Fortnightly Mailing

Internet connections sacrosanct in France? "The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man."

[Updated24/10/2009 - despite the decision below, the French Government has introduced a "cut-off" provision, albeit, only on the say-so of a judge.]

Excerpt from article in the Independent:

"Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said the members of a watchdog to oversee application of the digital clampdown would be named in November and the first warnings would go out "from the start of 2010."

The law sets up an agency that will send out an email warning to people found to be illegally downloading films or music.

A written warning is sent if a second offence is registered in six months and after a third, a judge will be able to order a one-year Internet rights suspension or a fine."

Here is an English translation of the 10 June 2009 decision of the French Constitutional Council [90 kB PDF]. As I understand it, the decision had the effect of overturning French Government plans to allow ISPs to cut off copyright infringers from the Internet. The decision is interesting because it makes such a clear connection between Internet access and a French citizen's right (enshrined in 1789) freely to communicate ideas and opinions. In effect, the ruling asserts that even if a citizen's use of the Internet may involve copyright infringement, that should not of itself entitle an ISP to cut off the citizen's connection. Excerpt:

"12. Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 proclaims : "The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man. Every citizen may thus speak, write and publish freely, except when such freedom is misused in cases determined by Law". In the current state of the means of communication and given the generalized development of public online communication services and the importance of the latter for the participation in democracy and the expression of ideas and opinions, this right implies freedom to access such services."

The French approach contrasts with the 25 August UK Government announcement [50 kB PDF] that in respect of "subscribers alleged by rights holders to be infringing copyright" it is now "considering the case for adding into the list of technical measures [to be at the disposal of ISPs] the power, as a last resort, to suspend a subscriber's account". The Digital Britain team strive in the Government's Digital Britain Forum to keep discussion of these issues civilised and open - 25 August 2009 and 27 August 2009 - but reaction is mainly hostile.

Google Docs now has translation between any pair of 51 languages as standard

Updated 31/8/2009

If you use Google Docs, the "Tool" drop-down allows you to produce a machine translation of the document into any of 51 42 languages, including, as of today, Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish. For more on the newly available language pairs, see this 31/8/2009 piece in the Google Research Blog by Franz Och, Principal Research Scientist. Excerpt:

"We're very happy that our technology allows us to produce machine translation systems for languages that often don't get the attention they deserve. For many of the newly supported languages ours is the only mature and freely available translation system. While translation quality in these languages will be noticeably rougher than for languages we've supported for a longer time like French or Spanish, it is most often good enough to give a basic understanding of the text, and you can be sure that the quality will get better over time."

A new strategic direction for the OU - OUeU?

The Open University has revised its strategic direction, with a decision taken to operate in five business areas. One of these "OU Supported Open Learning" is where most of the OU's current activity takes place. The plan is to grow the other four, and you get the feeling that the OU is aiming to be, as a monolithic entity, the heavyweight "eUniversity" that UKEU spectacularly (and predictably?) failed to become.

Here are all five in full:

1. OU Supported Open Learning — UK awards offered by the OU to students in the UK and other parts of the world (principally in Europe) through supported, blended open learning. This constitutes the traditional business of the OU.
2. OU Online — UK awards offered wholly online by the OU to students in the UK and throughout the world. Provision will initially be at postgraduate level.
3. OU Plus — UK or local awards and courses offered to students through or with partners who substantially augment and enhance the OU contribution. These will include organisations and companies drawn from the private as well as the public sector, operating internationally as well as within the UK. In the UK, they will include employers who will be engaged with the OU in the development of re-versioned and co-funded provision.
4. OU Freemium — new businesses deriving income from open educational resources (OER) and associated services. This business area was previously called OU for Free and has been re-titled to stress the need to monetise OER in order to create a sustainable business model. It includes OpenLearn, SocialLearn, iTunesU and Open Research Online.
5. OU Services — the sale of OU educational and research products and services throughout the world, usually on a for-profit basis. These are products and services created through the disaggregation of elements of the foregoing business areas and include not only OU course materials but also, and increasingly, stand-alone services, such as educational and careers guidance, credit rating and accreditation (where it is appropriate and profitable to do so), and academic consultancy and the licensing of intellectual property.

