Fortnightly Mailing

US National Academy of Engineering selects "Advance personalized learning" as one of 14 grand challenges for engineering

Source: US National Archives

Advance personalized learning is in pretty august company as one of 14 grand challenges for engineering (alongside, for example, Make solar energy economical, Provide access to clean water, Prevent nuclear terror, and Provide energy from fusion) chosen earlier this year by a panel of luminaries including Ray Kurzweil, Alec Broers , and Google's Larry Page. (The picture, from the Grand Engineering Challenges web site, is of a one-room 1950s US school-room  where lessons were individualized, since classes included children of different ages.)

There are two short video interviews from panel members: Calestous Juma (Professor of the Practice of International Development, Harvard University), and Wesley Harris (Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The rubric about the personalized learning challenge is interesting for the way challenge is posed; and the fact that personalisation is seen as a long-term challenge - on a par with fusion power - does act as a useful caution to the current UK policy emphasis on achieving extensive personalisation using technology right now.

Becta-funded "Schools Open Source Project" is looking for serving teachers for its advisory committee

The Schools Open Source Project is looking for practising senior teachers to serve on the project's advisory committee. The committee will meet 3 or 4 times each year, receive reports from the project team and provide advice and guidance to ensure the service meets the objectives of the project and its customers. Here is an excerpt from the project web site:

"The Schools Open Source Project is a Becta funded initiative to help schools with awareness, adoption, deployment, use and ongoing development of Open Source Software. A number of schools are already realising the benefits of OSS within their ICT strategy. This project will work to share their experiences along with good OSS practice from other sectors with the wider community of educational practitioners, including teachers, decision makers and IT specialists.

From September 2008, we will provide an authoritative, informative and impartial website that will raise awareness of how OSS can be used to enhance teaching and school infrastructures. The project will then develop and support a community of practice that engages those who are currently using OSS and welcomes and supports new members."

A welcome development, but you are left wondering what the link is between this Becta-funded activity, and JISC's Open Source Software Advisory Service. How will these two services avoid duplication of effort? How can the knowhow they are each developing be shared? Why not have a single cross-sectoral service? Readers with insights are welcome to comment below, or to write to me directly and I will summarise.

ALT-C 2008 - Rethinking the Digital Divide. Programme published.

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT), for which I work half time, has just published the full draft programme for ALT-C 2008, which will take place in Leeds, England, between 9 and 11 September 2008. The programme [160 kB PDF] describes a wide spectrum of short papers, workshops, symposia, research papers, posters, and demonstrations. As reported previously, the keynote speakers are Hans Rosling, Itiel Dror, and David Cavallo. Invited speakers are Denise Kirkpatrick, Richard Noss, George Auckland, Lizbeth Goodman, George Siemens, Jane Hart, Gilly Salmon and Clive Shepherd. The deadline for booking is 15 August 2008.

E-learning strategy for England - 2008 to 2014

Becta has just published Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning 2008-14, an overall cradle-to-grave e-learning strategy for English education. There are some depressing charts on page 27,  which contrast how children say they prefer to learn:

with what they say happens most frequently in classrooms.

(The second chart looks to have a poorly edited title.)

Dr Ray Mercer's evidence for Desire2Learn about prior art

The US Patent Office is currently re-examining the e-learning patent it awarded Blackboard early in 2006, following Desire2Learn's and the Software Freedom Law Centre's successful inter partes and ex parte re-examination requests. Dr Ray Mercer's 26 June 2008 evidence for Desire2Learn [450 kB PDF]  - part of the supporting material to Desire2Learn's Comments by third party requester to patent owner's response in inter partes reexamination [570 kB PDF] - is not for the feint hearted. Ideally it needs to be read in parallel with Dr Mark Jones's evidence for Blackboard [320 kB PDF], to which it is, in effect, a response.

Step by step, Mercer sets out the extent to which, in his opinion, Patent Number 6,988,138 was anticipated by prior art, and thus should never have been granted by the US Patent Office. Mercer concentrates in his evidence on several different sources of prior art, including Serf, Top Class 2.0 and Virtual Campus (early on-line learning systems).

Most interesting to me was his consideration of the EDUCOM/NLII Instructional Management Systems Specifications Document Version 0.5 (April 29, 1998), which I wrote about at the end of August 2006. The feeling I get from reading Mercer's evidence is that Desire2Learn might have benefited from it during Blackboard's infringement case earlier this year (which Desire2Learn lost, comprehensively); and I'm puzzled as to why it was not obtained earlier in the process. (My eye has been rather off the Blackboard/Desire2Learn ball in recent months, and it is entirely possible that I missed an earlier Mercer document.)

