Fortnightly Mailing

Millions being wasted on a deserted Second Life? [Updated 26/6/2009]

Source: Schome web site - see link below

[Updated 24 September 2007, on 5 October 2007, and on 26 June 2009]

Roughly this time last year I wrote about Cyber One: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, a course being offered by Harvard Law School and the Harvard Extension School using the "virtual world" Second Life as a vehicle. Around the same time business interest in Second Life was picking up, with the 28/9/2006 Economist publishing a 3 page explanatory feature, which emphasised the value of Second Life for teaching and learning.

During the last year there has been much interest in Second Life in UK Higher Education. For example, the Eduserv Foundation ran a well publicised and successful conference on Second Life in May. Meanwhile, Nature has an island - Second Nature - in Second Life and is reportedly trialling integration between Second Life and external research databases; and in June 2007 the BBC broadcast an edition of its influential Money Programme from within Second Life. [BBC press release. BBC news coverage.] [24/9/2007] Link to some optimistic comic-style explanations produced by the OU's Schome Project of how Second Life can provide a challenging environment for learning. [5/10/2007] Link to a thoughtful piece about immersive environments, written as a report from a recent "serious games" conference, by John Helmer, Marketing Director at Epic plc [27/6/2009] at the time this post was originally written.

Personally I found "being" in Second Life generally disquieting and completely unmotivating, thinking "why would anyone want to spend time in here?"; and talking last weekend with my 21-year-old son and one of his friends (both Internet-savvy, Facebook- and Myspace-using, web-site creating, CAD or graphics-fluent individuals), we were laughing at the way our lack of interest in Second Life made us sound like "left-behind" old fogies. 

Maybe we are not completely wrong in our disinterest. Here is a highly sceptical article about Second Life by Frank Rose in the 24/7/2007 issue of Wired. Excerpt:

"Then there's the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn't much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden's in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM's Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27."

3 million broadband customers are encouraged to share their WiFi

I've been a member of the FON community more or less since its inception. With a 34.44 Euro (and, in the early stages, free) wireless router from FON we make our broadband freely available to anyone within reach of our router. FON members get free access. Non-members pay an hourly rate.

FON, which is a business not a philanthropic operation, is impressively international in its tone.

According to  FON, BT, the UK's biggest provider of ADSL broadband, has announced that it is integrating FON into BT, and is inviting more than 3 million customers "to join the enormous global community of people sharing their WiFi".

The cynic in me says there must be a catch?

A reader comments by email: "I don't think there's reason to be cynical. I presume BT gets a split on the daily fees Fon charges non-Fon members for using a Fon member's wifi. I think and assume it's a straightforward commercial, money-making deal for BT. And for Fon."]

[8/10/2007 update: see The Register's "BT says its WiFi kibbutz is not targeting 3G".]

Becta's process for giving new shape to the e-strategy for education in England

Clickable thumbnail of larger image from Becta document

Harnessing Technology: Learning in the 21st Century, a Call to Action [8 pages, 3 MB PDF] - has just been published by Becta as the introduction for a series of policy seminars concerning the e-learning strategy. These take place between September and November 2007, and they lead up to a National Conference to be run by Becta on 6 November (election, if called, permitting).  Click on the thumbnail image above to see the timetable, process, and some of the people involved.

Thanks to Jacob Blandy for extracting these images from the Becta document.

China's second largest privately held media firm forms partnership with UK e-learning company

According to a press release issued today by LP+  (with quotes from Doug Brown, Head of the Technology Futures Unit at the English Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), Steve Beswick, head of education at Microsoft UK, Mehool Sanghrajka, CEO of LP+, and Bruno Wu, head of the apparently intermittently web site less Sun Media Investment Group) LP+ (whose newly appointed Executive Chairman is Stephen Heppell) and Sun Media "are going to build the largest e-learning platform in the world", providing a learning platform for 20 million Chinese in schools in 20 Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai.

The press release makes no direct mention of this, but as I listened blearily to an interview with Bruno Wu on this morning's 6 a.m. national news, I got the impression that Sun Media has bought or taken a stake in LP+, which would be consistent with one of the press release's quotes from Wu: "This is also exciting for me because it’s a partnership with a UK company to bring Chinese technology to the global education market."

ICT in Higher Education: what do prospective students want and expect?

Source: JISC MORI report, published September 2007

"Fundamentally, this age group suspects that if all learning is mediated through technology, this will diminish the value of the learning."

During June 2007 the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) commissioned Ipsos MORI to undertake research among prospective university students to understand:

• current levels of ICT provision at school/college
• expectations of ICT provision at university
• differences between expectation of ICT provision and that which is provided by HE institutions.

The study forms part of a bigger piece of research being undertaken by JISC to better understand student expectations of ICT provision.

This is a "must read" report, produced by researchers without an ICT axe to grind, which provides a wide range of current insights into how university-bound late teenagers in a developed country view, think about and use (and not...) ICT.

