Fortnightly Mailing

How to secure a Windows XP wireless laptop

Useful series of 12 slides from c|net showing how to make a Windows XP wireless laptop more secure.

Via Joe Dysart in the November 2007 Greentree Gazette, where there are links to other useful security-related resources.

Patent litigation haiku; and "steaming mounds of pleonastic arguments"

Inequitable Conduct

hid the piece of art
cheated the examiner
attorneys' fees paid

There are a few more of these on Michael Smith's Eastern District of Texas Federal Court Practice blog, where, on 20/11/2007, Smith also comments on the turn of phrase of Judge Ron Clark, who is presiding over the Blackboard Inc. v Desire2Learn patent infringement case:

"The parties in this case have, between them, filed 48 motions, responses and replies in less than 14 months, which, including attachments and exhibits, consists of no fewer than eleven thousand pages. They seem to share the misconception, popular in some circles, that motion practice exists to require federal judges to shovel through steaming mounds of pleonastic arguments in a Herculean effort to uncover a hidden gem of logic that will ineluctably compel a favorable ruling. Nothing could be further from the truth."

Can we design a supportive assessment system? Keynote speech by Paul Black of "Inside the Black Box".

In 2001 Paul Black, with Dylan Wiliam, wrote the brilliant and influential Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment [50 kB PDF], about the importance of formative feedback in learning.

Here, from 4 May 2007, is Paul Black's 1 hour keynote speech from the conference of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors [take care - this opens directly in your browser]. The PowerPoint slides that went with the talk are also on the IEA web site [186 kB PPT]. The talk contains plenty of insights into the value of formative feedback, as well as a telling quote from Margaret Thatcher's memoires on teacher-led assessment:

"The fact that it was then welcomed by the Labour party, the National Union of Teachers and the Times Educational Supplement was enough to confirm for me that its approach was suspect. It proposed an elaborate and complex system of assessment - teacher dominated and uncosted. It adopted the 'diagnostic' view of tests, placed the emphasis on teachers doing their own assessment and was written in an impenetrable educationalist jargon."

(Dylan Wiliam's 5 September 2007 keynote "Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control", is accessible from the the ALT web site.)

The first batch of Uruguay's 100,000 OLPC XO laptops are issued

"This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops."

I'd probably be linking to Ivan Krstić's 1/12/2007 first hand, detailed, picture-rich report on the distribution of OLPC laptops at School Number 109 in the small Uruguayan town of Florida, even if I wasn't half Uruguayan.

Over the next few months, a total of 100,000 XO laptops will be distributed in Uruguay. According to Krstić, who is the OLPC Director of Security             Architecture, the Government of Peru has just signed for over 250,000 machines.

Some previous posts about OLPC:

• Nov 2007 Wall Street Journal: OLPC "stomped by tech giants"?
• Nov 2007 OLPC begins mass production, and EA makes SimCity Open Source for OLPC use
• Sep 2007 Big IT is taking notice of One Laptop Per Child
• Sep 2007 "University Chapters" - a way to get involved in OLPC
• Aug 2007 David Cavallo, OLPC Chief Learning Architect to be keynote speaker at 2008 Association for Learning Technology Conference
• Jul 2007 What's inside the One Laptop Per Child laptop?
• May 2007 OLPC Laptops arrive in Uruguay: where flooding has caused a state of emergency
• Nov 2006 One laptop per child - further information and progress
• Oct 2006 Jonathan Zittrain: what would you install on one laptop per child? Guest Contribution from Steve Ryan