Epic escapes from Huveaux

Updated 24/7/2008

In September 2005 I wrote this:

"Epic plc to be taken over by the Huveaux plc. Epic plc is a major and successful UK e-learning company. I've occasionally reviewed Epic's often useful e-learning White Papers in Fortnightly Mailing, and some readers may have read an online interview with me which appeared in Epic's July Newsletter. Over the past few months Epic has had a friendly "suitor". At the end of July the boards of Huveaux and Epic announced the terms of a recommended share and cash offer [68 kB PDF - link now dead] for Huveaux, to acquire Epic, with approval to be sought for the deal from Huveaux's shareholders at an Extraordinary General Meeting, on 7 September. (Huveaux was formed in 2001 with the objective of "building a substantial publishing and media business focused on the creation and delivery of "must have" information across both the public and private sectors".) On 12 August, Futuremedia plc, another UK-based e-learning company, just round the corner in Brighton from Epic, also announced its interest in buying Epic, but by 18 August, Huveaux had gained control of Epic, rendering Futuremedia's interest irrelevant. Donald Clark, Epic's Chief Executive, will stand down from this role, and become a consultant to Huveaux."

I believe Huveaux paid over £20m for Epic. The offer valued the entire issued share capital of Epic at approximately £22.7 million.

33 months years later Huveaux has now sold Epic to successful entrepreneur Andrew Brode, for less than it originally paid (~£5m? ... which would imply an average loss of value since the original sale of over £1m per quarter). Jonathan Satchell, brought in by Huveaux in December 2007 to find a buyer, will continue as Epic's CEO. My guess is that away from Huveaux's largely print-based stable, Epic will thrive once more. Update - 24/7/2008. This 24/7/2008 post by Epic's founder, Donald Clark, has more.

Anarchy. The hidden cost of open access.

"Ah, sweet irony. If this article had undergone "peer review", or some other accuracy or quality checking criteria, then it would never had seen the light of day..."

writes John Kirriemuir amongst the many others deriding Philip Altbach's recent Hidden cost of open access in the 5 June 2008 Times Higher, for asserting this in particular:

"Profit, competition and excess have spawned the open-access movement. Academics, librarians and administrators think it is the answer to monopolistic journals. But there are several problems with it. Chief among them is that peer review is eliminated - all knowledge becomes equal. There is no quality control on the internet, and a Wikipedia article has the same value as an essay by a distinguished researcher. Open access may also offer greater benefit to those already at the top of the knowledge tree. A less well-known institution in a developing country would likely gain less attention than Harvard. While traditional journals also tend to privilege scholars working at top institutions, at least the peer-review system allows some opportunity for publication in recognised journals.

Essentially, open access means there is no objective way of measuring research quality. If the traditional journals and their peer-review systems are no longer operating, anarchy rules. Researchers will have no accurate way of assessing quality in a scholarly publication."

XP on the OLPC. Proprietary software meets open source hardware.

Normally it is the other way round.

In the continuation post below is a 5 minute video of Microsoft's Bohdan Rakiborski explaining somewhat thinly how Microsoft made Windows XP and Office run on the OLPC. The video serves also as an impressive demonstration of the OLPC laptop itself. There is no mention of OLPC's mesh networking capability - key to its exploitation as an educational device - and which is presumably inoperative when the OLPC runs Windows XP; and of the suite of educational software that ships with OLPC there is no sign. Because it is gone.....

There is a telling look on Rakiborski's face when he says "It starts up about four times faster than the original operating system that ships on the XO laptop" (is this mainly a result of the addition of a 2 GB SD memory card?), but Rakiborski is pretty obviously taken with the underlying design of the laptop - low power consumption, sunlight readable screen, e-book mode etc*.

* At the 2006 World Economic Forum Bill Gates reportedly said, "If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user. Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type."

When the cloud bursts - following an electrical fire in a data centre in Texas

Over the weekend a large data-centre in Texas suffered an electrical fault, resulting in a fire and in several thousand servers providing services to several thousand customers (including me, indirectly, as my Statcounter site statistics service is hosted there), being taken off line - with some data-loss. A fascinating chronology of how Planet, the company running the data-centre, handled the emergency, is (currently) visible on the company's bulletin board.

Ultra-mobile PCs in abundance - all are potential platforms for Sugar

Walter Bender writes in the 2/6/2008 Sugar Digest (see this earlier post for more on Sugar):

"The success of the OLPC XO and the ASUS Eee PC seems to have attracted the attention of the industry: it has been a busy week in the world of ultra-mobile PCs. Dell (see http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/dells-mini-inspiron-eee-pc-killer-revealed/), Acer (see
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/first-pics-of-acers-aspire-one-eee-pc-twin/),  Wizbook (see http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/28/noon-eee-pc-wizbook-hits), Elonex (see http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8294433279.html), and Kanguru (see http://pc.kanguru.pt/Home/) were all making headlines. Each of these machines represents yet another potential platform for running Sugar."