Fortnightly Mailing

Categorising information on the way out?

Donald Clark strikes a cord in Are we outsourcing memory?

"I've been blogging for years only to find that my posts form a sort of archive of thoughts that I often turn to for answers to questions I’m asked or reports I write or for items in talks I give at conferences."

It is easy to think of Donald's:

"What's remarkable about all of this outsourced memory is that it's free. The tools, storage and retrieval are all free. It's hard to see how astonishing this change has been, how absolutely revolutionary."

as stating the obvious; but plenty of people (and policies) fail to recognise how far "plain old web search", alongside the use of alerting mechanisms like RSS or Google Alerts, and a bit  (lot?) of tacit nous is increasingly how, in the developed world at least, knowledge is mediated for users, rather than visits to portals or repositories or gateways or other places where dedicated and committed professionals have spent time systematically organising, tagging, and cataloging material. (I know I've not got this quite right yet, but what is now happening feels to be that rather than the publisher, host, or owner of material needing to "categorise information on the way in", the user can "categorise it on the way out", with shape given to information by the user's choice of search terms, by the judgment he or she then exercises, and by the algorithms that rank-order what the user finds.)

Rethinking the digital divide - the themes for the 2008 ALT Conference, and the call for proposals

The paper submissions system for the 2008 Association for Learning Technology Conference opened on 14 December 2007, and will remain so until 29 February 2008. Meanwhile ALT  has announced the 7 (well 8) dimensions of the conference. Proposals for inclusion should address up to 3 of these:

• global or local;
• institutional or individual;
• pedagogy or technology;
• access or exclusion;
• open or proprietary;
• private or public;
• for the learner or by the learner;    
• or other aspects of the digital divide.

[Disclosure: I am employed half-time by ALT.]

Making sense of this year's PISA data

The Economist carries a generally helpful review of the OECD's PISA study, from which I take the image above, which shows how in Finland - top overall - the differences between schools are almost negligible. According to the Economist, the factors most affecting a country's ranking are: giving school principals the power to control budgets, set incentives and decide whom to hire and how much to pay them; publishing school results; and, most importantly, high-quality teachers. "A common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates."

For more on that issue, see Dylan Wiliam's Keynote Speech at the 2007 ALT Conference, with this extract from the soon-to-be now-published full transcript squaring very well with the massive in-school variance revealed by the PISA study for Britain:

"The variability at teacher level is about four times the variability at school level. If you get one of the best teachers, you will learn in six months what an average teacher will take a year to teach you. If you get one of the worst teachers, that same learning will take you two years. There's a four-fold difference in the speed of learning created by the most and the least effective teachers."

The first batch of Uruguay's 100,000 OLPC XO laptops are issued

"This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops."

I'd probably be linking to Ivan Krstić's 1/12/2007 first hand, detailed, picture-rich report on the distribution of OLPC laptops at School Number 109 in the small Uruguayan town of Florida, even if I wasn't half Uruguayan.

Over the next few months, a total of 100,000 XO laptops will be distributed in Uruguay. According to Krstić, who is the OLPC Director of Security             Architecture, the Government of Peru has just signed for over 250,000 machines.

Some previous posts about OLPC:

• Nov 2007 Wall Street Journal: OLPC "stomped by tech giants"?
• Nov 2007 OLPC begins mass production, and EA makes SimCity Open Source for OLPC use
• Sep 2007 Big IT is taking notice of One Laptop Per Child
• Sep 2007 "University Chapters" - a way to get involved in OLPC
• Aug 2007 David Cavallo, OLPC Chief Learning Architect to be keynote speaker at 2008 Association for Learning Technology Conference
• Jul 2007 What's inside the One Laptop Per Child laptop?
• May 2007 OLPC Laptops arrive in Uruguay: where flooding has caused a state of emergency
• Nov 2006 One laptop per child - further information and progress
• Oct 2006 Jonathan Zittrain: what would you install on one laptop per child? Guest Contribution from Steve Ryan

Yahoo! for Teachers goes more public

Yahoo! has begun to send out authorization codes to people who have signed up to try out Yahoo! for Teachers, "a place for educators to find, create, and share standards-based classroom materials". YFT makes use of a tool, called "Gobbler", that you download and install locally, and which you can use to  "gather images, text clippings, and web pages from the Web into projects in your portfolio", from which "you can create documents to use in your classroom", and which you can (or have to?) make publicly available for others to use. The term "standards-based" caught my eye, but when I searched within YFT for it, I could find no references to it.

At the moment i) the content available is overwhelmingly focused on the US school curriculum and ii) you need a Yahoo!-issued username and password to access the service. You can sign up for an invitation on the Yahoo! site. This Google blog-search will give you an insight (of sorts) into current reactions to YFT.

Wall Street Journal: OLPC "stomped by tech giants"?

Updated 24/11/2007; 26/11/2007.

