Fortnightly Mailing

What to advise a student about using the Web

Amended 26 October 2008

Towards the end of April I got a call from a Harriet Swain, a freelance journalist who writes an advice column aimed at students for the Guardian Newspaper. Here is what I sent her, with several subsequent helpful additions proposed by readers.

What to advise a student about using the Web

Minor revisions 18, 19, 20 May 2008

Students are like many users of the Web. You are short of time, easily distracted, and you've probably given little thought to how you use the Web.

Here are 8 9 things to do that will make life easier, and your studies more fulfilling.

1. Hone your searching skills. Don't just type a term in to the standard Google search window and hope for the best. Instead improve the efficiency of your searches by doing things like:

• putting quotes round search terms;
• searching within a particular web site using site:URL;
• search the scholarly literature using Google Scholar.

For more on this see http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.

2. Make use of some of the excellent curated resources on the Internet, for example Intute - http://www.intute.ac.uk/ - a free listing of high quality Web resources for education and research, that is maintained by a network of mainly university-based subject specialists.

3. [20/5/2008 - with thanks to Jay Fogleman] Learn how to use the high-quality online research resources your library has already paid for. These databases and news services are often better for research than public search engines, and provide access to more full text articles. (If your institution's systems are well configured then if you find a subscription-only research resource using Google or Google Scholar to which your institution has subscribed, you should be able to click straight through to it.)

4. Do not expect to find everything you might need on the Internet. Some documents have never been digitised. Others require you to log in to see them. So use your library, and get to know the subject librarians for your discipline. They can be a mine of useful information and support.

5. Discriminate. Much of the Internet is devoted to entertainment of one kind or another, and it is easy to get distracted. Furthermore, plenty of the information resources on the Internet are of variable quality, with Wikipedia being a case in point. Over time your information literacy will improve, and you will become a much better judge of the quality of what you find.

6. Manage your stuff. Create an account on a bookmarking service like del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/ - or on Nature's Connotea - http://www.connotea.org/, and bookmark things you find for future reference. You'll be able to access this from any device connected to the Internet.

7. Use Firefox as your browser. It is free, and there are a mass of free "addins" for it, for example, excellent spell-checkers in many different languages, tools to make your use of Connotea or del.icio.us easier.

8. Learn how to use RSS feeds. One of the easiest ways to use RSS is to set yourself up with an iGoogle account and install the Google Reader. As with Connotea or Del.icio.us you'll be able to access this from any device connected to the Internet.  Many of the web sites you will need to keep an eye on for your studies have RSS feeds. Subscribe to a web site's feed, and you'll be notified in Google Reader as and when new content is published.

9. Get good at collaborating online. This will assist you in your future working life, as well as in any group-based assignments that you are set. Try out different ways of online collaboration (Facebook, Google Groups, Ning, plain email, SKYPE, wikis, etc etc), and do not assume that the tools provided by your university will necessarily meet your needs. [19/5/2008 - with thanks to Mike Cameron] Be vigilant about how much personal information you reveal online. Once it is "out in the wild" it will be there for ever, visible to future employers, your children, the authorities, and identity thieves. 

For reference, here are Harriet's 29 April 2008 and 14 August 2008 "Art of Being Virtual" pieces; as of 25/10/2008, after much faffing about,  the latter now has an acknowledgement and link to this piece. 

JISC's £5m call: "Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design"

UK HE Institutions, and FE Institutions with more than 400 full time equivalents of higher education students, are eligible to apply for medium term funding for large-scale course redesign projects. Expect Carol Twigg's National Center for Academic Transformation to get a major boost in traffic, and for good reason. Excerpt:

"JISC invites proposals for projects to review course design and validation processes, and the ways these are supported and informed by technology, in order to transform learning opportunities to address an identified issue or challenge of strategic importance to the institution involved.

Funding of up to £400,000 per project is available with projects expected to last for just under four years. JISC has committed £5 million to this work and expects to funds up to 12 projects. Because of the need for institutions to identity issues or challenges relevant to their own context only one project per institution will be funded. Institutions are encouraged to ensure that the most appropriate bid from their institution is submitted.

JISC is holding a community briefing event where potential bidders will be given information about the background to the call, its objectives and the bidding process. Attendees will also have an opportunity to ask questions about the call. This meeting will take place on 21 May in Birmingham and registration will be open on Friday 2 May 2008.

The deadline for receipt of proposals is no later than 12.00 noon on Thursday 19 June 2008.  Projects should start in 1 September 2008."

Marc Andreessen's "If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo"

Long and interesting 28 April 2008 piece by Marc Andreessen (who founded Netscape, and is a successful serial entrepreneur in the US), analysing, with the help of expert analysis commissioned (?) by Marc from two corporate attorneys, about how a fully hostile takeover by Microsoft of Yahoo might play out.

Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?

Last September, just prior to Google switching to its own statistical machine translation system for all the language pairs it offers, I set up a crude comparison between the rules-based and statistical methods used at that time by Google for different language pairs. The crudity stemmed in part from my use of the "round trip" comparison method (defects outlined below), from the use of only one sample text, and from the inherent drawback of comparing translation methods across different language pairs, each of which presents different translation challenges.

