Fortnightly Mailing

Debunking the "Net Generation" myth

Iain Doherty, Mark Bullen and two less identifiable individuals are contributing to Net Gen Nonsense a blog "dedicated to debunking the myth of the net generation, particularly as it relates to learning, teaching and the use of technology".

Microsoft after Bill Gates - a briefing in the Economist

This three-page briefing in the Economist coincides with the imminent departure of Microsoft's founder Bill Gates. It provides a clear indication of the state of play in Microsoft: over 80,000 employees, net annual income of over $16bn, a market capitalisation of around $300bn (half as much as in 1999), with plenty of questions being asked about the quality of the Vista operating system. Whatever your role, the briefing is worth scan-reading for the summary it provides of Microsoft's direction of travel: towards products that support collaboration and interconnectedness over the Internet. Bear in mind that on Gates's departure, the boss of Microsoft will be Ray Ozzie, who was an early pioneer of online collaboration. Ozzie more or less invented Lotus Notes, and then went on to found online collaboration software company Groove Networks. Microsoft bought Groove in 2005, bringing Ozzie with it.

Dr Ray Mercer's evidence for Desire2Learn about prior art

The US Patent Office is currently re-examining the e-learning patent it awarded Blackboard early in 2006, following Desire2Learn's and the Software Freedom Law Centre's successful inter partes and ex parte re-examination requests. Dr Ray Mercer's 26 June 2008 evidence for Desire2Learn [450 kB PDF]  - part of the supporting material to Desire2Learn's Comments by third party requester to patent owner's response in inter partes reexamination [570 kB PDF] - is not for the feint hearted. Ideally it needs to be read in parallel with Dr Mark Jones's evidence for Blackboard [320 kB PDF], to which it is, in effect, a response.

Step by step, Mercer sets out the extent to which, in his opinion, Patent Number 6,988,138 was anticipated by prior art, and thus should never have been granted by the US Patent Office. Mercer concentrates in his evidence on several different sources of prior art, including Serf, Top Class 2.0 and Virtual Campus (early on-line learning systems).

Most interesting to me was his consideration of the EDUCOM/NLII Instructional Management Systems Specifications Document Version 0.5 (April 29, 1998), which I wrote about at the end of August 2006. The feeling I get from reading Mercer's evidence is that Desire2Learn might have benefited from it during Blackboard's infringement case earlier this year (which Desire2Learn lost, comprehensively); and I'm puzzled as to why it was not obtained earlier in the process. (My eye has been rather off the Blackboard/Desire2Learn ball in recent months, and it is entirely possible that I missed an earlier Mercer document.)

Elegant word or tag-cloud creator

 

Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle (via Kristian Still) is an elegant and flexible tool to create clouds from text. Wordle gives you a lot of control over fonts, font colours, and font positions. The one above uses the Executive Summary of the DIUS Higher Education at Work consultation document. The one below is from Lucy Kellaway's piece on the brainlessly upbeat language of business.

Epic escapes from Huveaux

Updated 24/7/2008

In September 2005 I wrote this:

"Epic plc to be taken over by the Huveaux plc. Epic plc is a major and successful UK e-learning company. I've occasionally reviewed Epic's often useful e-learning White Papers in Fortnightly Mailing, and some readers may have read an online interview with me which appeared in Epic's July Newsletter. Over the past few months Epic has had a friendly "suitor". At the end of July the boards of Huveaux and Epic announced the terms of a recommended share and cash offer [68 kB PDF - link now dead] for Huveaux, to acquire Epic, with approval to be sought for the deal from Huveaux's shareholders at an Extraordinary General Meeting, on 7 September. (Huveaux was formed in 2001 with the objective of "building a substantial publishing and media business focused on the creation and delivery of "must have" information across both the public and private sectors".) On 12 August, Futuremedia plc, another UK-based e-learning company, just round the corner in Brighton from Epic, also announced its interest in buying Epic, but by 18 August, Huveaux had gained control of Epic, rendering Futuremedia's interest irrelevant. Donald Clark, Epic's Chief Executive, will stand down from this role, and become a consultant to Huveaux."

I believe Huveaux paid over £20m for Epic. The offer valued the entire issued share capital of Epic at approximately £22.7 million.

33 months years later Huveaux has now sold Epic to successful entrepreneur Andrew Brode, for less than it originally paid (~£5m? ... which would imply an average loss of value since the original sale of over £1m per quarter). Jonathan Satchell, brought in by Huveaux in December 2007 to find a buyer, will continue as Epic's CEO. My guess is that away from Huveaux's largely print-based stable, Epic will thrive once more. Update - 24/7/2008. This 24/7/2008 post by Epic's founder, Donald Clark, has more.