Interesting and complex piece by Steve Stecklow and James Bandler, who assert in the 24/11/2007 Wall Street Journal that demand for the One Laptop Per Child laptop has been far lower than originally hoped, with, so far, only Uruguay solidly committed to it, and Libya apparently switching from OLPC to Intel's Windows-based Classmate. Stecklow and Bandler imply that Intel, which normally makes chips not devices, is actively seeking to stifle the OLPC laptop with the Classmate partly because the OLPC processor is supplied by AMD, its only competitor in the chip market. Meanwhile, the give one get one programme has been extended to 31/12/2007, "thanks to a growing interest in the program", which is reported to have taken 45,000 orders in its first 9 days of operation.

[24/11/2007 addendum prompted by Wayan's comment below.] For a detailed discussion of the WSJ article, with plenty of comments, see Wayan's piece in OLPC News. [26/11/2007] Further details of the scale of demand under Give One Get One, see ZDNET's How do we guage success: will 490,000 units do?.

David Weinberger: the future of book nostalgia

Updated 5/12/2007 with link, also via Weinberger, to Mark Pilgrim's "Future of Reading".

Long and interesting piece by David Everything is Miscellaneous Weinberger about the future of books and libraries, written as a response to Anthony Grafton's Future Reading - Digitisation and its Discontents in the New Yorker. Weinberger is no "anti-library philistine" - he is notably enthusiastic about libraries and librarians - but that does not stop him from acknowledging what he describes as the "existing and coming discontinuity" in the way that knowledge is/will be stored, mediated, and distributed, and the changing role of printed material. Weinberger's article, which is worth reading in full, concludes:

"Many of us share Grafton's nostalgia for books. But what will we miss about them, truly? The way they feel and smell? What does that have to do with knowledge, wisdom, understanding? We should not be shaping our systems of education and learning around the fetishes of collectors.

When we have interactive, networked, paper-quality devices, we will say good bye to books, and good riddance.

And our hearts will break a little."

I suppose my feeling is that the "when" should be more of a "maybe", notwithstanding Amazon's Kindle. Having stuff to refer to, search, annotate etc - a lot of it - on or accessible from a device is one thing. Getting down to some serious reading on a device rather than on paper is another, and the sheer utility and flexibility of print for this, in the bath, in bed etc., will take some beating. [5/12/2007] And for a provocative and much deeper and broader view, see Mark Pilgrim's 19/11/2007 The Future of Reading - A Play in Six Acts.

OLPC begins mass production, and EA makes SimCity Open Source for OLPC use

Originally written 7/11/2007; updated 11/11/2007

Today there are plenty of reports that the OLPC laptop has gone into mass production. I'm trying to get my hands on one through the (US only....) give one / get one programme that will start on 12/11/2007, with a well-organised media campaign, including a full page donated advert in the Economist, and professionally produced public service announcements on YouTube such as this one (the "Download video!" link does not function): 

Meanwhile the global games company EA has made Will Wright's original SimCity open source so that it can be ported onto the OLPC laptop. Some of the companies that subscribe to Fortnightly Mailing have content that might be suited for OLPC re-use, though SimCity is, as a learning environment, rather in a class of its own); and conceivably some of the material from Jam, the BBC's scrapped £150m on-line content service for school pupils, upon which the BBC has gone rather quiet, might also be suitable.

Marc Andreessen on OpenSocial: a new universe of social applications all over the web

[Updated 13.30 1/11/2007; 2/11/2007]

In the mid 1990s Marc Andreessen was one of the originally developers of Netscape, the browser that enabled the World Wide Web to take off in the mass way that it did. In June I wrote something about Ning, a promising looking commercial platform for supporting social networks which Andreessen founded with Gina Bianchini.

Here is a 31/10/2007 "top level technical" piece by Andreessen about Google's about-to-launch OpenSocial, which seems to provide a way for suppliers of social networking applications to make their applications work with each other, and for developers of individual components for social networking applications to make them work on any participating social networking platform. There is also a follow up post by Andreesson, with a screen-cast showing OpenSocial in action, for which thanks to Simon Grant; and this piece in the New York Times (via The Register) picks up on the fact that MySpace and Bebo, two of the largest social networking services are tied into OpenSocial.

Today Google is itself silent on OpenSocial, but from the tone of Andreessen's piece, that will change very soon. (It has). Expect serious concerns to emerge about privacy and the sharing/re-use of personal data.

Becta reports Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading - 19 October 2007

Here are three extracts from a 19/10/2007 Kable's Government Computing news item:

"The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency has referred Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading for alleged anti-competitive practices in the schools software market Becta, the government's education ICT partner, made the complaint on 19 October 2007. It also relates to concerns over Microsoft's policy on document interoperability."
...

"The agency's main concerns surround the limitations Microsoft places on schools using its subscription licensing arrangements and the potential interoperability difficulties for schools, pupils and parents who wish to use alternatives to Microsoft's Office software, including "free to use" alternatives."
...

"Becta advised schools that have already entered into a school agreement licensing model to consider their renewal and buyout options alongside the OFT's findings. Schools and colleges should only deploy Office 2007 when there is satisfactory interoperability with alternative products."

Becta's own press release.