Microsoft certified Moodle – Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer

A "Microsoft certified" version of Moodle can be downloaded now from SpikeSource, a venture capital backed US company that aims to make Open Source software "business ready". Available since February 27, 2008,  neither Microsoft or SpikeSource announced the certified version. A representative for SpikeSource said this was a routine extension of the company’s certifications for Microsoft.

Tangible Benefits of E-Learning - newly published report

Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning: Does investment yield interest? is a just-published report jointly produced by JISCinfonet, ALT (for which I work half-time), and the Higher Education Academy. It summarises a 2007 review of e-learning practice in Higher Education, and contains examples of where and how technology-enhanced learning is benefiting learners, teachers and institutions. Download a copy of the report [222 kB PDF]. Access a 2 page briefing published by JISC [170 kB PDF]. Order hard copy of the report from JISCinfonet.

Graphene used to create "the world's smallest transistor"

Graphene transistor - image from the University of Manchester

Impression of graphene by Jannik Meyer

Updated 16 April 2012

Within the next 10-15 years, say, Moore's Law will cease to hold for chips made from silicon, because individual transistors will get so small that silicon ceases to function as a semiconductor. Science Daily reports on work published on 17 April 2008 in the peer-reviewed journal Science - abstract - by Ponomarenko, Schedin, Katsnelson, Yang, Hill, Novoselov, and Geim , a team based mainly at the University of Manchester's Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology that proves that transistors one atom thick and 10 atoms wide can be made using graphene, a hexagonal mesh of carbon atoms that is one atom thick. 

For more on graphene, see the frequently updated Wikipedia article, and this 10 April 2007 Scientific American article by JR Minkel, who also comments  in the Scientific American on 18 April 2008 about the "smallest transistor" claim.

[Added 16 April 2012, with thanks to Alexandre Borovik.] There is also this nice autobiographic piece by Konstantin Novoselov on the Nobel Prize website.

"Motion charts" - Data animation tool for Google Docs

You may have seen (and wondered at) some of Hans Rosling's talks, in which he uses Trendalyzer (the Gapminder Foundation's data visualisation tool) to draw conclusions from complex time-series. Last year Google bought Trendalyzer and some or all of the team that designed it joined Google. In the last few weeks Google seems to have implemented the tool - now renamed Motion Tool - along with a couple of others - as standard components of Google Docs. The addition of these features begins to differentiate Google's spreadsheet from Microsoft Excel in a particularly profound way, as you will see if you look at this sample spreadsheet and motion chart.

JISC Learner Experiences of e-Learning: Half way through the phase 2 research - Guest Contribution from Ellen Lessner

The second phase of the research into the learner experience of e-learning is one year old, with most projects due to finish in March 2009.  Phase 2 of this programme is made up of 7 research projects, with a "Support and Synthesis" project running in parallel.  On the public area of the project wiki you can get a good idea of the work that’s been done so far.  While the 7 projects are doing their individual research, the Support and Synthesis project has run 4 support workshops which have enabled the project teams to work together while focusing on the issues surrounding data collection, methodology and dissemination outputs.

You may have seen the publication from the first phase of the research - In Their Own Words available from the JISC website, and you may have seen coverage of LEX here in Fortnightly Mailing. There continues to be considerable interest in the many aspects of this phase of the project; not only the possible findings but the different types of data collection (video and audio), the methodologies used by the range of projects and the model of support used by the Support and Synthesis project.  We’re now at the stage where a variety of themes are just beginning to emerge.

Evaluating what learners are doing with technology is obviously important and there are a number of UK projects, mainly HE centred, focusing on this theme.  For example, the Higher Education Academy has funded a project, running from January to July 2008, called the Experiences of E-Learning Special Interest Group (ELISIG), for those involved in investigations and evaluations of learners' experiences of e-learning.  An initial ELISIG workshop held in March 2008 was attended by over 40 people.   

For more information on the Learner Experience Projects,   contact Ellen Lessner, Project Manager, Support and Synthesis Project or Sarah Knight, JISC Programme Manager.

UK National Archive of Educational Computing

Richard Millwood is maintaining a National Archive of Educational Computing web site:

"This is the (emerging) web site for the UK National Archive of Educational Computing, documenting the development of learning technology through its invention, application, policies, practices, organisations and people over the last half century."

Richard is looking for sponsorship, and is organising a conference in London on 9 July at the Institute for Education - A one day conference sharing hindsight about learning with technology to provide insight for now and the future. He is also looking for volunteers. Here is Richard's list of options for volunteers:

• 1 SAY WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT - identify your own interest / experience strengths and perhaps join a relevant 'decade' team;
• 2 TELL A STORY OR TWO - create personal, descriptive, narrative and interpretive material about the history of educational computing - there is a form for submitting your story on the website in the Stories section ( http://www.naec.org.uk/stories )
• 3 CONTRIBUTE STUFF - add text, photos, sounds, movies and links to other stuff on the net - contact me if you wish to add to this web site directly;
• 4 EDIT THE MATERIAL - contribute by searching, scanning, writing, reviewing and organising the team effort;
• 5 ADVISE ON CURATION - tell us how we should organise material, describe good practice for all the above;
• 6 ORGANISE MEETINGS - help support events to enjoy doing this work together;
• 7 FIND SUPPORT - formulate further plans, seek funding and sustain the effort.

A4 leaflet about NAEC [60 kB PDF].  Flyer about 9 July conference [60 kB PDF]. Link to volunteering form.