Fortnightly Mailing

OLPC downsizes

(Via Stephen Downes.) Ryan Paul reports in Ars Technica that OLPC is cutting staff and the pay of those remaining, and, it seems, ceasing to develop software, and, it is said, concentrating on the Windows based OLPC 2. Others pick up the story.

Let's have more technical problems at the BBC

Checking the BBC web site I was impressed with what I took to be a new, clean, unfussy look, only to notice that bbc.co.uk is suffering technical problems. So we've not seen the last of the the overcomplicated BBC home page.

Richard Florida on cities as "the third great business model"

Today's BBC In Business had a gripping and wide-ranging interview with Richard Florida [link to podcast], Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, in the University of Toronto, who argues enthusiastically about the benefits of immigration, about successful cities like London and San Francisco as illustrating the "third great business model" (he is not a fan of the technology driven "death of distance"), and about popular music as a historically important driver of technologies and development (radio, TV, phonograph, CD, iPOD etc). Richard Florida's website is worth browsing, and below is a video of a one hour talk he gave at Google's New York Office on 5 April 2008.

Should higher education course materials be free to all? Leo Pollak in the IPPR's Public Policy Research

Leo Pollak's Should higher education course materials be free to all? [84 kB PDF] in a monthly publication of the influential Institute for Public Policy Research passed me by. Abstract:

"In recent months, UC Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have, respectively, announced and achieved their intention to make entire lecture and course materials freely available online – to anyone. Leo Pollak argues that while British universities lag far behind in online course provision, the UK is uniquely placed to innovate further than MIT, and to once again radically redefine the basis of opportunity, learning and social mobility."

A footnote in Pollak's paper:

"The Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock has argued convincingly that there exists a calculable opportunity cost to a wide range of restrictive intellectual monopolies; not merely to individuals, innovative firms, to jobs, consumers and to the wider economy, but, most crucially, to the providers of the ‘first copy’, the original content producers (Pollock 2006)."

took me to Pollock's January 2008 Innovation and imitation and with and without intellectual property rights [250 kB PDF] which provides a "welfare economics" based argument for Open Content. Abstract (emphasis added):

"An extensive empirical literature indicates that returns from innovation are appropriated primarily via mechanisms other than formal intellectual property rights and that `imitation' is itself a costly activity. However most theory assumes the pure non-rivalry of `ideas' with its implication that, in the absence of intellectual property (for example under an `open source' regime), innovation (and welfare) is zero. This paper introduces a formal model of innovation based on imperfect competition in which imitation is costly and an innovator has a first-mover advantage. Without intellectual property, a significant amount of innovation still occurs and welfare may actually be higher than with intellectual property."

[As an aside, today's  Open Education Skeptic: We Are All Prof. Gradgrind Now, by Michael Feldstein, gets to the heart of a weakness in Leo Pollak's paper, namely that access to course materials is not the same as access to education.]

Science Magazine's January 2009 Special Issue on Educational Technology

Revised 2 January 2009

There is plenty of interest, some of it with a UK focus, in this 2 January 2009 Special Issue of The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Magazine, though you will need to be a subscriber (or work for an organisation with a subscription) to view most of it other than at USD10 per article. There is a freely available video piece focusing in part on video games in science learning, and a podcast to promote the special issue, and I can see the issue having quite an impact in the US, given Science Magazine's reach and influence amongst policy-makers, the relatively poor performance of the US school system, and the political changes that are afoot there. See for example this coverage of the Science article about video games picked up by the Scientific American. From a UK perspective, Scotland's "Glow" national education intranet gets supportive and no doubt welcome coverage in a two page article by Dan Clery, and there is a longer review article about online education worldwide - abstract - by Frank Mayadas, John Bourne, and Paul Bacsich.

As an aside I think that Science Magazine is missing a trick from both a business and influence point of view by not making this issue freely (or far more cheaply) available on-line.

John Lanchester on video games

Here is an interesting and well-written article by John Lanchester about Video Games in the 1/1/2009 issue of the London Review of Books, covering ground I am not familiar with, and highlighting the fact that 2008 was the year in which the UK market for video games is forecast to have overtaken that for music and video combined (it overtook that for books in 2007). Excerpt:

"There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t. Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist. (The exceptions come in the form of occasional tabloid horror stories, always about a disturbed youth who was ‘inspired’ to do something terrible by a video game.) Their invisibility is interesting in itself, and also allows interesting things to happen in games under the cultural radar."