Fortnightly Mailing

Venki Ramakrishnan discusses the ribosome, and why measures of "impact" should not be used when assessing the quality of fundamental research

Venki Ramakrishnan was one of the people who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for deducing the structure of the ribosome, the protein macro-molecular machine that takes the genetic information in DNA using RNA to create protein. This seven minute video is a set of snippets with Ramakrishnan's talking about his work (and the ribosome). He concludes with a convincing critique of the approach currently favoured by government that which research gets funded should by decided in part by its economic impact. Ramakrishnan (and many others) believe that knowledge should be pursued for its own sake: and that economic impact follows.

Digital Inclusion: an unusual opportunity to help develop a critique of current digital inclusion research, policy, and practice

Digital Inclusion is a contested term and I think the ESRC/EPSRC funded Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Programme¹ is onto a good thing with this Digital Inclusion Commentary Site.

Why?

1. The site is implemented in Comment Press (a variant of Wordpress) that allows users to comment on a complex document at the level of individual paragraphs. [Explanation]
2. The site is open to the world.
3. The aim of the document that is in the process of being written is to influence future research relating to digital inclusion.

By the look of the first two chapters, the work is going to be thorough and free of the glibness that sometimes infects discussion about digital inclusion. Excerpt from the introduction:

"This is an area of the Digital Inclusion that we have created to facilitate the creation of an online document that reviews and critiques current digital inclusion research, policy and practice: with a particular focus on drawing out potential implications for future digital inclusion research. This document, when completed will have a stand-alone life of its own, but it will also form the foundation of a separate publication towards the end of the TEL programme that highlights ways in which each of the TEL projects has (or has the potential to have) made a contribution to advancing our understanding or practice in relation to digital inclusion."

¹ Disclosure. I am a member of the TEL Programme's Advisory Group; at one point I made a point to Jane Seale (the principal author of the two chapters to date) about the suitability of Comment Press as a platform for this kind of thing. So I have an interest in this project being a success.

Being mighty: how mortals can make learning technology projects that cause real impact - a talk by Jonathan Drori

Jonathan Drori puts his finger on why so many pilot projects never get beyond the pilot stage in this invited speaker session on 9 September at ALT-C 2009 (running time 32 minutes). (Here also is a link to a page with all the videos from ALT-C 2009.)

Jaw-dropping: a talk about "lightweight learning" by Sugata Mitra at Google's London office

Source: Infonomia

Updated: added extra bullet-point from Sugata Mitra - 11/10/2009; dates clarified - 25/10/2009.

Last Monday I had the pleasure of hearing Sugata Mitra give a jaw-dropping talk about his "Hole in the wall experiments", at a 157 Group / Becta event at Google's London office that I had had a bit part in organising. (Becta is the UK Government's agency to promote and support the effective use of ICT in education, and singled out on Thursday 7 October by David Cameron, in his pre-election speech to the Conservative Party Conference. The 157 Group is a group of England's big and most successful further education colleges.)

The BBC giving airtime to the British National Party is a form of appeasement

[Written 22/10/2009. Updated 30/10/2009.]

Standing on repugnant policies, Hitler's National Socialist Party was initially successful in democratic elections. In power it implemented these policies, through deportations, and eventually through the "final solution".

My grandmother was gassed in Auschwitz. My grandfather and great grandmother perished in Terezin. For all my life the Nazi Holocaust, and the political developments that preceded it, have been in the background for me.

So I felt physically winded to read the BBC's chief political advisor Ric Bailey's statement that the decision to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time was "based on the party's success in June's European elections, at which it won more than 940,000 votes and two seats".

Had the BBC's reasoning been that it wished to discredit the BNP and negate its influence, then I could have understood its logic, though I'd have disagreed with its decision.

But by its stance the BBC appeases racism: it publicises and makes respectable the BNP's ideas; it ignores the distress and fear that the BNP evokes amongst those it targets; it grants the BNP valuable exposure. Whilst I hope that David Dimbelby, and the panel in Question Time will expose Griffin, and reduce his standing, it is not mainly amongst the viewers of Question Time that the BNP's policies hold sway: so the net effect of the BBC's decision will be to boost Griffin and his party's popularity.

Since when was that supposed to be the purpose of the BBC?

