Fortnightly Mailing

OLPC Laptops arrive in Uruguay: where flooding has caused a state of emergency

Via Stephen Downes comes this link to a report by Scott Gilbertson on the issue of 150 OLPC laptops to all the children in the small Uruguayan town of Villa Cardal. Meanwhile, further North there is a state of emergency owing to disastrous floods. In Mercedes, in the Soriano Department, where my uncle lives  - he is known, indirectly, to participants in the Collaborative Approaches to the Management of E-Learning (CAMEL) project and its various "spawnings" - the Rio Negro rose by 9.8 m earlier this month , and was still 8 m above its normal level several days after it reached its peak. In a neighbouring department (Durazno) the River Yi, which feeds the Rio Negro, was 13 m above its normal level. Some parts the country had an average of over 10mm of rain per hour for 3 whole days Below are pictures of some street scenes in Mercedes.

ALT Journal - Vacancies for Editor and Deputy Editor

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) for which I work part time, is advertising to fill vacancies for an Editor and Deputy Editor for the ALT Journal. The closing date for responses is 1/6/2007, with interviews to be held on 22/6/2007 (by phone or face-to-face, depending on the location of short-listed candidates).

To express an interest, download the details (28kB pdf).

These are important, high profile roles for the Association, which would give the people appointed a terrific opportunity to make their mark, and develop the ALT Journal in new and interesting ways, at a time when ALT is growing, and when the world of academic publishing is changing fast.

Please feel free to forward this message to people you know whom you think would be interested.

Skype founders get funding for their Internet TV service

Last year I drew attention to Joost (at that time called "The Venice Project") as "one to watch". Joost is a commercial Internet TV service - with much more "TV-like" quality tham Google or YouTube - founded by the Danish entrepreneurs originally behind Skype. As I understand it, Joost uses a clever method, akin to file-sharing applications, to cause (large) video files to be distributed close to where users are calling for them, thereby economising greatly on the amount of storage and bandwidth that Joost itself needs to provide, piggy-backing on the storage and connectivity of users' own devices. Today the FT's Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson reports that Joost has just raised USD 45m from four venture capital firms and various media groups.

FT article via Rafat Ali's invaluable PaidContent .

Universities discover Second Life - Guardian article

This article by Jessica Shepherd in today's Guardian picks up on this Friday's Eduserv conference at the TUC in London about the educational use of Second Life.

Previous posts referring to Second Life:

• 9/9/2006 CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion;
• 1/10/2006 Economist feature about Second Life;
• 9/10/2006 The Web is not just a better printing press. Nature's Timo Hannay on what the Web means for science.

The Board of Sheffield's Learning Light resigns en masse

Updated 4/5/2007

Donald Clark reports with anger that the Board of Sheffield's Learning Light a Government-funded not-for-profit company set up with Government and EC funding to serve as a "centre of excellence in the use of learning technologies in the workplace and in organisational learning best practice"  resigned en masse at Learning Light's AGM.* From the tone of Donald's post you might think he was at the AGM: apparently this was not the case. New board members have now been appointed.

See also coverage of:

• Learning Light's March 2006 absorption of Jane Knight's wonderful E-Learning Centre web site;
• Jane Knight and Vaughan Waller's December 2006 departure from Learning Light; 
• the genuinely useful material written for Learning Light by Itiel Dror. (Get it while you can.)

*Disclosure. Prior to the establishment of Learning Light I bid for got some interesting work from PA Consulting to write two "research reports" which formed some of Learning Light's initial resources; and I am now on Learning Light's list of qualified consultants, though no work has come my way as a result.

Globalisation of on-line tutoring

Source: TutorVista

Thanks to Dick Moore for pointing out Bangalore based TutorVista, a flat-monthly-fee service to provide round the clock on-line tutor support mainly for school-aged learners. Not something to contemplate organising other than on a large scale, which clearly is the case given the amount of venture capital that has been raised. And you could imagine quite a lot of money being made out of parents signing up (for less than the cost of 2 hours private tuition per month) because they want to "do something" to up their child's chances, with not that much use of the service then being made by the child. Interestingly, TutorVista also promotes its service as something that businesses might want to buy to then provide their employees as a benefit in kind, alongside, say, private health insurance. The services Faq's (sic) page is worth scrutinising: note its description of 8 hours per day x 6 days per week openings.

If any readers have experience of this or similar services, feel free to comment below, or contact me directly.

The Economist distinguishes between "Wireless Communications" and "Information Technology"

Source: Economist Special Report on Telecommunications

The 28/4/2007 edition of the The Economist has a special report on telecommunications. You need to be (or know!) a subscriber to read on line all but the introductory article, which provides a clear overview of how influential the Wireless Communications revolution (as distinct from plain old Information Technology) will be over the next few years. Central to the changes are the two-way technologies that are under development (see the table at the start of this post) , and  the:

• increasing efficiency with with the wireless spectrum can be used;
• falling costs of wireless systems;
• rising capacity of the chips that process the signals.

