Fortnightly Mailing

The Literacy Project

Via the indefatigable New Zealander Richard Elliott I found the Google hosted Literacy Project, "a resource for teachers, literacy organizations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning".  Is it any use? I'm not the best person to judge, but some aspects of the site, for example its Literacy Map, were superficial.  Try searching on Sheffield (where I live, and which I know well). What do you get? Sheffield University's Department of Education. Not Ufi; not Sheffield City Council; and not The Sheffield College, all of which are far more active on literacy issues than this university education department. If you've got views, post a comment below.

WolframAlpha: David Weinberger interviews Stephen Wolfram

Though I kept wanting him to challenge a bit more, here is an interesting, fairly searching and definitely thought-provoking 55 minute interview with Stephen Wolfram about WolframAlpha [MP3] by David Weinberger.

WolframAlpha is  described by Wolfram as a new "computational knowledge engine", and it is due to be launched by Wolfram's company during May.

I listened into a presentation about WolframAlpha on 14 April, and summarised this fairly enthusiastically here. Meanwhile, there is some sceptical commentary about WolframAlpha here on Slashdot.

Links for a talk

Below is an eclectic set of links that I included in, or drew material and ideas from, in talks at Learning Technologies 2009 in London in January, at a JISC RSC "e-Learning in HE: Strategy and Planning" event in Doncaster in March, and at the Cambridge Assessment Network in April.  At the bottom you will find a link to a (big) zip folder with the assets for the March version of the talk.

Hut-to-hut skiing in Jotunheimen

Looking West from top of Fortundalsbreen, 4 April 2009

This Easter I skied "hut-to-hut" in Norway from Lake Tyin via Tomashelleren and Lake Bygdin to Gjendesheim, followed by three days with a friend in and above the birch woods East of Gjendesheim (Finnbølesætra to Storholiseter to Skriurusten to Oskampen to Finnbølesætra). I then joined a group skiing from Sota Sæter to Fondsbu over the Fortundalsbreen and Smørstabbrean glaciers via Nørstedalsæter, Krossbu, and Skogaldalsbøen.  The weather ranged from still, clear and cold, with perfect snow to match, via downright hot, to too windy for safety, this last resulting in the welcome attention of the Red Cross. The pictures below will give you the flavour.

Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning - Technological Change "Thematic Paper"

The National Association for Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) has published Simon Mauger's Technological Change Thematic Paper [50 pages, 1.4 MB PDF] from the National Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning (IFLL). I get quoted a bit in the document, which makes me feel well disposed towards it, and possibly clouds my judgement that though it is not saying anything earth-shatteringly original, the document does manage to capture in one place, and in language that policy-makers will relate to, the scale and nature of the changes taking place in the overall environment for learning.

Is it sufficient to entitle citizens to a 2 megabits per second Internet connection?

Donald Clark provides a scathing perspective on yesterday's "Digital Britain" summit. The FT's coverage of the event was more positive, and Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson's strong hints that the UK's interpretation of the Universal Service Obligation on telephone companies (to the extent that the USO relates to Internet access) will be changed from its current derisory 28.8 kbit/s to 2 megabits/s are not to be sniffed at, especially considering that in March 2006 Ofcom was arguing that "no significant changes are needed at this time" and in particular that "the benchmark minimum speed will remain at 28.8 kbit/s". A rapid implementation of a 2 mbit/s obligation would have big and beneficial effects on the parts of rural Britain where dial-up Internet access remains the only cost-effective option. But keep in mind that other developed countries are taking a much more ambitious approach. For example, earlier this month the Australian Government announced a $AU43 billion plan to provide 90% of households and business with affordable access to 100 mbit/s connections, with the remaining 10% having access to a 12 mbit/s connection.

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn 10 April round-up, with 18, 21, 24 April, and 7 May updates

[Updated 18, 21, 24 April 2009, and 7 May] - I suggest you read this in conjunction with the excellent 21 April piece from Michael Feldstein, and this piece by Jeff Bohrer.]

18/4/2009 update. Yesterday, the US Patent Office, which has been re-examining US Patent 6,988,138 since early last year in response to inter partes and ex parte applications from Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Centre, issued a non-final  "Action Closing Prosecution" rejecting the whole of that patent.

Blackboard now has one month in which to respond, and assuming (which I don't) that any such representations have no effect on the results of the Patent Office's re-examination of the patent, it would then be open to Blackboard to appeal against the final results of the re-examination through the US courts. 

Will Blackboard be exercised by this development? I'm happy to stand corrected on issues that are not in my area of expertise, but my instinct tells me that Blackboard may not be too fussed about the non-final action by the US Patent Office. This is because the company's new US Patent 7,493,396 [PDF] (see relevant section of 10 April round-up below):

• incorporates Patent 6,988,138 in its entirety;
• includes in its "Other References" section a comprehensive list of most if not all of the "prior art" cited in Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Centre's re-examination requests on 6,988,138, and by Desire2Learn in its appeal against Blackboard Inc.'s successful infringement case, and in Desire2Learn's original defence (even the Sheffield-based EU Framework 4 Renaissance Project, in which I and several readers of Fortnightly Mailing were involved in 1996ish, gets referenced).

Provided the US Patent Office got its teeth into the the listed prior art (which I'm told Blackboard would have been required to cite in its application) and came to a proper judgement that it did not affect the validity of the claims in the patent, then the new patent will be tougher to challenge than if the Patent Office has only considered the prior art superficially, if at all.

Problem-based learning - York Law School's guide for students

This Guide to problem-based learning, which draws heavily on a similar guide written by students at Hull York Medical School, provides an impressive and comprehensive overview of an approach to (HE) course design and delivery that is used throughout the undergraduate law course at York University. Via Hull Work Medical School I came across this long list of probably a bit dated links to resources about Problem Based Learning maintained (?) by the University of Maastricht.

Are there too many UK communities and professional bodies supporting workplace e-learning?

Prompted by a piece by Donald Clark which touches (I think rightly) on the problem of "too many membership organisations in the e-learning space", Clive Shepherd lists some of the reasons why rationalisation might be hard, without dissing the idea, and pulls together a useful two page list of the organisations concerned [60 kB PDF]. Clive invites comments on the list, and I am assuming it will evolve a bit, so its URL might alter. In the continuation post below I've included the comment I wrote (from the point of view of my employer the Association for Learning Technology) in response to Donald.

WolframAlpha: changing the face of information retrieval? Report from webinar with Stephen Wolfram

Updates

5/5/2009. Perceptive reflection by David Weinberger on the importance (or lack of it) of WolframAlpha.

28/4/2009. Here is some informative and sceptical discussion about WolframAlpha on Slashdot.

29/4/2009. NB. On Tuesday 28 April, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will hosted a face-to-face and remotely accessible preview of the WolframAlpha system. Participants included WolframAlpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law. Here is David Weinberger's contemporaneous report from the session, and here is a link to a 55 minute interview by Weinberger with Wolfram.

16/4/2009 - "Making 'expert level' knowledge accessible to everyone" - Stephen Wolfram

I signed up for a preview of WolframAlpha, and today I took part in a webinar presented by Stephen Wolfram, in which he put the very impressive WolframAlpha through its paces by feeding its search field with a wide range of brief (English) queries e.g. "next solar eclipse in Chicago" - including from participants - generating, quickly, elegantly presented well-structured answer-screens, with facts, data, graphs, time-lines, and links to sources of data (but not images). Think of it as a "CIA world fact book" that can generate its fact-sheets flexibly and on the fly, about a huge