The state of the LMS market - shades of Napoleon's march to Moscow

Here is a wonderful diagram from a report by Michael Feldstein from a "Delta Initiative" webinar about the state of the LMS market. 

The diagram reminded me of Joseph Minard's "Carte Figurative" of Napoleon's march to and retreat from Moscow:

Source: Edward Tufte.

Digital Britain Implementation Plan

13/8/2009, updated 29/8/2009

Here is the August 2009 Digital Britain Implementation Plan [214 kB PDF]. It describes 18 projects, with varying degrees of sketchiness, and with occasional references to amounts of funding attached to different measures. The sketchiness stems in part from the fact that the different projects consist of actions from the June Digital Britain report, which were not organised into projects. The 18 project areas are as follows, and I've made bold those that I think will be of interest to readers of Fortnightly Mailing (you may also want to run your eye over Donald Clark's 29/8/2009 shot-from-the-hip comments on each):

1. Digital Economy Bill
2. Digital Inclusion/Participation
3. Digital Skills
4. Current and Next Generation Broadband
5. Spectrum Modernisation
6. Digital Radio Upgrade
7. Video Games
8. Illegal File Sharing
9. Contestable Funding
10. Public Service Content
11. Independently Funded News Consortia
12. BBC/Independent Production in the Nations
13. Digital Security
14. Personal Digital Safety
15. Online Consumer Protection
16. Digital Government (including establishment of "G-Cloud")
17. Digital Delivery Agency
18. Other Relevant Activity

Help mySociety choose its next projects - call for proposals closes on 15 September 200

mySociety is running a public competition for ideas for mySociety's next services. Excerpt:

"We need your help to decide what mySociety builds next. Our previous calls for proposals have led to WhatDoTheyKnow.com, WriteToThem.com and Pledgebank.com. What big new services should we build? What features should we add to our existing sites? What bright ideas do you have to promote mySociety to the world?"

Here is the full Call For Proposals.In mySociety style, submitted ideas are immediately visible on the site.

Hal Abelson on Google's "App Inventor for Android"

14 July 2010 update - see also this post about the launch of App Inventor as a publicly available beta product.

Hal Varian is not the only academic (nor Hal...) seconded to Google. Hal Abelson is an eminent professor of computer science and engineering at MIT, and a very influential figure in the field. He was founding director of Creative Commons and of the Free Software Foundation. Over the last year he has been working on secondment to Google on a project about using the Android Open Source operating system as platform for learning computer science. He now reports on this in the Google Research Blog. This excerpt is about as succinct a summary as you will find of the "architectural shift" that is taking place:

"Mobile applications are triggering a fundamental shift in the way people experience computing and use mobile phones. Ten years ago, people "went to the computer" to perform tasks and access the Internet, and they used a cell phone only to make calls. Today, smartphones let us carry computing with us, have become central to servicing our communication and information needs, and have made the web part of all that we do. Ten years ago, people's use of computing was largely dissociated from real life. With the ubiquity of social networking, online and offline life are becoming fused."

Abelson goes on to announce App Inventor for Android, which "lets people assemble Android applications by arranging 'components' using a graphical drag-and-drop-interface", and which will be trialled with students in a group of around a dozen universities (all in the US bar the University of Queensland) in Autumn 2009. The rationale for the development of App Inventor for Android is that the architectural shift needs to be matched by a shift in the computer science curriculum "to make it more about people and their interactions with others and with the world around them", so that people "can engage the world of mobile services and applications as creators, not just consumers".

Abelson concludes:

"Through this work, we hope to do the following:

• make mobile application development accessible to anyone;
• enhance introductory learning experiences in computing through the vehicle of Android’s open platform;
• encourage a community of faculty and students to share material and ideas for teaching and exploring."

For me, this development raises several interesting issues:

1. Where are UK (on Indian, for that matter) Universities in developments of this kind? Are they not involved because there have been no opportunities, or because they've responded to calls and failed?

2. Openness (of approach, software etc) as a key vehicle to support innovation. It is hard to see an equivalent initiative being taken using the software components that the iPhone relies on.

3. Users as creators of applications. Note the broadening of emphasis from users as creators of content to users as creators of tools.