Fortnightly Mailing

Progressive austerity - a term to watch

You know things have come to a pretty pass when a term like "progressive austerity" come into use, especially when an egalitarian (?) think tank originates it. See this 21 May 2009 Financial Times piece by Richard Reeves, head of Demos. Excerpt:

Second, progressive austerity means giving the public sector more than just a hard squeeze. The principal lesson from Canada – where spending was cut by 10 per cent in the mid-1990s – is that whole budgets, agencies and departments should be axed. The default assumption in spending rounds is that money will continue to flow towards an activity. Expenditure must address a clear need, through demonstrably effective policies.

Much of the quangocracy that has sprouted under Labour will fail one or both of these tests. Regional development agencies, sector skills councils and the communities and local government department should all go. Any agency with the word “improvement” in its title could probably disappear without discernible negative effects. Middle-class welfare should end. Child benefit should be abolished. Subsidised higher education ought to be targeted at low-income students.

Mapometer - a well implemented way of tracing and saving a route onto a Google map

Thanks to Nicky Ferguson for sending me a link to Mapometer. You can use it to trace, save, and share a route on a Google Map, Mapometer estimates distance, energy used, and height gained. This example of its output is my regular (well, not that regular) run from my front door. Serving a different function is Where's the Path, which enables you to view an Ordanance Survey map side by side with a Google satellite image of the same terrain, there by working out where in the landscape a route lies. A mashed together version of these two services would be a killer application for fell-runners.

Device diversity. More blurring of the boundary between phone and PC.

Succinct article in the Economist which properly credits One Laptop Per Child with triggering the development of the netbook and points out that several PC-makers are now working on devices relying on a chip designed by ARM (i.e. neither Intel nor AMD) and running Android, a Linux-based "software stack" (operating system, middleware and key applications) for phones developed by/with the support of Google.

Google Translator Toolkit

Google has launched Google Translator Toolkit, a set of tools to enable users to exploit the power of Google Translate whilst enabling them to improve upon the machine-translated output, contributing in the process to the quality of Google Translate's output. Find out more.

Links to previous posts on this subject:

• 12 June 2005 - Combining human with machine translation;
• 24 January 2006 - Machine translation;
• 24 November 2006 - The November 2006 (and June 2008) NIST results;
• 26 April 2008 - Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?;
• 30 September 2008 - Google launches eleven more languages at translate.google.com;
• 21 May 2009 - Automatic translation of email.

A wiki full of snapshots of uses of learning technology in UK HE and FE

Here is a wiki with a wide and well structured range of "best practice examples" of learning literacies, defined as the range of practices that underpin effective learning in a digital age, for example academic skills, information literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, ICT skills, learning to learn. The wiki has been produced as part of the JISC-funded Learning Literacies for the Digital Age project at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Google Wave - plenty to think about in this 90 minute overview

Updated 4 June 2009

I'm not that easily impressed by new ways of using the Web - because I think there is no shortage of useful tools: instead there is a shortage of useful tools put to good use.

If you've got 90 minutes to spare, and can tolerate the self-congratulatory tone, which measured about 5 on the Wolfram scale, the presentation below explains Google Wave, a very sophisticated "rendered-in-your-browser" but "running-in-the-cloud" collaboration environment, which Google says it will launch later in 2009, and which makes Google Docs (and a lot of other collaboration products, VLEs, e-portfolios, social networking environments) look extremely primitive.