Fortnightly Mailing

Anticipating the Web - information available "in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance"

Source

During a discussion about Open Access journal publishing Brian Whalley posed this "christmas quiz" question:

Who wrote the following and when?

"The kind of organization we wish to aim at is one where all relevant information should be available to each research worker and in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance. Further, that not only should the information be available, but that it should be to a large extent put at the disposal of the research worker without his having to take any special steps to get hold of it."

Google and Sheila Webber's interesting¹ 2003 Journal of Information Science article Information Science in 2003: A Critique led me to discover that this anticipation of the Web was by the UK-based Irish physicist JD Bernal, pictured above. In 1939.

¹ Webber's categorisation of disciplines, building on Becher, as "Hard pure", " Soft pure", "Hard applied" and " Soft applied" caught my eye.

Tim Berners-Lee's "Long Live the Web": a call to defend the Web

It is 20 years since the Web went live on Berners-Lee's desktop at CERN, with one web site and one web browser on the same PC.

This Scientific American article provides a non-technical and thorough overview of what sets the Web apart from most other technology infrastructures - principally its openness, simplicity, ubiquity, and the way in which the standards that shape its operation are governed.

Berners-Lee spells our clearly some of the emerging threats to the Web as a decentralised, egalitarian, open, and public resource. These threats include the "walling off" of information posted by users of social networking sites, interference by ISPs in which kinds of content get priority (i.e. absence of net-neutrality), and monopoly (when, say, one search engine, or one browser, or one social-networking site become overly dominant).

Berners-Lee does an important job as a figurehead in summarising the threats, but he is more-or-less silent on what to do about them. I can think of three reasons for this. 1. The Scientific American is probably not the place for a call to action. 2. What to do depends so much on where you live and what your role is.  3. The World Wide Web Consortium that Berners-Lee heads is complex (and I would guess sometimes uneasy) coalition of businesses and agencies which will not speak with one voice.

From a UK perspective, a key problem seems to be the Coalition Government's unwillingness to enforce net neutrality, evidenced by the disappointing "ISPs should be able to manage their networks to ensure a good service and have flexibility in business models" in this media release for a 17/11/2010 speech by Communications Minister Ed Vaizey.

One way for UK readers to "defend the Web" is through membership of and support for the Open Rights Group.

Cath Ellis: iconoclasm and lecturing as a normative discourse

Some weeks after the 2010 Association for Learning Technology conference, with the agreement of Donald Clark and Sugata Mitra, and with the help of Martin Hawksey, ALT published versions of the videos of Donald's and Sugata's keynotes with the Twitter back-channel superimposed as subtitles. (Apparently this is something of a first.) Cath Ellis, who is a lecturer in English at the University of Huddersfield, has written an admirable piece Tweckling, iconoclasm and lecturing as a normative discourse, which reflects on the two keynotes, taking account of the reactions that each generated.

Disclosure: I work half-time for ALT.

Judging experimental evidence: a couple of informative essays

Proponents of ideas sometimes find, stake their careers on, and then cling to bogus evidence in support of their ideas, ignoring other, stronger, negating evidence. (think free schools, learning styles, neuroplasticity, and The Shallows.....).

Two essays by Peter Norvig: Evaluating Extraordinary Claims: Mind Over Matter? Or Mind Over Mind? and Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation are dryly written, entertaining, but at the same time very informative essays about research methods. The first essay illustrates the problem using an extended case study. The second provides a clear framework for judging experimental evidence more generally.

Clayton Wright's worldwide listing of educational technology conferences

Clayton Wright continues his very valuable contribution to the field of technology in learning with another comprehensive listing: "Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences for January to June 2011".

A varied crop of articles in the October 2010 ALT News Online

Here is a list of authors, titles and links from the current issue of ALT News Online. I think that Sean Duffy's piece about the design principles behind his excellent Excel Everest teach yourself Excel programme is particularly interesting, as is the Stuart Sutherland's and Ray Irving's article about CancerNursing.Org.

Sirin Soyoz - Identifying learning technologists – The key roles, activities and values of an emerging group.

John Stone - Technology revolution is the way for education to deliver through the cuts. 

Marion Walton - Deep thoughts or deep prejudices? 

Kevin McLaughlin -  When using technology makes a difference. 

Adam Blackwood - GPS:  What is the learning value of knowing where you are? 

Ray Irving and Stuart Sutherland - CancerNursing.org – A case study in international open educational resources. 

Sean Duffy - Make them struggle but keep them smiling – A set of design principles for interactive learning tools.

Bob Harrison - iStanford.

Bryony Taylor -  A Twitter experiment.

Meic Watkins and Liz Bennett - I don’t want any help!! - A survey of attitudes to help packages. 

Tom Browne, Roger Hewitt, Martin Jenkins, Julie Voce, Richard Walker and Hennie Yip - Key Findings from 2010 technology enhanced learning survey.

Adrian Perry - Instinct or reason – How education policy is made and how we might make it better.

