Fortnightly Mailing

Closure of BBC Jam - usage and other data - results of Freedom of Information Act enquiry

Jam, the BBC's £150m on-line learning service was scrapped earlier this year. Having written a piece asserting that usage data was needed to judge the extent to which use of the service was taking off, I requested usage and other data from the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act.  In the continuation post below I include the BBC's introduction to its response of 24/4/2007, followed by  the main questions put (in bold), together with the full responses (in italics). Any annotations by me are underlined.

For me, the "killer fact" that the data reveals is the low average weekly use made of the service per registered user, summarised in the chart below, which I made from the data provided by the BBC. (It is so low that I only half trust my calculations, and am waiting for someone to show me the "killer error".)

User friendly Linux; how people use communications technologies; free client and server software to build virtual worlds. From the Economist Technology Quarterly.

This week's Technology Quarterly from the 9/6/2007 Economist has several articles of interest, all of which seem to be accessible without a subscription:

1. Bringing free software down to earth, which is about entrepreneur and self-financed astronaut Mark Shuttleworth's successful efforts to fund the development of Ubuntu, a user-friendly version of Linux, which is distributed alongside a suite of Open Source applications for desktop PCs and laptops.

2. Home truths about telecoms, about anthropologists' findings concerning the way people use communication technologies. This is a "must read" article, which challenges assumptions about the convergence of digital technologies, and which offers evidence that:

• users are showing a growing preference for semi-synchronous writing (text, chat, email) over synchronous voice;
• private communications are invading the workplace rather than the other way around;
• migrants are the most advanced users of communications technology.

3. Online gaming's Netscape moment? , about Multiverse Network, set up by some of the original founders of Netscape, which has created client and server software (based on open standards), and free for download by anyone who wants to build and host a virtual world.

Software and community in the early 21st century. Not just 65 minutes of a "fat dude" talking.

From time to time [links below] I have covered the work of Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia Law School, in Fortnightly Mailing. I came across this video of a presentation by Moglen at the 2006 Plone Conference in Seattle (Plone is an Open Source content management system). Although speakers who exude such confident certainty as Moglen always set my teeth on edge, I do not agree with one viewer's sceptical comment "This has no point. It is 65:05 of this fat dude talking. I don't understand".  Worth watching if you want to do either or both of:

• marvel at someone who can speak without notes or visual aids for over an hour, developing a complex and sustained line of argument;
• hear a politically fierce exponent of the Open Source movement in full flow.

The  video should appear in the continuation post below.

 31/10/2004 - The dotCommunist Manifesto
15/12/2006 - Two contrasting views about software patents. A debate between Eben Moglen and Blackboard's Matt Small
9/9/2006 - The Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Gavin Clarke reports in The Register on the views of Tim Berners-Lee and Eben Moglen

Jim Farmer on "Making college textbooks more affordable"

First of a series of Guest Posts by Jim Farmer in Michael Feldstein's e-Literate. This one picks up on the recently published US Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable” and examines the way in which (US) HE students use the on-line materials to which they get time-limited access from a text-book publisher through their ownership of the text-book. One sentence jumped out at me:

"In a 1999 presentation to the National Council of Higher Education Programs, an Open University official confirmed the estimated cost for the development of Open University’s media-rich, fully tested, baccalaureate program was US$1 billion."

and my instinct is that some extra zeros may have slipped into the presentation referred to by Jim, unless what is being referred to is the whole or a really substantial proportion of the Open University's entire provision.

Getting RSS feeds into one place. Solving the problem with "Yahoo! Pipes"

Last September I wrote a dissatisfied piece about SpeedyFeed, through which you could get several RSS feeds into one place. The trouble with it, as far as I could work out,  was that you could not get the feeds to merge in date order. I've had a note to myself to take a look at Yahoo! Pipes for some months and I finally got round to it just now. Within a few minutes I was able to solve the problem, and above is a screen-shot of the what the Yahoo Pipes interface looked like to cause 4 RSS feeds to be firstly combined, and secondly sorted in date order. The output from the "pipe" is itself an RSS feed.

