Fortnightly Mailing

David Wiley's "Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education"

In 1998 my enthusiasm for openness was given a boost (or started?) by David Wiley and the Open Content license that he developed. At that time the use of such licenses, which have been superseded and absorbed by Creative Commons, was very rare. (The LeTTOL course was originally published under an Open Content License, though this seems no longer to be the case.) Ten years later, David Wiley's influence has grown a great deal, and his 85 slide presentation Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education deserves to be widely viewed, though you can only follow Wiley's argument to a certain extent from his slides; and without that you cannot develop a critique or endorsement of it.

[With thanks to Dan Barker for highlighting this.]

Sleep apnoea and road accidents - our memorandum of evidence to the Transport Select Committee

[This post is tagged "nothing to do with e-learning...]

Earlier this year the Transport Select Committee began an Inquiry on Road Safety. The then Chair of the Committee, Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, who sadly died in April of this year, helpfully agreed to allow my family to submit a memorandum of evidence, well beyond the closing date, concerning the problem of undiagnosed sleep apnoea and the large numbers of vocational drivers suffering from it. 

Our evidence is now available on the Parliament UK web site. One of the things we called for was for the  Health and Safety Executive, with its responsibilities for minimising work-related death and injury, and with its powers to insist on action by employers to prevent risks to non-employees (that is, road users at risk from drivers suffering from sleep apnoea), to play a much more prominent role in relation to work-related fatal road-traffic accidents and their prevention. The Transport Select Committee's  report, published on 15/10/2008, makes scant reference to sleep-related road accidents, and none to sleep apnoea, but it is nevertheless good to see that the report highlights, in paragraph 110 the anomaly that "the vast majority of work-related deaths are not examined by the Health and Safety Executive, purely because they occur on the roads", and calls for the Government to "review the role of the Health and Safety Executive with regard to road safety to ensure that it fulfils its unique role in the strategy beyond 2010".

Mick Waters on personalisation: "unless pressed, I never use the word"

In previous posts I've been sceptical about personalisation (April 2006; October 2006; January 2007 ; March 2007).  On 17 November the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee took oral evidence from Mick Waters and Teresa Bergin (respectively Director of Curriculum and Director of the Diploma Programme at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority), Professor David Hargreaves (Associate Director for Development and Research, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, and a past chair of Becta), and Tim Oates (Director of Assessment Research and Development, at the major examining body Cambridge Assessment). The uncorrected record of evidence must make uncomfortable reading for those still wedded to use of the term. Here are some extracts.

Hargreaves: 'We have been struggling with this definition for four years, and I have concluded that it is a total waste of time trying to find a tight definition-it does not work; there are too many of them. In that sense, my sympathies are entirely with Mr. Heppell. The current thing from the Department quotes the definition given in the Gilbert report on teaching well in 2020, of which I was a member: "It means strengthening the link between learning and teaching by engaging pupils-and their parents-as partners in learning." In my view, that is well-intentioned waffle. It is well intentioned, but it means nothing. In fact, many schools will say that that is what they do. There is no implication of action at all. '

Mick Waters: 'Unless pressed, I never use the word, because I think that it has become one of those things that everyone says but hardly anyone does.'

Professor Hargreaves: 'When you cannot define it, the best thing to do is to not use it. I agree with Mick. I think that it has outlived its usefulness. When Tony Blair made the original challenge back in 2004, it was a very real challenge. Today, our interest is in how to redesign the whole experience of schooling, so that our young people achieve more and find their education a good one. Personalisation was a useful way forward at a certain period, to draw attention to something. I am personally sorry that the Department has a thing called "personalised learning", as though it is a thing we can identify. It is not. "Personalised" was always the wrong word; it was always a process of personalising, as in the business world. It is past its usefulness. We would be much better looking for words on which we can find more agreement-such as curriculum, choice and entitlement-than having the debate strained. Frankly, I wish the Department would drop the concept.'

Dan Hill on the new State Library of Queensland

Two impressive posts by Dan Hill about the State Library of Queensland, one from the perspectives of a user - "The best public library I’ve seen anywhere. Certainly superior to the Bibliothèque National de France, far superior to the British Library, and superior even to the otherwise peerless Seattle Public Library, to name but three I’ve studied in person. And despite having a fraction of their budget, I’d guess." - and the other with some intriguing visualisations of the library's "wifi ambience", along with some atmospheric and very classy sketches of laptop users at work.

European debut for OLPC XO1 laptop

Updated 09.10 17/11/2008

According the BBC, OLPC is planning to sell XO1 laptops in Europe via Amazon from 17 November. (If you search Amazon for OLPC you get a related result [124 kB PDF], dominated by a competitor's product.) Although it is unclear from the Amazon web site, the machines will apparently be sold under the "Give One, Get One" scheme that the OLPC organisation has already run in the US, with £275 securing one XO1 for you and contributing one XO1 for use in less developed countries by OLPC.

