Fortnightly Mailing

What makes Finnish schools successful?

Long, almost incredulous piece in the Wall Street Journal by Ellen Gamerman comparing the Finnish school system with the US system - via Stephen Downes. (A similar comparison could have been made with the English system, and there was BBC news coverage of this back in 2004; and here is a previous Fortnightly Mailing post about this year's PISA data.) Here is an extract:

"Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. 'In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs,' says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.

One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck."

Google Sites - what JotSpot's "application wiki" has become

Updated 4/3/2008

We've used JotSpot internally in ALT to good effect for our "Operations Manual" for several years; and during 2005-2006 I was involved in using it for producing the TUC's online course development and management manual. Last year Google bought JotSpot, and JotSpot went into a sort of benign limbo - we ceased having to pay for the service, no new features were added to it, and no new JotSpot sites could be created. After six months of rumour that the Google version of JotSpot was imminent, Google finally relaunched JotSpot today as Google Sites. I've not had a chance to look at it properly; but at first glance it appears simpler than JotSpot - not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a good thing either. Our existing JotSpot site remains unchanged, and the question within ALT will be whether we can start to create new user accounts on the site, which we've not been able to do since last year's take-over. I have a nasty feeling that we'll not be able to, though I hope I'll be proved wrong. with its functionality apparently intact. So far so good, but I had (naively) been hoping that  existing JotSpot sites would miraculously transform themselves into the new "sites" system without any action by subscribers. According to this 29 February report in InfoWorld by Juan Carlos Perez, Google intends to provide a "one click" conversion process. If readers have insights or practical experience on this issue please comment below.

Riina Vuorikari - Patents and e-learning do not make a good match - what’s “Blackboard Inc. vs. Desire2Learn” gotta do with the EU?

Here, via Stephen Downes, is a post by Riina Vuorikari with a European angle on software patents in general and e-learning-related software patents in particular. Riina's “Money spent on software patent and defending against litigation would be better spent on development, education and training” is brought into sharp relief by Blackboard Inc. and Desire2Learn having spent between them well over USD 10m on bringing and defending the infringement claim. So far. I do not know what the "gearing" is between vendor and user spending on lawyers, risk avoidance etc, but I am certain that the fact of the patent dispute has led to a large number of user organisations incurring unwanted management and legal costs; and not just in the US. For example on answering questions like "if we choose this VLE, what risks to do we run that the vendor will go out of business?"; "if we use an open source product, are we at risk of legal action?". At the heart of this is a specific kind of market failure, in which  "maximizing value for shareholders" conflicts with the general good;  and whilst the US patent system might encourage and enable technological progress generally, it fails in relation to software.

Vacancy for Director of Development with the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

Some readers of Fortnightly Mailing may be interested in being Director of Development with the Association for Learning Technology. The closing date for applications is 6 March 2008; and if you know of people who might be interested, and suited, please tell them.

(Disclosure: I work half time for ALT.)

Harvard researchers voting on whether to publish scholarly research free on the Internet

Via the Sloan-c mailing list, here is the lead-in to an article in the 12/2/2008 New York Times by Patricia Cohen:

"Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost. 'In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,' said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. 'It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.'"

Blackboard v Desire2Learn: Joint Final Pre-trial Order

Here is the Joint Final Pre-trial Order [130 kB PDF] which summarises, in 16 clear pages,  the main issues that will be tested in the patent trial due to start on Monday 11 February in Lufkin, Texas. Expect a result by the end of  February.

Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn?

Amended 9/2/2008, 10/2/2008, 4/3/2008

Donald Clark takes a fairly well-aimed swipe at the quality of the content being made freely available under the Open University's MIT OpenCourseWare-inspired OpenLearn initiative.

Several readers of Fortnightly Mailing will know the current ins and outs at the OU, but when I wrote about Open Learn in 2006, the OU planned to put about 5% of its materials into OpenLearn (as compared with MIT's decision to make the whole lot open); and poking about in the materials that have been made available you get the impression that the OU has been cautious about what to make open, allowing its laudable experiment to take place with only its more mundane content.

A further problem is that the implementation makes the material unpleasant to use on screen, especially if you are scan-reading it rather than using it, as it was designed, for learning. For example the course I looked at was broken down into very small chunks, and the latency between pages, with a typical "broadband" connection, was far too long for convenience.

The impression you get is that there was internal pressure from those saying "but we depend on people to pay for our courses, we cannot risk putting some of the 'top sellers' into Open Learn".

I think that if the OU does not use OpenLearn to showcase its best stuff, the OpenLearn initiative risks being judged as some rather pedestrian content sitting in a (possibly) innovative environment. That would be  a major missed opportunity.

Firefox uptake around the world

Twice today I encountered academic web sites that did not work at all in Firefox; in both cases these were sites that simply could not afford to have users struggle with them.

It is some time since I looked at figures for the uptake of Firefox as compared with Internet Explorer and other browsers:  when I searched I found this interesting map in a late 2007 article on the French company XiTi's web site.

Scroll down the article for a much wider range of informatively organised data.

Event in London on 20/2/2008 to showcase R&D in the UK about learning mediated by technology

ALT, for which I work part time, supports a the Lab Group, a collaboration between labs which do R&D in learning mediated by technology. We are organising the 2008 Lab Group Open Day, sponsored by JISC, at Oracle's City of London offices, between 10.45 and 15.30 on Wednesday 20 February. Around a dozen labs will be presenting:

• The Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) – Cambridge University
• Inspire – Anglia Ruskin University
• Institute for Educational Cybernetics – Bolton University
• Institute of Educational Technology – Open University
• Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) – Bristol University
• Futurelab – Bristol
• Institute for Social and Technical Research (formerly Chimera) – Essex University
• Learning Science Research Institute (LSRI) – Nottingham University
• Learning Societies Lab – Southampton University
• Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI) – London Metropolitan University
• London Knowledge Lab – Birkbeck and the Institute of Education
• The Serious Games Institute (SGI) – Coventry University
• SmartLab – University of East London

The closing date for bookings is Monday 11 February 2008. (There is no charge for attendance.) Further information and booking form. Full programme for the day [140 kB PDF]. Descriptive flyer for the day [100 kB PDF].

Nintendo DS shows educators the future - useful piece by Donald Clark

Donald Clark's Consumer e-learning goes global is worth reading in full. Excerpt:

"Over Christmas something quite extraordinary happened. E-learning became a global consumer phenomenon. Nintendo has been THE global success in games this year with learning product. So how did Nintendo do what educators have been trying for eons to achieve (unsuccessfully)? Simple, they went back to some basic principles in the psychology of learning around motivation, goals and spaced practice. They realised that one-on-one content, that becomes addictive for the learner, played a little but often, is the way ahead in learning. In designing a game that appeals to all ages they’ve literally created a massive consumer-led e-learning market."