep their promises by committing to close the annual US$15bn financing gap needed to achieve education for all with increased and predictable aid over the long term. There is an urgent need to front-load increases in aid to education.
• Civil society organisations need to develop their own economic literacy so they can better scrutinise government budgets, increase the sensitivity of budgets to the needs of girls, poor people and other excluded groups, and engage in discussions about alternative macroeconomic policies."

You can download the full 56 page report as a 1 MB PDF file from the Action Aid web site. 

UK National Archive of Educational Computing

Item in the National Archive

A long time ago I used to veer between lust for and scepticism about the Sinclair ZX80. In the end I only started using computers in 1985 when I bought an Amstrad PCW.  ZX80s and a load of other artefacts and documents are held in the National Archive of Educational Computing, under the auspices of Core-UK, which is part of the diaspora of entities left after the restructuring and "down-sizing" of Ultralab.  Richard Millwood, who is now running Core-UK, and who will write a future Guest Contribution in Fortnightly Mailing, is looking for support for the archive. 1 page blurb about the National Archive - [50 kB PDF].