Fortnightly Mailing

Economist feature about Second Life, a "virtual online world"

I covered Harvard University's use of Second Life on the "Law in the court of public opinion" course in a previous posting. This 3 page feature from the 28/9/2006 Economist magazine provides a clear non-technical overview of how Second Life works, with plenty of examples of how it is being used, mainly by individuals, but increasingly by organisations, including the BBC and Toyota. Here is an excerpt:

Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical? asks Barry Dahl

Interesting 23/9/2006 long post by Barry Dahl, VP of Technology and Distance Learning at Lake Superior College, Minnesota,  about Turnitin, which is the anti-plagiarism system that sits behind the JISC Plagiarism Detection Service. Excerpt:

"It's with a great deal of interest that I've been following the most recent uproar in the blogoshpere about Turnitin.com and about whether or not higher ed is taking the proverbial low ground in the ethical battles by the increasing use of Turnitin. It is my opinion and always has been that there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole process of requiring students to turn in their work to the plagiarism police."

Other related posts of potential interest:

• Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture.
• When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?
• Anonymity online as the default.
• Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical?
• Privacy and self-disclosure online.

5/10/2006. Added links to other related posts of potential interest.

Steve Ehrmann running ALT roundtable on Open Source software, benchmarking etc. London on 30/10/2006.

ALT (I work half-time for it) has arranged with Steve Ehrmann, Director of the Flashlight Program, and Vice-President of the not-for-profit Teaching, Learning and Technology Group, to run a round table in London on Monday 30 October. I heard him speak once in the US and he's got a reputation for making his audiences think, and then act (effectively).

Topics

• factors affecting the wide adoption of faculty-developed open source software;
• new approaches to surveying, benchmarking and action research made possible by the new Flashlight Online 2.0 system;
• strategies for involving large numbers of instructors in using computers and the Web in improving their courses.

Further details. Online booking form.

"Commons Theory" - workshop in Bonn in May 2007. But you've got to be a scholar. And young.

A reader sent me this link to a May 2007 Commons Theory Workshop "for young scholars" at the Max Planck Institute for Research, in Bonn, Germany, in May 2007. Outline:

"In recent years, the increasing commodification of information production has led to a broad debate in intellectual property, communications, broadcasting, media, contract and privacy law, as well as in Internet governance, about whether self-governed 'commons' are a feasible and desirable alternative institutional arrangement. This debate includes analyses of the open source movement and a fresh interest in calibrating the boundary between intellectual property rights and the public domain. It also focuses on the privatization of Internet governance, network neutrality rules in telecommunications law, the propertization of the radio frequency spectrum as well as on media concentration."

2 billion people own mobile phones. 80% of the population is covered by GSM. W3C workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries.

Picture source: The Economist

Occasionally I've included posts about mobile phones and economic development, pointing to their much greater impact than networked PCs. See for example this 2005 article from the Economist. On 5 and 6 December the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will hold a Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries. Here is the "background" section of the conference call in full:

Impressive work by the UK's AoC NILTA on learning platform requirements and on e-portfolios

AoC NILTA describes itself as the "voice of the Further Education sector for ICT and e-learning in the UK". With a new team at the top, including Josie Fraser (from Wyggeston & Queen Elizabeth I sixth-form College), and Sally-Anne Saull (from RM plc), AoC NILTA has altered the way it disseminates its views. Gone are the unweildy and infrequent PDF Newsletters, and the rather bizarre web site. In comes a nice simple web site, with a blog as the main communication vehicle. Most importantly some strong thought has gone into recent AoC NILTA statements. Here are two interesing examples, both issued on 13 September 2006:

3 year agreement reached on LSC funding for JISC

On 6/9/2006 JISC made the exceptionally welcome announcement that it has reached agreement with the Learning and Skills Councils (LSC) on the LSC’s contribution to the JISC budget. This seems to bring to a pragmatic end the hiatus caused by last year's sudden cut in LSC funding to JISC.

"The agreement means that the following will be available to those institutions funded by the LSC for the next three years, including Specialist Colleges:

• JANET connections;
• support from the Regional Support Centres;
• membership of the UK Access Management Federation;
• all JISC’s advisory services;
• delivery services at data centres;
• membership of the new JISC Collections content company;
• access to all current content under existing licensing agreements."

There is a comprehensive questions and answers page on the JISC web site.

A fund to transform education, workforce training, and lifelong learning

Shades of the UK's digitisation programme in this US campaign to establish a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT), to be funded by revenues from the auction of publicly owned telecommunications spectrum:

"DO IT’s goal is no less than to transform America’s education, workplace training, and lifelong learning through the development and use of the revolutionary advanced information technologies comparable to those that have already transformed the nation’s economy, its communications system, media, and the daily lives of its people."

Articles in eLearn Magazine by Michael Feldstein, Lisa Neal, and Ken Korman. I. II.

BBC seeks rival for MySpace

Rafat Ali reports that BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, is looking to buy an internet-based social networking site similar to MySpace. According to a senior BBC source quoted in a 10 September 2006 article in the Daily Mail's ThisIsMoney (sic):

"These sites are definitely of interest to us. They are growing at a fantastic rate. They allow users to produce their own content and, above all, they are incredibly attractive to younger people, mostly between the ages of 13 and 24, with whom broadcasters have the biggest problems. If you lose them at 12 or 13, getting them back at 25 is not easy."

The Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Gavin Clarke reports in The Register on the views of Tim Berners-Lee and Eben Moglen.

Useful amunition in this 30/8/2006 article in the Register.

Five years after the first internet bubble burst, we're now witnessing the backlash against Web 2.0 and a plethora of me-too business plans, marketing pitches and analyst reports exploiting the nebulous phrase.

Tim Berners-Lee, the individual credited with inventing the web and giving so many of us jobs, has become the most prominent individual so-far to point out that the Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Berners-Lee has dismissed Web 2.0 as useless jargon nobody can explain,  and a set of technology that tries to achieve exactly the same thing as "Web 1.0."

For a slightly less sceptical view, see this March 2006 piece by Bill Thompson. For an entirely contrary view see this piece by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Note. Link to Dion Hinchcliffe's article added in response to comment from Mark van Harmelen.