11/4/2008 review of OLPC in Fortnightly Mailing by Geoff Stead of the Tribal Group.

Could the UK become a world leader in e-learning?

The UK's Department for Innovation Universities and Skills has launched a public discussion on a report commissioned from Sir Ron Cooke [300 kB PDF], about how the UK might become a world-leader in higher education e-learning¹. DIUS is eager to encourage discussion of this report, to which ALT contributed, and in partnership with JISC, a blog has been set up to record public comments on Sir Ron Cooke's report.

Personally I think that though the report's "The experience of Ufi/learndirect in providing high quality e-learning should also be built upon." is a correct sentiment to express, not enough is made of the need to examine and build upon the experience of Ufi/learndirect, one of the UK's few really successful large scale on-line learning interventions.

Readers who are enthusiastic about open educational resources will be pleased, as I am, at the overall strong emphasis on OER: "It is taken for granted in the research process that one builds on the work of others; the same culture can usefully be encouraged in creating learning materials." But, having nailed its colours so strongly to the OER mast, with five OER-related actions, of which this is one example:

"A comprehensive national resource of freely available open learning content should be established to provide an “infrastructure” for broadly based virtual education provision across the community. This needs to be curated and organised, based on common standards, to ensure coherence, comprehensive coverage and high quality."

I believe that the report somewhat skims over the profound cultural and organisational change that will be needed in HE if use of OER is to become really widespread, with the proposal for the setting up of a number of "distributed centres of excellence" in OER being insufficient to bring about the kinds of changes that are envisaged.

^1. ALT, for which I work part-time, provided extensive comments on drafts of Ron Cooke's report.

Precautionary registration of domains. Derek Morrison highlights the importance of YouTube "channel ownership"

In 2001 when I worked for The Sheffield College - http://www.sheffcol.ac.uk/ - I initiated a complaint to Nominet concerning an abusive registration of the domain http://www.sheffcol.co.uk/. The result of this [50 kB PDF]  was the compulsory transfer to The Sheffield College of http://www.sheffcol.co.uk/ from its owner. Excerpt:

"In light of the foregoing findings, namely that the Complainant has rights in respect of a name or mark which is identical to the Domain Name and that the Domain name, in the hands of the Respondent, is an Abusive Registration, the Expert decides in favour of the Complainant. The Complainant’s requested remedy is transfer, and accordingly the Expert directs that the Domain Name, sheffcol.co.uk, be transferred to the Complainant."

At that time organisations were in the process of learning the importance of precautionary registration of domains relating to their brand. (Since that time, The Sheffield College seems to have let its ownership of the sheffcol.co.uk domain lapse.... to poor effect.)

This interesting, though long post by Derek Morrison in Auricle "On the video - a reflection on YouTube and friends (part 2)" shows how easy it now is to register "channels" on YouTube, and, by implication, the importance of education providers seeing the registration of such channels as something to manage, rather than treat passively. Derek writes:

"What I find a bit surprising is that many HEIs don’t seem to view ever-growing services like YouTube as an important part of the virtual landscape. When that perception is compounded with a lack of naming convention then there is some risk that others will occupy the space. For example, a visit to http://uk.youtube.com/OxfordUniversity will not illuminate any aspect of the Oxford University’s brand. In that case the University of Cambridge’s, as yet unpopulated, YouTube channel may be a wise move. So what to do? It took me just 5 minutes to register the following YouTube accounts:

• http://uk.youtube.com/UniversityPoppleton
• http://uk.youtube.com/PoppletonUniversity
• http://uk.youtube.com/AuricleDotOrg
• http://uk.youtube.com/AuricleOrg"

Data visualisation - many methods, neatly categorised

Ralph Lengler and Martin Eppler come up with this elegant if a bit contrived periodic table of visualization methods. The methods are organised into six broad (and to some extent overlapping) categories, and according to whether they help:

• visualise a structure or process;
• give overview or detail (or both);
• "divergent" or "convergent" thinking (quotes added).

Studs Terkel - a moving obituary

I'm rarely moved by reading the Economist. This obituary of Studs Terkel, who died on 31 October, was an exception.

Obama and Biden on broadband access and net neutrality

Updated 9/11/2008

Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Technology Policy, on the Office of the President Elect web site, is was (until it ceased to be accessible....) positive on two important issues (emphasis added):

Protect the Openness of the Internet: A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.

Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Barack Obama believes that America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access. As a country, we have ensured that every American has access to telephone service and electricity, regardless of economic status, and Obama will do likewise for broadband Internet access. Obama and Biden believe we can get true broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.

and less so on two others:

Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad: The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that in 2005, more than nine of every 10 DVDs sold in China were illegal copies. The U.S. Trade Representative said 80 percent of all counterfeit products seized at U.S. borders still come from China. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will work to ensure intellectual property is protected in foreign markets, and promote greater cooperation on international standards that allow our technologies to compete everywhere.

Protect American Intellectual Property at Home: Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. Barack Obama believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.

Via David Weinberger.