Currently I am using Google's Reader to merge some of the RSS feeds from web logs that I keep an eye on, and to integrate the mergeds feed into my home page; and Reader does the merging in date order OK, and it renders the merged feeds in a clever and clear way. But anyone with a logical mind, and better still some programming know-how should be able to make Yahoo! Pipes do a great deal more, probably making it worth spending USD10 on this newly published ~60 page O'Reilly Short Cuts Guide by Mark Pruett.

Test the mobile-readiness of a web site

More and more use is being made of the Internet by mobile phone users. Most web sites work badly with mobile devices, and designing web site to work better is tricky: there is a wide range of devices and browsers; testing the site on even a small proportion of the possible combinations is not a viable proposition.

Furthermore, mobile users are generally paying for their data - so big or graphics rich pages are costly (as well as usually pointless) to view. Finally, mobile Internet users behave differently from users of Macs or PCs. For example, they may not know how to enter text into their browser, or the may be slow at doing it. Users tend to find things by searching and then navigating.

dotMobi controls access to the ".mobi" top-level domain. It also publishes Style Guides for developers of mobile web sites. These seem largely to be based on the output from the World Wide Web Consortium's Mobile Web Initiative; and generalising a bit glibly, the way to make a web site work for mobile phone users is to:

• use well-formed mark-up that conforms to the relevant W3C standards;
• follow a few very specific design rules concerning the maximum size of images, the positioning of navigation links, and the use of Cascading Style Sheets to control format rather than tables;
• test it on the entry-level, older phones, that are still in widespread use.

(For much more on all this, see this 31/5/2007 talk by Icelander Gummi Hafsteinsson, Google's Mobile Applications Product Manager.)

dotMobi has several useful tools on its web site.  For example, you can subject a URL to a fairly comprehensive test of how well it is likely to work with mobile devices. Or you can access a clever emulator of a couple of different mobile phones [JAVA enabled browser needed] enter a URL, and see how that URL is likely to render in either of the phones. Fairly badly in the example given....

Several readers of Fortnightly Mailing know a lot about "mobile learning". Comments on the way they or the projects with which they are familiar have got content to work reliably on mobile devices will be very welcome.

Ning - a platform to support social networks. One to watch.

I chanced on Ning, a commercial platform for supporting social networks, albeit with at least one free option.

One of the founders of Ning is Marc Andreessen, the original founder of Netscape (the  first "proper" browser, which Microsoft tried hard to destroy, but which now lives again as Firefox). The other is Gina Bianchini who has had a more conventional, though stellar,  business career.

The Ning for business page , and the FAQ area are good places to begin assessing Ning. The former gives you a clear sense of prices and of the underlying business model. It also starts with the disarming:

"Depending on your needs, we may be a great option for you. If not, we're happy to recommend some other companies that may be a better fit."

The Ning entry on Wikipedia is also informative.

The FAQ area has an unusually well-organised feel, with, for example, semantically meaningful URLs, and an impressive overall "design tone", on which a great deal of  care has been lavished. (In passing I also noticed that some though not all of the code for the site is valid, something which always makes me well-disposed towards a service.) From what I could make of it a user can take the code of an existing Ning social network site that they like, and use this as a starting point for their own network. This is explained technically in Ning's description of its underlying architecture. Shades of Tim O'Reilly's 1999 essay "Where the Web leads us", of which this is a short extract:

"Perhaps even more important, both the technology and the Internet ethic made it legitimate to copy features from other people's web sites.  HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pages that were used to implement various features on a web site could be easily saved and imitated. Even the CGI scripts used to create dynamic content were available for copying. Although traditional computer languages like C run faster, Perl became the dominant language for CGI because it was more accessible. While Perl is powerful enough to write major applications, it is possible for amateurs to write small scripts to accomplish specialized tasks. Even more important, because Perl is not a compiled language, the scripts that are used on web pages can be viewed, copied, and modified by users. In addition, archives of useful Perl scripts were set up and freely shared among web developers. The easy cloning of web sites built with the combination of HTML+CGI+Perl meant that, for the first time, powerful applications could be created by non-programmers."

Of course judging a service by how it describes itself is unwise. You have to have used it. So if any readers of Fortnightly Mailing have experience of Ning it would be great if they would post a comment with their assessment of it, especially from the the point of view of its role or potential role in learning.