Added 30/10/2009. This letter by Paul Rees appeared in the Independent Newspaper on 26 October. He makes my point far more effectively than I ever could.

Alan Cann - using FriendFeed as a personal learning environment for science students in HE

Three months ago I started to use FriendFeed for lightweight blogging, telling myself I would use if for 3 months and decide whether or not to stick with it. The three months is up and on balance I am impressed with it - in particular at the scope for people to comment on posts, and the ability to pull RSS feeds into and out of FreindFeed. I now include some of the FriendFeed posts I write in the emailed version Fortnightly Mailing. (My main plea is for other users to be selective about what they pull into their own FriendFeed, and, in particular, not to include stuff from Twitter if they are Twitter users.)

Today, through FriendFeed, I came across this interesting piece by Alan Cann Leveraging FriendFeed for authentic science education. Excerpt:

"Using the Facebook paradigm, they will create a Friendfeed account, subscribe to RSS feeds, bookmark and share items and build a network. We will use FriendFeed as a feedback channel to guide them. Assuming FriendFeed is still around, this should work much better than our past approach to building a PLE. (They'll also use other tools, but their PLE will be based around FriendFeed, which will be the main communication channel, vertically and horizontally)."

Alan's "assuming FriendFeed is still around" comment stems partly from the fact that just after I started to use it, FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook. Who knows what Facebook's plans are for the product.......

Making money from free digital content - Cory Doctorow experiments

I've had a soft spot for Cory Doctorow because of his wonderful 2001 diatribe Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. With a Little Help is a print-on-demand book of short stories by Cory Doctorow that explores - in the manner of its publication - several different "freemium" models for turning a free, digital object into profitable and physical objects. Cory explains - in his column in Publishers Weekly, and on his blog.

Related: 7 May 2007 piece in Fortnightly Mailing.

All Party Communications Group comes down firmly against disconnection as a way to stop illegal filesharing

The UK "All Party Parliamentary Communications Group", chaired by John Robertson MP and Derek Wyatt MP, has just published the report of its recent inquiry “Can we keep our hands off the net?”. Exerpt:

"We conclude that much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available."

"We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this approach to dealing with illegal file-sharing should not be further considered."

The report covers a much wider range of issues, with a set of pragmatic recommendations relating to issue like: ISPs' role in preventing the spread of malware and spam, the need for minimum guaranteed speeds of broad band connections to be advertised, and for consistent default standards of child-protection filtering on mobile internet connections.

(With thanks to Steve Ryan for sending me a link to the report.)

THE-QS World University Ranking - a US perspective that takes account of country size: Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer

When the 2009 Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings of the world’s universities were published 8 October, Editor of the THE-QS rankings, Phil Baty wrote: “America's superpower status is slipping as other countries' efforts to join the global elite begin to pay dividends.” And he could have written the U.K. universities continue to improve their rankings.

OLPC laptops - a year of mass use in Uruguay / Android: coming from behind

Two informative pieces in the 3/10/2009 Economist. The first - "Education in Uruguay - Laptops for all" - provides quite an upbeat, though "warts and all" summary of Uruguay's deployment of nearly 400,000 OLPC laptops (nearly all of the country's primary school pupils now have them), pointing out that government's ambition that laptops will improve the overall standard of education "will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects", and that the introduction of laptops should "prompt a shift away from rote learning towards critical analysis".

The second - "The boom in smart-phones" - describes the rise of the Open Source operating system Android, emphasising how Android has enabled "cut-price Chinress firms such as Huawei and ZTE to enter the smart-phone market which they had previously stayed out of for lack of the necessary software". The article suggests that within four years half of handsets sold will be "smart", and that almost all will be so by 2015. (I think these figures relate to worldwide supply, in which case the switch will be quicker in the UK.) The changes this will cause in the role of technology in learning (and, perhaps more importantly, in its organisation and control) will be profound.

Back-links to related pieces:

• 26/9/2009 - The "mobilely accessible" Internet - global overview;
• 20/2/2009 - Using mobile technologies to promote children's learning;
• 2/10/2008 - Android: phones are PCs, only smaller and with more stuff on them;
• 4/8/2007 - Smartphones "are the PCs of the developing world";
• 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
• 1/6/2007 - Test the mobile-readiness of a web site;
• 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa: a "simple sort of eBay for agricultural products;
• 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
• 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
• 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.