The full 40 page report is available on the JISC web site as a 1 MB PDF.

Google switches on Presentation, its competitor to Microsoft's PowerPoint

Here is a link to the announcement on the Official Google Blog about Presentation, which is part of the Google Docs family, and which offers a simple web-based "slide" creator. Expect Google to very soon launch its wiki, based on Jotspot (acquired by Google last year). The arguments for educational providers to give all their staff and learners Google accounts are getting steadily more persuasive, even without taking account of the potentially massive savings to be made in infrastructure and support costs.

Big IT is taking notice of One Laptop Per Child

Nortel provides telecommunications infrastructure and services and has annual revenues of around USD 10 billion. Here is a September 12 piece about One Laptop Per Child by John Roese, Nortel's CTO. Nortel develops, makes, and sells the stuff that enables networked devices to connect to each other. So it is no surprise that Roese is keen on "hyper-connectivity", which he defines as "a state in which the number of network connections exceeds the number of humans using the network". But the point about Roese's piece is that the evidence it provides that "big IT" is taking notice of OLPC, and most certainly does not see it is as a the work of a "bunch of well-meaning open source amateurs", as it is sometimes characterised. 

Norvig, Wiliam, and Selinger - keynotes from ALT's 2007 Conference. Plus useful interview with Norvig.

[Updated 13/9/2007 with links in notes section to BBC and Custom PC interviews with Peter Norvig, on 22/9/2007 with this link to a post by Ian Harford quoting in full Norvig's  reply to his question about user involvement in "ranking" web sites, and on 4/10/2007 with this link to Theorising from Data, which is a long presentation about how Google extracts meaning from data.]

You can access the full keynote presentations from the 4-6 September 2007 Association for Learning Technology* Conference as large files that can be viewed within Elluminate from the ALT-C 2007 web site. More open format versions due over the next week or so.

What I found most interesting was the dovetailing between Dylan Wiliam's absolutely gripping talk and Peter Norvig's more laid-back one.

Both concentrated in part on what can improve the progress that learners in formal education make, without increasing costs.

In different ways they each identified the key as "better formative feedback"; and I was left feeling that one particular enabler of progress would be some sustained collaboration between i) academic and industry researchers in the online testing domain, and ii) the engineers behind systems like Google's own translation tools. The reason I think this is that each are concerned with drawing out semantic meaning from large amounts of complex multifaceted data; and I would love to be a fly on the wall at a seminar involving people from both these worlds.

Two other aspects of Norvig's talk that struck me hard were this diagram from Adrian Sannier, of Arizona State University, which illustrates the rationale (on our partner's development curve not our own) behind ASU's decision to make very extensive use of Google Apps (for example Gmail) for its learners (and staff?), rather than providing its own:

Source: Peter Norvig's keynote presentation at ALT-C 2007

and this explanation of the practical meaning of the 2 standard deviations of performance difference that Benjamin Bloom found between learners taught normally, and learners given (unaffordable) individual tuition. (Use of mastery learning produced 1 standard deviation of difference.)

Source: Peter Norvig's keynote presentation at ALT-C 2007

The conclusion to Norvig's talk was that most education should be:

• centred on engaging, real-world projects;
• explored in teams;
• organised so that teachers are facilitators and can point to theoretical knowledge when it is needed  ("which is less than you’d think").

Finally that "Different students learn differently. But let them figure it out from the world full of information, don’t try to create materials ahead of time."

Note. I spent some of the time in the run-up to and during ALT-C organising media interviews with a tolerant Peter Norvig; and with luck these will appear during week beginning 10/9/2007 in Computing, on the BBC's Digital Planet [MP3 file of 10/9/2007 broadcast], as well as in Custom PC, which I am linking to despite its vile pop-up adverts. I also arranged a brief interview between Norvig and Rhona Sharpe (who with Frances Bell is newly appointed as a co-editor of the ALT Journal). When and if the latter is published it will have some news about a Google service that is imminent.

* I have half-time employment with ALT.

TerraNet - a mesh network based on mobile phones

Serendipity led me from a short BBC World Service piece flowing from the ALT conference to TerraNet AB. a Swedish start-up that has developed a way of enabling mobile phones to communicate directly with each other (rather than via the operator's network of masts) and with the internet via any internet-connected device fitted with a TerraNet USB interface. The TerraNet web site, from where the images above are taken, is short on detail, but the interview with TerraNet founder Anders Carlius (whose LinkedIn profile pulls no punches), a few minutes into this BBC Podcast, is worth listening to.

Ofcom publishes detailed demographic data about how people and businesses in the UK use (digital) communications

Source: Ofcom 2007

Ofcom has just published its fourth annual report on trends and developments in the UK's communications market, and if you need to get a full appreciation of who can access what communications services from where, or to understand the demographics of access, this is the place to look.

• Summary;
• Key points;
• access page for full print version, where the real meat is.