Fortnightly Mailing

How to stop email overload

Nice clear explanation by Anand Rajaraman about how his 30+ person business (Kosmix - a company that is developing a pretty impressive topic-focused search engine - example 1; example 2) uses blogs, wikis, and instant messaging for internal communication. Plenty to emulate there for many organisations.
 

Court in Texas denies Blackboard's motion for contempt against Desire2Learn

According to Desire2Learn, Blackboard Inc.'s forcefully worded motion for contempt against Desire2Learn was denied by the court in Beaumont, Texas, yesterday. Blackboard has apparently failed to convince the court that the changes made by Desire2Learn in Version 8.3 of its VLE are "only transparently cosmetic", and "do not design around the claims of the ’138 patent".  Blackboard had sought explicitly coercive damages in its motion for contempt:

"Blackboard suggests that for each day following this Court’s order that Desire2Learn uses, sells or offers for sale version 8.3 or associated services, Desire2Learn should be ordered to pay Blackboard $23,000.00. No litigant can be permitted to simply choose to pay a sanction and continue to violate a federal district court’s injunction, however. If, after five days, Desire2Learn continues to defy the order, the daily sanction should double to $46,000.00. And if, after five more days, that sanction is insufficiently strong coerce Desire2Learn into compliance, it should double again. The sanction should continue to increase until Desire2Learn complies."

so the failure - even if it is only a temporary failure - must come as a relief for Desire2Learn. Expect more on this in the next few days on the Desire2Learn and/or on the Blackboard patent information pages, especially once the full judgment from the case is published. Conceivably this may have a sting in its tail for either company.

US National Academy of Engineering selects "Advance personalized learning" as one of 14 grand challenges for engineering

Source: US National Archives

Advance personalized learning is in pretty august company as one of 14 grand challenges for engineering (alongside, for example, Make solar energy economical, Provide access to clean water, Prevent nuclear terror, and Provide energy from fusion) chosen earlier this year by a panel of luminaries including Ray Kurzweil, Alec Broers , and Google's Larry Page. (The picture, from the Grand Engineering Challenges web site, is of a one-room 1950s US school-room  where lessons were individualized, since classes included children of different ages.)

There are two short video interviews from panel members: Calestous Juma (Professor of the Practice of International Development, Harvard University), and Wesley Harris (Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The rubric about the personalized learning challenge is interesting for the way challenge is posed; and the fact that personalisation is seen as a long-term challenge - on a par with fusion power - does act as a useful caution to the current UK policy emphasis on achieving extensive personalisation using technology right now.

Why are researchers citing fewer papers than ever?

Via this article about James Evans's work in the Economist, referring to Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship, published yesterday in Science, I came across this (poorly produced!) National Science Foundation short video of Evans discussing why researchers cite fewer research papers despite having access to more. Blurb:

"Thanks to the Internet, scientists now have access to an astonishing number of research papers, scholarly journals and other papers. But according to new research conducted by James Evans, a professor sociology at the University of Chicago, researchers are actually citing fewer papers than ever, and they tend to cite newer papers that are also cited by many of their peers. In this interview, James discusses what got him interested in the topic, how he conducted his research and what he believes are some of the implications of this trend."

The key cause of the change - which Evans alludes to towards the end of the interview - is surely "search", and in particular the ranking technologies that search engines employ: once a paper on the Web has a lot of citations from articles also on the Web, then that paper's search ranking rises; if its search ranking is high it is more likely to be cited.  You wonder what account is being taken of this by proponents of metrics-based assessments of research excellence.

Becta-funded "Schools Open Source Project" is looking for serving teachers for its advisory committee

The Schools Open Source Project is looking for practising senior teachers to serve on the project's advisory committee. The committee will meet 3 or 4 times each year, receive reports from the project team and provide advice and guidance to ensure the service meets the objectives of the project and its customers. Here is an excerpt from the project web site:

"The Schools Open Source Project is a Becta funded initiative to help schools with awareness, adoption, deployment, use and ongoing development of Open Source Software. A number of schools are already realising the benefits of OSS within their ICT strategy. This project will work to share their experiences along with good OSS practice from other sectors with the wider community of educational practitioners, including teachers, decision makers and IT specialists.

From September 2008, we will provide an authoritative, informative and impartial website that will raise awareness of how OSS can be used to enhance teaching and school infrastructures. The project will then develop and support a community of practice that engages those who are currently using OSS and welcomes and supports new members."

A welcome development, but you are left wondering what the link is between this Becta-funded activity, and JISC's Open Source Software Advisory Service. How will these two services avoid duplication of effort? How can the knowhow they are each developing be shared? Why not have a single cross-sectoral service? Readers with insights are welcome to comment below, or to write to me directly and I will summarise.

ALT-C 2008 - Rethinking the Digital Divide. Programme published.

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT), for which I work half time, has just published the full draft programme for ALT-C 2008, which will take place in Leeds, England, between 9 and 11 September 2008. The programme [160 kB PDF] describes a wide spectrum of short papers, workshops, symposia, research papers, posters, and demonstrations. As reported previously, the keynote speakers are Hans Rosling, Itiel Dror, and David Cavallo. Invited speakers are Denise Kirkpatrick, Richard Noss, George Auckland, Lizbeth Goodman, George Siemens, Jane Hart, Gilly Salmon and Clive Shepherd. The deadline for booking is 15 August 2008.

Michael Wesch talks about the future of education

You'll possibly have seen some of cultural anthropologist Mike Wesch's widely viewed pieces: as Information R/evolution, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us, and A Vision of Students Today. Here, via Matt Jukes, is a long and gripping talk by Wesch at a University of Manitoba conference on 17/6/2008, in which Wesch manages successfully to trash the ghastly "digital natives/digital immigrants" dichotomy that currently plagues discourse about technology in learning.

Summary, from the conference web site:

During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.

Digital Ethnography course portal at Kansas State University. Thorough review of the Wesch's University of Manitoba talk by Matt Lingard from LSE.

E-learning strategy for England - 2008 to 2014

Becta has just published Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning 2008-14, an overall cradle-to-grave e-learning strategy for English education. There are some depressing charts on page 27,  which contrast how children say they prefer to learn:

with what they say happens most frequently in classrooms.

(The second chart looks to have a poorly edited title.)

Dylan Wiliam on formative e-assessment

[Updated 14/7/2008]

I've focused on formative assessment in previous posts. I'm a member of the steering group for a short JISC-funded project about formative e-assessment run by the Institute of Education. The aim of the project is to "scope a vision for formative e-assessment". Here is a link to the PowerPoint slides of an introductory talk given by Dylan Wiliam [1.2 MB PPT] at the project's first "practical enquiry" day. (An MP3 file for the talk would be useful, and will be available soon.)  Wiliam's introduction sets the tone:

"Much of the debate about the improvement of systems of educational assessment focus on binaries. Is reliability more important than validity? Are constructed-response items better than multiple-choice items? Is teacher assessment better than externally-set tests and examinations? Is continuous assessment through coursework better than terminal examinations? In this talk, I will argue that as long as the debate is conducted in terms of such either/or issues, then progress will be slow, if not entirely absent. Rather, progress is to be made by mapping out the shades of grey between these extremes, understanding how each end of the spectrum is useful in helping us understand the spectrum, and the tensions we have to reconcile, but lethal as a goal in itself."

and these statements about formative feedback make you think:

• "Frequent feedback is not necessarily formative
  
• Feedback that causes improvement is not necessarily formative
  
• Assessment is formative only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner in making improvements
  
• To be formative, assessment must include a recipe for future action"

The project is looking for a spectrum of case studies of "formative e-assessment in action". Further details about the project.