Fortnightly Mailing

Thinking like a vegetable: how plants decide what to do

Terrific 1 hour talk [link to IPTV Archive] given in London on 24/10/2007 at the Royal Society by Ottoline Leyser, which explains, clearly and engagingly, how brainless plants process information about their environment, and use hormone signals to integrate information and regulate their behaviour.

Wide range of interesting stuff in the October 2007 ALT Newsletter

The Octboer 2007 issue of the ALT-N, the newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) - for which I work part time - has several interesting articles, including:

• a piece by Sanjesh Sharma about Djanogly City Academy's structured and successful use of ICT;
• a case study by Federica Oradini and Gunter Saunders about the introduction of e-portfolios at Westminster University;
• a report by Bob Banks from Becta's 17/9/2007 "Harnessing Technology" Research Forum;
• a detailed article by Jim Farmer about the the growing provision by US text book publishers of accompanying on-line support materials, and its impact on student success;
• a report from Howard Hills comparing the use, uptake and impact of e-learning in colleges with businesses generally.

Puncturing the hype: large-scale analysis of MySpace users and their behaviours, by Mike Thelwall

Mike Thelwall is Professor of Information Science in the School of Computing & Information Technology at the University of Wolverhampton. He has recently published a fascinating piece of "work in preparation" about MySpace users - Social Networks, Gender and Friending: An Analysis of MySpace Member Profiles [250 kB DOC], which he is happy for people to quote and cite.

The analysis uses two nice big data sets, and a third, much smaller one. The large data sets were obtained in the following interesting way:

"The raw data for this article are three samples of MySpace public user profiles. Each MySpace user has a personal identification number, and these numbers are apparently given out in sequence. We identified approximately the last ID issued by MySpace on July 3, 2007 and for the first collection selected every 10,227th ID starting at 1,939 (a random starting point) to give a large total sample size (20,064). The profile page associated with each of these user IDs was then downloaded via the URL http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid= followed by the user ID. These profiles were downloaded at a rate of 8,000 per day over three days to avoid overloading the MySpace server. This is the 'all members collection', and encompasses MySpace users from a wide variety of joining dates. "

"The second collection is the 'July 3, 2006 members collection' and consists solely of users who joined on July 3, 2006, as identified by trial and error through MySpace ID ranges, selecting 10,000 IDs (90,306,349 to 90,316,348). These were downloaded over four hours on July 17, 2007 starting at 2.30am central U.S. time in an attempt to access the data when most users were asleep in order to (a) minimise impact upon the MySpace servers and (b) capture comparable data."

The article draws many useful insights, and represents the data visually with great clarity. Here is a small selection:

• ".... (half of the users had not checked their account for at least two and a half months), because they had given up MySpace, had a pattern of infrequent checking, or had switched to another MySpace account ."
• "Excluding users with 0 or 1 friends on the grounds that they are probably mainly inactive users, the median length of time since the last logon was approximately one week (8 days)."
• "In simple terms, it seems that about a third of members give up immediately, a third become regular users and the rest log on occasionally."
• Users lie about their ages: "The surprisingly high number of centenarians could be due to children signing up their oldest living relatives but certainly reflects joke ages for at least some: several claimed to want children 'someday'; and there are examples in the data like 'Kevin' (apparently 102) who appears to be about 13 from his picture and has a typical teen action-packed MySpace profile."
• "A large majority (77%) of users were from the U.S., although – surprisingly - the UK was in second place (5%), followed by Canada (2%), Australia, (2%), the Philippines (1%) and Mexico (1%)."
• "The median number of friends is 1, and the median number for users who have at least 2 friends is 27."

Thelwall concludes:

"If there is a typical MySpace user then she is probably 21, single, with a public profile, interested in online friendship and logging on weekly to engage with a list of mixed but majority female 'friends' that are predominantly acquaintances (including bands). This is a very different profile to those of the teen users frequently discussed in the contemporary press, and so it seems likely that public perceptions of MySpace are at variance with reality."

Note. After writing this piece I came across dana boyd's extensive and up-to-date Research on Social Network page, which contains a link to Thelwall's paper, and a lot of other material besides.

Becta reports Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading - 19 October 2007

Here are three extracts from a 19/10/2007 Kable's Government Computing news item:

"The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency has referred Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading for alleged anti-competitive practices in the schools software market Becta, the government's education ICT partner, made the complaint on 19 October 2007. It also relates to concerns over Microsoft's policy on document interoperability."
...

"The agency's main concerns surround the limitations Microsoft places on schools using its subscription licensing arrangements and the potential interoperability difficulties for schools, pupils and parents who wish to use alternatives to Microsoft's Office software, including "free to use" alternatives."
...

"Becta advised schools that have already entered into a school agreement licensing model to consider their renewal and buyout options alongside the OFT's findings. Schools and colleges should only deploy Office 2007 when there is satisfactory interoperability with alternative products."

Becta's own press release.

Institute for Fiscal Studies monthly public finance bulletin

Some subscribers to Fortnightly Mailing are in roles where access to a regular low-volume, neutral commentary on the state of the public finances is valuable.

One good way to get this is by subscribing to the Institute for Fiscal Studies monthly Public Finance Bulletin, which provides a monthly three-paragraph update.  Here, for example is the update for October.