 

A quick and dirty review of a Dell netbook running Ubuntu Linux

Over the last few weeks I've had on/off access to a Dell Latitude 2110 which I was offered to trial by a company working for Dell, in exchange for writing a brief review. I do not normally get distracted by this kind of thing, but when I idly asked if Dell could supply the review machine with Linux on it, and Dell said yes,  curiosity got the better of me.

Here is a rough and ready assessment of the device.

Features

1. Weight - 1.35 kg.
2. Construction - extremely solid with a non-slip easily gripped rubberized surface.
3. Keyboard - quiet action, with full-sized key, 250 x 100 mm, with trackpad.
4. Indicator lights - prominent and unambigious, for all the normal functions.
5. Security - Kensington lock point on either side of the device enabling a carrying strap to be fitted.
6. Resilient screen covering that looked like it would be difficult to puncture, but with a shiny enough surface to work badly in conditions of high ambient light.
7. Ports:
   • - on the sides not the rear - VGA, audio, three USB ports, network socket, power input;
   • - on the front - SD card reader.
8. Battery - removable 2.42 AmpH, with the option of a larger one, which would alter the keyboard and screen orientation, probably for the worse in both cases, by raising the rear of the machine, and possibly fowling the screen when opened to the maximum.
9. Power supply - rather bulky and weighing 380 g.
10. 144 GB hard disk; 1 GB? of RAM.
11. Video camera and microphone centrally positioned on the upper edge of the screen, and speakers positioned on either side of the screen.

Performance

1. Time to boot from cold - 45 seconds; time to load Firefox - 7 seconds.
2. Silent operation, but with slightly disconcerting barely discernable vibration from the hard disk.

The device in use

1. Strongly built, pleasingly designed, simple, and obvious, and perfectly satisfactory as a netbook, with the only stand-out flaws being the shiny screen and weighty power supply, with the latter only an issue for travellers.
2. Ubuntu and the supplied applications that I looked at worked OK but on the device supplied Firefox was not set up to play YouTube videos; I did not have the patience and possibly do not have the wherewithal to sort this problem out.
3. Several hours of operation using the standard battery.

Would I buy one?

For years I've spoiled myself with a series of top-of-the-range as light as you can get high specification laptops, usually with a docking station, full sized keyboard and large separate screen, doubling as a desktop machine, running Windows, and the Windows applications I am accustomed to and fluent in.  (The photo below is of the first of these, circa 1994. I think it cost about £1200, which is about £200o in today's money.) A netbook like the Latitude is not a substitute for my current set up (and nor is designed to be). But as a back-up or second machine, it would work well. As a device for student or pupil use I would consider it seriously, with the apparent build quality, good layout, nice grippy surface, and sensible positioning of ports all being points in its favour.

Value for money? This is not something I can easily judge given the big differences between bulk and single device prices.

Windows vs Ubuntu Linux? I would need to be confident that I would not be tripped up by the video problem I encountered, but my guess is that after a steepish and possibly enjoyable learning curve, I would become confident in problem solving, just as I have had to become with Windows. In a managed environment my guess is that you'd have a standard disk image organised via which everything could be made to work consistently.

1994 Dell 320 SLi - 1.6 kg, rubberised, running DOS and Ability Plus, with a mono LCD screen that worked worked well in direct sunlight. The then state of the art, and manufactured in Ireland.....

The impact of technology on classroom practice

The Impact of Technology: Value-added classroom practice [1.3 MB PDF, 95 pages], by Charles Crook, Colin Harrison, Lee Farrington-Flint, Carmen Tomás, and Jean Underwood was published recently on the Becta web site. The report is one of those useful and interesting attempts to get behind the normal generalisations, and to examine what teachers do, what works, and why.

Here is an excerpt from the executive summary.

The study reports an analysis of 85 lesson logs, in which teachers recorded their use of space, digital technology and student outcomes in relation to student engagement and learning. The teachers who filled in the logs, as well as their schools’ senior managers, were interviewed as part of a ‘deep audit’ of ICT provision conducted over two days. One-hour follow-up interviews with the teachers were carried out after the teachers’ log activity. The aim of this was to obtain a broader contextualisation of their teaching. The learning practices that we identified as mediating ICT for learning are presented as a taxonomy. This taxonomy is used to classify the lesson activity reported in the logs. We argue that ICT has reconfigured classroom practice in the project schools in important ways. Among these, we would highlight the following consequences:

• ICT makes possible new forms of classroom practice. This is apparent in three particular respects: (1) the reconfiguration of space such that new patterns of mobility, flexible working and activity management can occur, (2) new ways in which class activities can be triggered, orchestrated and monitored, (3) new experiences associated with the virtualisation of established and routine practices – such as using multiple documents in parallel or manipulating spatial representations.
• ICT creates the possibility of a wide variety of learning practices. Overarching this variety are three central activities which are significantly enriched by the increasingly ubiquitous availability of technologies: (1) exposition which is animated by the opportunity to invoke rich shared images, video and plans, (2) independent research which is extended by the availability of internet search opportunities, and (3) construction which is made possible by ready-to-hand ICT-based tools.