Fortnightly Mailing

Copyright and related rights policy issues

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has a web site - Intellectual Property Office - Copyright and related rights policy issues - summarising current policy issues relating to Copyright in the UK.  An example is this summary of where things currently stand on the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, with a link to a summary of responses made under last year's consultation. The latter shows the deep divide that exists between users and rights holders, and it will be interesting how this is addressed in the forthcoming second consultation, which will include proposals for changes to the law in the area of copyright exceptions. (In case it is of interest, here is ALT's response to last year's preliminary consultation [~50kB PDF]¹.)

¹ Disclosure: I am employed part time by ALT.

Andrew Gowers (of the Gowers Report) disparages the current Culture Secretary's call for copyright extension

Andrew Gowers used to be editor of the Financial Times and he subsequently led the Government's Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, which proposed some beneficial changes in IP law. On 14 December 2008 the Financial Times carried an Opinion piece by Gowers criticising the current Culture Secretary Andy Burnham for suggesting that the Government will consider extending copyright for recordings to 70 years from the present 50. "All the respectable research shows that copyright extension has high costs to the public and negligible benefits for the creative community," says Gowers.

With thanks to the Open Rights Group, which I helped found, for highlighting this article.

Pearson buys Fronter

The Bookseller and others report the acquisition by Pearson of Fronter. So now Pearson, one of the world's largest publishing business, with a market capitalisation of around $5bn, owns in Fronter, a highly regarded VLE supplier as well as eCollege, a US supplier of VLE services to (mainly US distance) education providers, which it acquired last year. Who should be worried about this? My guess is that the smaller suppliers of VLEs to schools in the UK will feel a bit threatened; and if Pearson decides to move in the direction of HE, then it definitely has the weight and international presence to give companies like Desire2Learn and Blackboard a run for their money.

"In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" ...

... is not the title of the 2009 Association for Learning Technology¹ conference, and it would have been a step too far to so name ALT-C 2009, which will take place between 8 and 10 September 2009 in Manchester, UK.

Instead we chose a different phrase from WB Yeats and named the conference "In dreams begins responsibility" - choice, evidence, and change. The calls for proposals for research papers, short papers, workshops, posters, demonstrations, and symposia has now been issued and are available at ALT papers page on the ALT-C 2009 web site. Individual documents are as follows:

• Call and Guidelines for Research Papers [10 page 59 kB PDF file]
• Research Paper Template [4 page 53 kB DOC file]
• Call and Guidelines for Short Papers, Posters, Symposia, Workshops and Demonstrations [10 page 60 kB PDF file]

Key dates

1. Proposals accepted from late December 2008
2. Deadline for receipt of proposals: midnight UK time on 16 February 2009
3. Bookings open during May 2009
4. Presenters' registration deadline 29 June 2009
5. Earlybird registration deadline 6 July 2009
6. Bookings close on 14 August 2009

¹ I am employed part time by ALT.

The death rate of "NEETs", and the educational performance of looked after children

I spent some time this week at a stock-taking overnight workshop organised by Becta, which focused on the "Harnessing Technology" strategy for England. I'm not going to report from the workshop, bar to mention two statistics that were referenced by one of the workshop speakers, both of which will stop you in your tracks.

The first concerns young adults who are not in employment, education, or training (known in education-speak as NEETs).  Work in a major English city shows that one in six male NEETs are dead within 10 years of leaving school.

The second concerns looked after children. Whereas well over half of children in England leave school with at least 5 grade A*-C GCSE passes at school, only around 16% of looked-after children achieve this¹.

These two figures set in context the practical and policy challenges facing Ed Balls, Secretary of State at the Department for Children, Schools, and Families (DCSF) last July, at the launch of the new department, who said (and I am sure means) :

"Our aspirations are straightforward and ambitious: every child deserves to be safe and loved and have a healthy and happy childhood, free from harm; and every child should have the chance to make the most of their talents and fulfil their potential. To do this, we must provide excellent universal services for all children and their families be able to identify potential problems early, before things go wrong; and when children are at risk, do something quickly to help children and their families get back on track."

¹ As an aside, someone mentioned to me that looked-after children in Germany have a better-than-average educational performance.

David Wiley's "Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education"

In 1998 my enthusiasm for openness was given a boost (or started?) by David Wiley and the Open Content license that he developed. At that time the use of such licenses, which have been superseded and absorbed by Creative Commons, was very rare. (The LeTTOL course was originally published under an Open Content License, though this seems no longer to be the case.) Ten years later, David Wiley's influence has grown a great deal, and his 85 slide presentation Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education deserves to be widely viewed, though you can only follow Wiley's argument to a certain extent from his slides; and without that you cannot develop a critique or endorsement of it.

