Fortnightly Mailing

Peoples-uni.org - an open access initiative for public health

Guest Contribution by Dick Heller

Dick Heller recently retired as Professor of Public Health at the University of Manchester, UK, where he developed a fully on-line Masters course in Public Health. Previously Dick was at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he was part of the International Clinical Epidemiology Network  (INCLEN).

Let me tell you about http://www.peoples-uni.org/ which aims to develop educational content around Open Educational Resources, freely available on the Internet, to help with Public Health capacity building in low- to middle-income countries.

Local universities offering public health education may be oversubscribed for face-to-face courses and fees for overseas universities, including e-learning distance programmes, are higher than can be afforded by most potential students in these countries. Internet-based e-learning has the exciting potential to deliver high quality learning resources anytime and anywhere, and although access is by no means universal it is improving quickly.

There is an ever expanding range of high quality on-line education resources freely available through the Internet, and a number of universities are putting educational material on-line for open access, although they do not include either teaching or accreditation of learning. Peoples-uni.org aims to provide educational context around the materials freely available on the Internet. A number of national and international partners have agreed to be part of this, and momentum is building.

We are starting with Public Health, building towards Masters level courses, and are piloting our first course module on Maternal Mortality currently. We have a large interest in accessing this course and the pilot is going very well. Draft course modules on Maternal Mortality and Child Mortality can be seen on http://moodle.cawd.net/course/category.php?id=68.

We are hoping for collaborations to develop to assist with this initiative, and plan to keep costs low enough to allow access by those who will benefit. Any groups or individuals who wish to join the initiative in any capacity will be welcome.

Dick Heller -  dick.heller "AT" manchester.ac.uk

Subtitled version of Common Craft explanation of RSS

Here is a helpfully subtitled version of Common Craft's April 2007 4 minute video explanation of RSS, aimed at the lay user. 

[With thanks to Kate Butler.]

Virtual video cutter - creates small chunks of content from longer streaming audio or video files

One of the drawbacks of video and audio in learning materials is that typically "the bit you want" is buried deep inside a file. In a conversation during a conference I attended last week, Robert Schuwer of the Open University of the Netherlands mentioned SURF's Virtual Video Cutter. This is an impressive web-based tool for making snippets from streaming media files.

The tool has comprehensive instructions in Dutch, English, and Spanish. I usually struggle with this kind of thing, but managed quickly to make usable snippets from MP3 (audio) and MP4 (video) files, and to save these locally in a format that enabled me subsequently to open them and play them locally; though the actual asset seems to be stored (for how long?) on a SURF server. One of the nice features of the Virtual Video Cutter is that it enables you precisely to specify the start and finish time of the snippet, and easily to alter this.

If readers know of other web-based tools that do the same kind of thing, post a comment below.

[SURF is, broadly, the Dutch equivalent of the UK's JISC.]

Marc Andreessen on OpenSocial: a new universe of social applications all over the web

[Updated 13.30 1/11/2007; 2/11/2007]

In the mid 1990s Marc Andreessen was one of the originally developers of Netscape, the browser that enabled the World Wide Web to take off in the mass way that it did. In June I wrote something about Ning, a promising looking commercial platform for supporting social networks which Andreessen founded with Gina Bianchini.

Here is a 31/10/2007 "top level technical" piece by Andreessen about Google's about-to-launch OpenSocial, which seems to provide a way for suppliers of social networking applications to make their applications work with each other, and for developers of individual components for social networking applications to make them work on any participating social networking platform. There is also a follow up post by Andreesson, with a screen-cast showing OpenSocial in action, for which thanks to Simon Grant; and this piece in the New York Times (via The Register) picks up on the fact that MySpace and Bebo, two of the largest social networking services are tied into OpenSocial.

Today Google is itself silent on OpenSocial, but from the tone of Andreessen's piece, that will change very soon. (It has). Expect serious concerns to emerge about privacy and the sharing/re-use of personal data.

The principal requirements of plain English style, by William Strunk in 1918

If you need a terse guide to writing style, try this one from 1918 by William Strunk.

"It aims to give in a brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. The numbers of the sections may be used as references in correcting manuscript."

[Thanks to Dick Moore for this.]