Headline Comparisons

• Central government current receipts in September were 4.6% higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase over last year's levels of 6.1% for the year as a whole and of 6.8% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. The latest figures show an increase over last year's levels of 4.9 % for the year to date.
• Central government current spending in September was 5.4% higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase over last year's levels of 5.1% for the year as a whole and of 4.1% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. The latest figures show an increase over last year's levels of 6.3% for the year to date.
• Public sector net investment in September was £1.2bn, or 68%, higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase of 13.1% for the year as a whole and an increase of 19.5% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. Together, public sector net investment during the first six months of 2007-08 has been £10.3bn, which is 10.8% higher than in the same months of 2006-07.

Bill Dutton - a political scientist's perspective on the Internet

The pace of change on the Internet is so fast, and there is so much snake oil around, that it is hard to keep a sense of perspective. Bill Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, does us a service in the text of his 15/10/2007 inaugural lecture Through the Network (of Networks) - the Fifth Estate [300 kB PDF]. In it he argues, in a thorough, reflective, and evidenced way, that just as printing led to the creation of an independent institution that has become known as the ‘Fourth Estate’, the Internet is leading to the 'Fifth Estate' which Bill describes as "a new form of social accountability" which is "enabling people to network with other individuals and with a vast range of information, services and technical resources..... in ways that can support greater accountability not only in government and politics, but also in other sectors", and which "could be as important – if not more so – to the 21st century as the Fourth Estate has been since the 18th".  It is worth taking the time to read the whole document; and if you have comments on it, the place to put them is on Dutton's blog.

TagCrowd - make your own "tag cloud" from any text

 

academic academy account acl administration administrator adult advanced adviser advisor advisory application assessor assistant associate based blended business campaigns care careers category cel centre chief co co-ordinator coach college commercial commissioning communications consortium consultant content coordinator corporate course curriculum department deputy designer development director divisional doctoral e-learning e-strategy early education elearning england enterprise environment esol events executive facilitator faculty fe general greek head health iclt ict ilt improvement information innovation instructional instructor iv jorum key le lead leader leadership learner learning lecturer libraries library life lrc management manager managing marketing mathamatics maths mobile national network officer on-line online operations ordinator partnerships performance plp policy practitioner principal professional programme project projects proprietor quality research resource resources sales school science section senior service services skills social software sport staff strategic student suport teacher teaching team technologies technologist trainer training tutor vice virtual vocational vpash wales work years

The other day I needed to make a "tag cloud" to give people at a conference an at-a-glance view of the kinds of people in the audience. I used TagCrowd, feeding in a text file, and then extracting the cloud as an image file, in a roundabout way. TagCrowd produces the HTML for a tag cloud with ease, but if you know of an alternative that generates the cloud directly as in image file, please post a comment below.

Freebase: lowering the barriers for participation in the Semantic Web. Guest contribution from Phil Rees.

Freebase is a web application that organisations and individuals use to easily publish information on-line, in a semantic structure, collaboratively.  Contributors from around the world can use the application to structure and edit any topic in the system or define meaningful links and relationships between topics.  All of the information in Freebase is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which means it can be reused for any purpose without going through a copyright clearance process.  To encourage the reuse of information, Freebase has made some programming tools available to ease the creation of web applications that extract live data from the system.

Clive Shepherd's "top picks" from Patti Shank's "The Online Learning Ideas Book"

Clive Shepherd posts his "top 12 picks" from the 95 ideas listed in Patti Shank's newly published The Online Learning Ideas Book. Reading a list like Clive's makes you realise how hard (futile?) it probably is to try to develop a formal language or syntax with which to describe learning design or to model learning, though the Open University of the Netherlands and IMS are trying, with Educational Modelling Language and IMS Learning Design.

Millions being wasted on a deserted Second Life? [Updated 26/6/2009]

Source: Schome web site - see link below

[Updated 24 September 2007, on 5 October 2007, and on 26 June 2009]

Roughly this time last year I wrote about Cyber One: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, a course being offered by Harvard Law School and the Harvard Extension School using the "virtual world" Second Life as a vehicle. Around the same time business interest in Second Life was picking up, with the 28/9/2006 Economist publishing a 3 page explanatory feature, which emphasised the value of Second Life for teaching and learning.

During the last year there has been much interest in Second Life in UK Higher Education. For example, the Eduserv Foundation ran a well publicised and successful conference on Second Life in May. Meanwhile, Nature has an island - Second Nature - in Second Life and is reportedly trialling integration between Second Life and external research databases; and in June 2007 the BBC broadcast an edition of its influential Money Programme from within Second Life. [BBC press release. BBC news coverage.] [24/9/2007] Link to some optimistic comic-style explanations produced by the OU's Schome Project of how Second Life can provide a challenging environment for learning. [5/10/2007] Link to a thoughtful piece about immersive environments, written as a report from a recent "serious games" conference, by John Helmer, Marketing Director at Epic plc [27/6/2009] at the time this post was originally written.

Personally I found "being" in Second Life generally disquieting and completely unmotivating, thinking "why would anyone want to spend time in here?"; and talking last weekend with my 21-year-old son and one of his friends (both Internet-savvy, Facebook- and Myspace-using, web-site creating, CAD or graphics-fluent individuals), we were laughing at the way our lack of interest in Second Life made us sound like "left-behind" old fogies. 

Maybe we are not completely wrong in our disinterest. Here is a highly sceptical article about Second Life by Frank Rose in the 24/7/2007 issue of Wired. Excerpt:

"Then there's the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn't much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden's in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM's Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27."