Fortnightly Mailing

Need random numbers? Plenty of enhancements to Mads Haahr's RANDOM.ORG.

Mads Haahr's RANDOM.ORG is classy site devoted to the provision of "true" random numbers. It has developed quite a bit since I described it in 2007, though its use of atmospheric noise to generate random numbers rather than a mathematical algorithm is unchanged.

The widget below (a beta) is just one of the tools available from the site. Others include a random location generator that integrates with Google Maps, a random password generator, and a random jazz scale generator.

The mobilely accessible Internet - global overview from the Economist

Source: Economist special report on telecoms in emerging markets

Finishing the job is a useful overview of mobile phone uptake and Internet access world-wide and how these are expected to change. It also contains an OLPC-oriented discussion about whether it will ultimately be phones or "netbooks" that become the dominant means by which users access the Internet. (Phones are in the ascendency, it seems, though the boundary between them is getting increasingly blurred.) Excerpt:

"On the face of it, those in the mobile camp seem to have won. Mobile phones are now seen as a vital tool of development, whereas Mr Negroponte’s laptop project has failed to meet its ambitious goals. But although his engineers have so far only managed to get the cost of their elegant laptop down to about $150, they have shown what is possible with a low-cost design, and helped create today’s vibrant netbook market. If netbooks do indeed become the preferred devices to access the internet in the developing world, Mr Negroponte will have had the last laugh. But if those netbooks turn out to be, in effect, large mobile phones with keyboards that access the internet via mobile networks, as also seems likely, Mr Quadir and his camp can claim to have won the day. Technological progress in devices and networks seems to have rendered the debate moot: the important thing is that internet access will be on its way to becoming as widespread as mobile phones."

More on self-organised learning

David Jennings has written a second instalment on self-organised learning in part responding my reservations. Dougald Hine comments (I mostly agree with him) that workplaces usually (often?) provide better vocational learning environments than institutional ones. When and if time permits I want to link this discussion with some points made by David Price


David Price - Co-founder of Debategraph: Thinking deeply together (click on thumbnail to run 28 minute video). Other ALT-C 2009 videos.

at the ALT conference (drawing on Clay Shirky) about the "cognitive surplus" in the heads of learners, and the scope there ought to draw value from it - thereby reducing the net cost of provision - by basing learning activities on finding real world solutions to problems.

Using PSPs for learning in a Birmingham primary school for the deaf

Here are two superb ~8 minute videos in which Alison Carter, deputy head teacher of Longwill School, talks comprehensively, clearly, and passionately about the benefits flowing from pupils' use of Sony PlayStation portable devices. These talks deserve to be widely viewed.

Part 1

With thanks to Jenny Ellwood from East Birmingham City Learning Centre for telling me about this work.

Videos of keynote and invited speaker sessions at the 2009 ALT conference

Over the last few weeks Matt Scholes has been working with colleagues in ALT (where I work part-time) to edit the video recordings from the 2009 ALT conference, and to get these made available on the Web.

Hopefully we've got the format for these videos about right within the budgetary and technical constraints we faced; and the "wide-screen" format has enabled us to combine the video of the speaker with a reasonably legible view of their presentation in one screen, without needing to switch between them.

Paul Krugman - How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” - John Maynard Keynes

Via Peter Norvig, here is a beautifully written piece from the 6 September 2009 New York Times by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman. There are shades of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist's description of capitalism in this excerpt:

"I like to explain the essence of Keynesian economics with a true story that also serves as a parable, a small-scale version of the messes that can afflict entire economies. Consider the travails of the Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op.

This co-op, whose problems were recounted in a 1977 article in The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, was an association of about 150 young couples who agreed to help one another by baby-sitting for one another’s children when parents wanted a night out. To ensure that every couple did its fair share of baby-sitting, the co-op introduced a form of scrip: coupons made out of heavy pieces of paper, each entitling the bearer to one half-hour of sitting time. Initially, members received 20 coupons on joining and were required to return the same amount on departing the group.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the co-op’s members, on average, wanted to hold a reserve of more than 20 coupons, perhaps, in case they should want to go out several times in a row. As a result, relatively few people wanted to spend their scrip and go out, while many wanted to baby-sit so they could add to their hoard. But since baby-sitting opportunities arise only when someone goes out for the night, this meant that baby-sitting jobs were hard to find, which made members of the co-op even more reluctant to go out, making baby-sitting jobs even scarcer. . . .

In short, the co-op fell into a recession."

Progressive austerity and self-organised learning

I've worked on and off with David Jennings for nearly 15 years, starting with unsuccessful efforts in the mid 1990s to get Sheffield-as-a-City to take the Internet more seriously, and including Living IT [slow to load from The Wayback Machine] a project with MANCAT, The Sheffield College, and FD Learning, to make a suite of wholly online courses about how to use the Internet.

More recently we've pitched for and won various contracts concerning e-learning, standards, web site usability, social networking to support professional development, and so on.

Why the throat clearing? To provide a context for my pointing to a longish piece that David Jennings has written - Progressive austerity and self-organised learning - which I think is worth taking the time to read, and to make comments on it. (Though I've not switched off comments on this post, I encourage you to respond there not here.)

For the record and leaving aside my scepticism about "collapsonomics" (which reminds me too much of The Limits to Growth and Protect and Survive) I agree with some but not all of David's argument.

I particularly like the way David tabulates some "Literacies for self-organised learning" using lists by Guy Claxton and Howard Reingold (I'd be for including Claxton's "characteristics of a confident explorer/researcher" in many recruitment specifications), but I think David underplays the importance of accreditation of learning and of qualifications generally (this is more than the issue of compliance training that he raises towards the end of the piece).

Secondly learners in many contexts at many levels (medicine, catering and hospitality, car maintenance, marketing, say) need to learn in real "vocational" environments. These are generally anything but "lightweight" to provide.

Finally, though we are programmed to learn, for many it helps a great deal to receive the right formative feedback, and to be asked what Dylan Wiliam calls "hinge questions" [150 kB PDF - see page nine]; and in this respect the "self-organised" learning that David argues for  is not sufficient. 

What I think we do agree on is that the "information environment" has become far more "lightweight", with the bypassing of institutions, libraries, teachers, publishers, experts etc, and the establishment of an apparently open environment in which motivated people can learn a great deal on their own. (I put quotes round the term "lightweight", because the technical infrastructure that sits behind and supports the information environment is anything but lightweight.)

But you can make up your own mind by reading David's piece.

Using Twitter and Yahoo Pipes for electronic voting, by Martin Hawksey

Here is a plausible description by Martin Hawksey from the JISC RSC for Scotland North and East which explains how to use Twitter as a classroom voting tool.

Quest to Learn - a newly opened 12 to 18 school relying 100% on games-based learning

The 5 September 2009 Economist reports on the opening of Quest to Learn, a new publicly funded school in New York. Closing excerpt:

The school plans to admit pupils at the age of 12 and keep them until they are 18, so the first batch will not leave until 2016. If it fails, traditionalists will no doubt scoff at the idea that teaching through playing games was ever seriously entertained. If it succeeds, though, it will provide a model that could make chalk and talk redundant. And it will have shown that in education, as in other fields of activity, it is not enough just to apply new technologies to existing processes—for maximum effect you have to apply them in new and imaginative ways.

There is plenty else of interest and value on the Institute of Play's web site, including this list of references relating to game-based learning.