Fortnightly Mailing

Academic Earth - founder Richard Ludlow answers some questions

Richard Ludlow, founder of the video-lecture sharing Academic Earth, preferred answering some questions to writing a Guest Contribution, which was fine by me.

My questions and Richard's responses are below.

How we make websites (for the BBC)

Thanks to David Jennings for sending a 29/1/2009 link to a presentation by Michael Smethurst about how (some of) the BBC's web sites are designed and built.

University of the People - providing low cost online degree courses worldwide

The University of the People will "open its doors" (i.e. take enrolments for a September 2009 start) in April 2009. According to the organisation's web site:

"The University of the People is a nonprofit organization devoted to providing universal access to quality, online post-secondary education. The organization, founded by Shai Reshef, is comprised of volunteers from all around the world. Many of these volunteers are appointed faculty at universities; others are active professionals-business administrators, librarians, computer programmers, economists, and educators. They share the belief that all people should have the opportunity to change their lives and contribute to their communities, as well as the understanding that the path to societal and individual prosperity is through education. We are certain that our collective efforts as volunteers can be decisive in developing and executing the programs through which millions of people previously denied access to higher education will be able to earn accredited academic degrees."

UoP (a not-for-profit)  is coy about costs:

"The University of the People plans at this stage to charge only nominal application fee ($15-$50) and examination fees ($10-$100), which will be adjusted on a sliding scale based on the student's country of origin."

and will start with two degree courses, a BA in Business Administration and a BSc in Computer Science, running over ~four years for full-time students. Currently, UoP says it "intends to apply for accreditation from recognized authorities as soon as possible".

Shai Reshef, the founder, is a serial entrepreneur with a very strong track record in making this kind of thing work. For example, a Netherlands-based for-profit company Reshef chaired, and which was subsequently sold to Laureate Inc. [PDF], was the delivery partner for a range of Liverpool University online masters courses.

How to write in the age of distraction

For all you writers out there, Cory "Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" Doctorow's Writing in the Age of Distraction has some sharp advice summarising how to avoid being "info-whelmed" when writing to deadlines. Via dana boyd.

Doctorow's five-minute video Writing a Novel is in the same vein.

(Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, from 2001, is here.)

Updated with the Doctorow video, 26/4/2012, with thanks to @jjn1.

Economic implications of alternative scholarly publication models

Very meaty report to JISC - Economic implications of alternative scholarly publication models [286 pages, 2.25 MB] - published today, by John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen, Peter Sheehan, Charles Oppenheim, Anne Morris, Claire Creaser, Helen Greenwood, Mark Summers and Adrian Gourlay, which examines the costs and benefits of three alternative models for scholarly publishing, namely: subscription publishing; open access publishing; and self-archiving.

Difficult to gut it (while sitting in the meeting in which it was tabled) in the absence of a good executive summary, but here is an extract from the JISC media release about the report:

"The research centred on three models which include:

• Subscription or toll access publishing which involves reader charges and use restrictions;
• Open access publishing where access is free and publication is funded from the authors' side; and
• Open access self-archiving where academic authors post their work in online repositories, making it freely available to all Internet users.

In their report, Houghton et al. looked beyond the actual costs and savings of different models and examined the additional cost-benefits that might arise from enhanced access to research findings.

The research and findings reveal that core scholarly publishing system activities cost the UK higher education sector around £5 billion in 2007. Using the different models, the report shows, what the estimated cost would have been:

• £230 million to publish using the subscription model,
• £150 million to publish under the open access model and
• £110 million to publish with the self-archiving with peer review services plus some £20 million in operating costs if using the different models.

When considering costs per journal article, Houghton et al. believe that the UK higher education sector could have saved around £80 million a year by shifting from toll access to open access publishing. They also claim that £115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to open access self-archiving.

In addition to that, the financial return to UK plc from greater accessibility to research might result in an additional £172 million per annum worth of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone."

Google Research Awards - call open to staff in universities worldwide

There is a Google research award call open to full-time faculty members from universities worldwide. Awards are typically for one year in the range from $10K-$150K.

"Areas that are of particular interest include (but are not limited to):

• Economics and market algorithms
• Education innovation
• Geo/maps
• Health
• Information retrieval, extraction, and organization
• Machine learning and data mining
• Machine translation
• Mobile
• Multi-media search and audio/video processing
• Natural language processing
• Policy and standards
• Security and privacy
• Social systems
• Speech
• Structured data and database management
• Software and hardware systems infrastructure
• Human-computer interaction"

Educause/NMC 2009 Horizon Report - predictions for emerging technologies

Thanks to Mike Sharples for this link to the New Media Consortium/Educause Horizon Report for 2009 [370 kB PDF - irritating two-column format], which makes predictions about the emerging technologies that are likely to have a significant impact on education. This year's concentrate on: mobile devices, cloud computing, location awareness (the report calls this "geo-everything"), the personal web, semantic-aware applications, and smart objects (that is, object that include a unique identifier that can track information about the object).

National Audit Office diagrams showing the gross over-complexity of the English learning and skills system

Source: Reskilling for recovery - 16/1/2009, page 94

Reskilling for recovery - 16/1/2009 [1.88 MB PDF] is a recent report of the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, which examines "how responses to the agenda set out in the Leitch Report would affect the broader structures of further education (FE), higher education (HE) and lifelong learning".

It contains an Appendix, supplied by the National Audit Office with, on pages 94 to 97, four "function maps" showing the functions and relationships on November 2008 of the key organisation in England with a hand in the provision of education and training. Simple the system certainly is not - "The charts in particular speak for themselves showing how complicated the system has become" -  and, if the Committee's recommendations are acted on, we can expect complexity and reducing it to feature in a future National Audit Office review of the training system.  On this subject, Frank Coffield's diagrams [130 kB PDF] from his "The Impact of Policy on Learning and Inclusion in the New Learning and Skills Sector" are worth reviewing. If anything they show the situation to be even worse than the National Audit Office diagrams indicate.

December 2006 Fortnightly Mailing piece about the Leitch Review of Skills.

Alex Jones - PWC's report on Building Schools for the Future

Alex Jones manages one of the City Learning Centres in Sheffield. His thoughtful blog provides a steady flow of reflections on (and summaries of) official and other publications relating mainly to technology in schools. The most recent concerns PriceWaterhouseCoopers' December 2008 Report on BSF. It is worth subscribing to Alex's RSS feed.

@Tickler: a way of slowing email flow and keeping your inbox to zero

I've relied for years on a 43 folder "tickler" system in my filing cabinet (with one folder per month and 31 folders for the month I am in) where I put papers, tickets, bills, letters-to-be-answered etc relating to different days of the month and the months ahead.

A few days ago, a chance discussion with a friend about email workload and the "frenzied" nature of some email exchanges, led to us devising a tickler system for email, shown above.  In the continuation post below I describe the problem, the contribution that @Tickler can make to controlling it, and how.