Bologna: are European entrepreneurs now leading the US on the development of Higher Education student record software? Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer.

On Wednesday 21 May the Institute of Higher Education Policy released a report “The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Reconstruction.” One week later, 28 May 2008, two young European entrepreneurs, Manuel Dietz and Stéphane Velay, of the German company unisolution GmbH, described the collaborative work of 13 European software and service providers to automate administrative services supporting the emerging Bologna Process.

The report's author Clifford Adelman wrote:

What has transpired since 1999 cannot be but lightly acknowledged in the United States. While still a work in progress, parts of the Bologna Process have already been imitated in Latin America, North Africa, and Australia. The core features of the Bologna Process have sufficient momentum to become the dominant global higher education model [emphasis added] within the next two decades. We had better listen up.

Lucy Kellaway's diatribe against "brainlessly upbeat" business language

Financial Times journalist Lucy Kellaway's "Point of View" this morning on BBC Radio 4 was a terrific diatribe against several aspects of business language. Not least the growing use of terms like "reaching out", "going forward", "warm(est) regards", "passion", and "heads up" (gulp.... that's one I've used...).

For a while you can listen to the piece as a 10 minute broadcast. Otherwise you'll need to read it. (And you will enjoy this word-cloud based on it.) Excerpt:

"Yet what no list of words can get at is the new business insincerity: a phoney upping of the emotional ante. Last week I got an e-mail from someone I had never met that began by saying "I'm reaching out to you" and ended "warmest personal regards". As her regards had no business to be either warm or personal, the overall effect was somewhat chilling.

But this incontinent gush is nothing compared to an e-mail sent by an extremely powerful person at JP Morgan encouraging his investment banking team to be more human. In it he said: "Take the time today to call a client and tell them you love them. They won't forget you made the call." Indeed. I'm sure the client would remember such a call for a very long time.

If love has no place in the language of business, neither does passion. Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office - unless things have gone very wrong indeed. And yet passion is something that every employee must attest to in order to get through any selection process. Every one of the candidates in the final rounds of interview on the Apprentice solemnly declared that they were passionate about being Sir Alan's Apprentice."

Anand Rajaraman on how Google measures search quality

Anand Rajaraman is another of those clued up computer scientists/entrepreneurs who takes the time to share their insights in a candid and accessible way. Today's How Google Measures Search Quality is a good example. Excerpt:

"Let me try to explain the latter point. There are two broad classes of queries search engines deal with:

• Navigational queries, where the user is looking for a specific uber-authoritative website. e.g., "stanford university". In such cases, the user can very quickly tell the best result from the others -- and it's usually the first result on major search engines.
• Informational queries, where the user has a broader topic. e.g.,
  "diabetes pregnancy". In this case, there is no single right answer.
  Suppose there's a really fantastic result on page 4, that provides
  better information any of the results on the first three pages. Most
  users will not even know this result exists! Therefore, their usage
  behavior does not actually provide the best feedback on the rankings."

Anarchy. The hidden cost of open access.

"Ah, sweet irony. If this article had undergone "peer review", or some other accuracy or quality checking criteria, then it would never had seen the light of day..."

writes John Kirriemuir amongst the many others deriding Philip Altbach's recent Hidden cost of open access in the 5 June 2008 Times Higher, for asserting this in particular:

"Profit, competition and excess have spawned the open-access movement. Academics, librarians and administrators think it is the answer to monopolistic journals. But there are several problems with it. Chief among them is that peer review is eliminated - all knowledge becomes equal. There is no quality control on the internet, and a Wikipedia article has the same value as an essay by a distinguished researcher. Open access may also offer greater benefit to those already at the top of the knowledge tree. A less well-known institution in a developing country would likely gain less attention than Harvard. While traditional journals also tend to privilege scholars working at top institutions, at least the peer-review system allows some opportunity for publication in recognised journals.

Essentially, open access means there is no objective way of measuring research quality. If the traditional journals and their peer-review systems are no longer operating, anarchy rules. Researchers will have no accurate way of assessing quality in a scholarly publication."

Learning and technology in China. Long piece from Donald Clark.

This long Learning and Technology in China post by Donald Clark, who has recently returned from time spent during May doing e-learning work for the Chinese Government through the World Bank, is worth reading. I bet Donald would welcome feedback from Chinese readers, and I'd happily pass these on to him.