[With thanks to Dan Barker for highlighting this.]

Mick Waters on personalisation: "unless pressed, I never use the word"

In previous posts I've been sceptical about personalisation (April 2006; October 2006; January 2007 ; March 2007).  On 17 November the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee took oral evidence from Mick Waters and Teresa Bergin (respectively Director of Curriculum and Director of the Diploma Programme at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority), Professor David Hargreaves (Associate Director for Development and Research, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, and a past chair of Becta), and Tim Oates (Director of Assessment Research and Development, at the major examining body Cambridge Assessment). The uncorrected record of evidence must make uncomfortable reading for those still wedded to use of the term. Here are some extracts.

Hargreaves: 'We have been struggling with this definition for four years, and I have concluded that it is a total waste of time trying to find a tight definition-it does not work; there are too many of them. In that sense, my sympathies are entirely with Mr. Heppell. The current thing from the Department quotes the definition given in the Gilbert report on teaching well in 2020, of which I was a member: "It means strengthening the link between learning and teaching by engaging pupils-and their parents-as partners in learning." In my view, that is well-intentioned waffle. It is well intentioned, but it means nothing. In fact, many schools will say that that is what they do. There is no implication of action at all. '

Mick Waters: 'Unless pressed, I never use the word, because I think that it has become one of those things that everyone says but hardly anyone does.'

Professor Hargreaves: 'When you cannot define it, the best thing to do is to not use it. I agree with Mick. I think that it has outlived its usefulness. When Tony Blair made the original challenge back in 2004, it was a very real challenge. Today, our interest is in how to redesign the whole experience of schooling, so that our young people achieve more and find their education a good one. Personalisation was a useful way forward at a certain period, to draw attention to something. I am personally sorry that the Department has a thing called "personalised learning", as though it is a thing we can identify. It is not. "Personalised" was always the wrong word; it was always a process of personalising, as in the business world. It is past its usefulness. We would be much better looking for words on which we can find more agreement-such as curriculum, choice and entitlement-than having the debate strained. Frankly, I wish the Department would drop the concept.'

Dan Hill on the new State Library of Queensland

Two impressive posts by Dan Hill about the State Library of Queensland, one from the perspectives of a user - "The best public library I’ve seen anywhere. Certainly superior to the Bibliothèque National de France, far superior to the British Library, and superior even to the otherwise peerless Seattle Public Library, to name but three I’ve studied in person. And despite having a fraction of their budget, I’d guess." - and the other with some intriguing visualisations of the library's "wifi ambience", along with some atmospheric and very classy sketches of laptop users at work.

European debut for OLPC XO1 laptop

Updated 09.10 17/11/2008

According the BBC, OLPC is planning to sell XO1 laptops in Europe via Amazon from 17 November. (If you search Amazon for OLPC you get a related result [124 kB PDF], dominated by a competitor's product.) Although it is unclear from the Amazon web site, the machines will apparently be sold under the "Give One, Get One" scheme that the OLPC organisation has already run in the US, with £275 securing one XO1 for you and contributing one XO1 for use in less developed countries by OLPC.

11/4/2008 review of OLPC in Fortnightly Mailing by Geoff Stead of the Tribal Group.

Could the UK become a world leader in e-learning?

The UK's Department for Innovation Universities and Skills has launched a public discussion on a report commissioned from Sir Ron Cooke [300 kB PDF], about how the UK might become a world-leader in higher education e-learning¹. DIUS is eager to encourage discussion of this report, to which ALT contributed, and in partnership with JISC, a blog has been set up to record public comments on Sir Ron Cooke's report.

Personally I think that though the report's "The experience of Ufi/learndirect in providing high quality e-learning should also be built upon." is a correct sentiment to express, not enough is made of the need to examine and build upon the experience of Ufi/learndirect, one of the UK's few really successful large scale on-line learning interventions.

Readers who are enthusiastic about open educational resources will be pleased, as I am, at the overall strong emphasis on OER: "It is taken for granted in the research process that one builds on the work of others; the same culture can usefully be encouraged in creating learning materials." But, having nailed its colours so strongly to the OER mast, with five OER-related actions, of which this is one example:

"A comprehensive national resource of freely available open learning content should be established to provide an “infrastructure” for broadly based virtual education provision across the community. This needs to be curated and organised, based on common standards, to ensure coherence, comprehensive coverage and high quality."

I believe that the report somewhat skims over the profound cultural and organisational change that will be needed in HE if use of OER is to become really widespread, with the proposal for the setting up of a number of "distributed centres of excellence" in OER being insufficient to bring about the kinds of changes that are envisaged.

^1. ALT, for which I work part-time, provided extensive comments on drafts of Ron Cooke's report.