The charts below show how all are governed by "Moore's Law" logarithmic relationships.

Source: Economist Special Report on Telecommunications

Google buys Swedish technology originally developed for distance learning

In March 2006, writing about Google's acquisition of Upstartle, the company behind Writely (which is now Google Docs), I speculated whether Google would buy iRows (a web based spreadsheet). In November Google recruited the  founders of iRows, at which time I guessed:

"If I had to predict what's next, I would say that Google will acquire a web-based audio and/or video-conferencing service."

On 22/4/2007 the northern Swedish firm Marratech AB announced that Google had acquired Marratech's video conferencing software, software that originated in research that began in 1995 at the Centre for Distance-Spanning Technology (CDT) at Luleå University of Technology, in Sweden. (Colleagues in the Italian Trade Union Confederation CISL were very positive about the effectiveness of Marratech when they showed me it in use last year.)  Press reports, which have been countered on the Official Google Blog, imply that it is not just the software that has been bought, but the company as a whole.

Marratech's technology requires the user to download an application that you need to run locally as a discrete application, unlike most of Google's services (Search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs etc). However, plenty of other Google services, for example Earth, Talk, and Desktop Search, involve users in downloading and installing software. It remains to be seen whether the acquisition will result in Google offering audio or video conferencing as one of its free or paid-for services, or whether Google will instead be using Marratech technology for internal purposes. Certainly for people who use Google Docs or Jotspot as collaboration tools, provision of a synchronous communication environment would be of great value.

Al Essa's "Software patents. Why should we care?"

The vast  Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, where Al Essa is Associate Vice Chancellor and Deputy CIO, has more than 0.3 million students.  Al's article - Software patents. Why should we care? - in the March/April 2007 Educause Review is worth reading. After a stirring quote from Thomas Jefferson, starts:

"Imagine a world in which Socrates not only originated the dialogue form of inquiry but also filed a patent claiming 'intellectual property' rights for his invention and then vigorously enforced his patent against the Sophists to ensure the 'purity' of his learning method. Imagine an Oxford scholar travelling to the University of Bologna in the thirteenth century, observing the 'lecture' style of teaching, adapting it for use at Oxford, and then filing for patent protection. A cross-licensing agreement permits Bologna faculty to use the lecture format, but Cambridge University faculty are locked out."

Having highlighted what he describes as a gold-rush to "carve out and 'own' the basic building blocks of ideas that enable all educational technology", Al covers, lucidly, the software development process, the way in which (in the US and several other jurisdictions) the ideas behind software have become patentable, and why this is harmful. He concludes with a proposal for a (US-oriented) three-stage solution, that, he contends would "work" in the current context in which the ideas behind software are patentable:

• "Level 1: Basic Disclosure. The company publishes a list and a description of its educationally relevant software patents, both those it currently holds and those it has applied for.
• Level 2: Peer Review. As proposed recently by IBM, the company puts its patent filing on-line for public comment, review, and scrutiny for prior art. The company also allows for a legally non-binding peer review of its education software patent claim by domain experts. The review process could be mediated by an entity such as EDUCAUSE.
• Level 3: Pledge. The company declares that its intention in holding the patent is strictly defensive. It will not file for patent infringement or expect royalties from any party unless it has been threatened by that party."

Al is looking for feedback on his article. You can provide this directly to the Educause Review (where you need an account), or to Al's blog (where you do not).

One laptop per child and the Commonwealth of Learning

OLPC wireless mesh demo image from OLPC web site

I subscribe to OLPC's informative Community News, which consists of a weekly (or fortnightly?) plain-text summary of progress on One Laptop Per Child, written in a chatty but rigorous way by Walter Bender, with a nice "give credit when credit is due" tone. Most of the news relates to technical and operational developments. Today's also had this paragraph about work being done by the Commonwealth of Learning relating to wikis.

"The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) hosted an annual conference about collaborative production of learning materials in Vancouver, Wednesday through Friday. Attendees included Merrick Schaefer of UNICEF, Murugan Pal of CK12, Erik Moeller of Wikimedia and Open Progress, and Joel Thierstein of Connexions; who are all working towards a global collection of CC-BY and locally-developed works. We set immediate goals for sharing materials across these projects; and identifying collections. COL offered broad support across their network of teachers and volunteers, especially in Nigeria. Erik and Brion Vibber from Wikimedia discussed how MediaWiki is planning to support asynchronous and offline editing; and 'live' off-line snapshots that people can edit. The Wikipedia 0.5 static snapshot was released last week; it can be downloaded via torrent. A child-friendly selection of topics is being developed; but still written at a high language level. A proper kid's-encyclopedia is still in the future."

Find out more about the Commonwealth of Learning.