Fortnightly Mailing

Peter Norvig and Michelle Selinger will be keynote speakers at next September's ALT conference in Nottingham, England

Image from Scientific American

The new holding page for next year's 3 day Association for Learning Technology (ALT) conference, is at http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/. The conference will take place between 4 and 6 September 2007.

We (I work for ALT half time) have arranged some interesting keynote speakers, including Peter Norvig, Director or Research at Google (via whose web site I learnt that insects do $57 billion worth of free labour per year in the US...) , and Michelle Selinger, Education Strategist from Cisco Systems (there will be at least one more); and the main conference theme - Beyond Control - has a lot going for it.

From the holding page you can join a low volume mailing list which ALT will use to notify you of major changes to thes web site, last minute updates, key dates and deadlines.

CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion

From Autumn 2006, Harvard Law School and the Harvard Extension School are offering a course called Cyber One: Law in the Court of Public Opinion both to the Internet-using public, and to Harvard Extension students:

"If we do say so ourselves, the course will be unlike any that has ever been taught. It is a course in persuasive, empathic argument in the Internet space. Throughout the course we will be studying many different media technologies to understand how their inherent characteristics and modes of distribution affect the arguments that are made using them. Students will be immersed in this study through project-based assignments in which they will be using these technologies to make their own arguments."

The subject matter of the course is "the creation and delivery of persuasive argument in the new integrated media space constituted by the Internet and other new technologies". People doing the course as Harvard Extension students will experience parts of the course through a virtual world called Second Life.

Course web site. Flash movie in which Professor Charles Nesson and an "avatar" version of his daughter Rebecca Nesson explain the course. Text-based official description of the course.

Discovered via David Weinberger.

There is no such thing as a "next generation" learner....

..... well, that was one conclusion which seemed to emerge from the "learners" theme of the 2006 Association for Learning Technology conference in Edinburgh, which ended today. Phil Candy, who is Director of Education, Training and Development within "Connecting for Health", the National Health Service's National IT Programme, provided this summing up from the theme [0.3 MB PPT]. This contains plenty of nuggets from the conference as a whole. Here are a few which stood out for me:

"Schools are the supply chain for universities, and it therefore behoves academics to know more about the technology environments their incoming students are used to."

"Generational differences are relatively unimportant in explaining comfort with technologies and, in any case, are commonly ‘washed out’ within 6 months to a year."

"Game-playing in early life does not seem to be particularly influential in the use of ICT for learning purposes."

"Academics may be seeking to use technologies – both for teaching and for assessment –  to reproduce models of learning and social relationships that are in fact at odds with the real demands of most jobs and society at large (e.g., individual effort, circumspection, scholarly precision)."

Phil's summing up concluded with a super brief precis of his  2004 report for the Australian Government - Linking Thinking: Self-directed Learning in the Digital Age. 3 other summings up from the conference (by Chris Yap, Gilly Salmon, and Terry Anderson) will be available from the ALT web site in due course.

Blackboard's work for IMS

Note: 4/1/2011. Several of the links below are broken. I am working on this.

Last week, in my (paid) half-time role as Executive Secretary of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), I took part in ALT's teleconference with Matt Small, Blackboard's General Legal Counsel. The notes of the teleconference [110 kB PDF] are on the ALT web site.

Personally I do not think that software or business methods should be patentable, and I am glad that the position in the EU is different from that in the US and several other parts of the world.  (Interesting German article on the Blackboard patent.)  Whilst I can see why businesses feel compelled to take out patents in an environment in which if you do not do it someone else will, and harm you as a result, I am much less happy about the active use of patents against competitors, especially in contexts in which the ideas upon which a patent is based appear to be so widely drawn, with so much input from individual researchers and developers, from companies, and from institutions to whom the patented software is primarily sold.

One aspect of the Blackboard patent which I think is particularly interesting concerns Blackboard's involvement in 1997-1999 in the early stages of the IMS project.

im+m e-Library - by Jim Farmer and Jon Allen. Worth subscribing to its RSS feed.

instructional media + magic, inc. a.k.a. im+m"develops standards-based multimedia courseware for colleges and universities, and the supporting information technology infrastructure. Based on research from early initiatives, im+m developed multimedia-rich classroom presentations and on-line courses leading to the improvement of student retention and performance".

im+m hosts a rapidly expanding, regularly updated, and authoritative e-library, complete with RSS feed. im+m describes the e-library as being:

"From the Avalanche of Information regarding Higher Education. Source documents referenced in recent blogs and email and discovered during our own research."

Currently, the e-library is particularly strong on North American material relating to the patenting of educational software. What is especially useful about it is its inclusion of blog posts, material from state agency web sites etc, all rendered as PDF files and stored by im+m, irrespective of their source. So this is a proper library, rather than just a library of potentially volatile hyperlinks.

Can e-learning really make a difference to your business and staff? An opportunity to join a UK wide research project and find out.

Howard Hills, who wrote a Guest Contribution about e-learning for public library staff earlier this month, asked me to include this item.

"The Skills for Business Network work based e-learning project (based at e-skills UK) is conducting a major study to understand why UK employers are currently investing in e-learning and the difference it is making to their business and staff. This will give participating employers a unique insight into workforce preferences and what learners really think.

The study investigates why organisations are investing in e-learning (which is defined broadly as the application of technology throughout the learning process) and what their successes and challenges have been.

UK employers of any size who are already investing in e-learning programmes at work are invited to take part in a short anonymous, online survey.

In stage 2 of the research, there is an opportunity to take part in a simple analysis of employee’s attitudes and responses to e-learning which is a unique chance for you to gather important internal feedback as well as contribute to the overall debate. Places for stage 2 are limited and we would encourage you to register your interest as soon as possible.

Full details of the research are available from e-skills UK.  The final report will be launched at Learning Technologies Conference in January 2007."

YouOS is one to watch. Wikipedia-style software development in a "web operating system".

Sometimes you come across something on the web that really makes you sit up and take notice. I bumped into YouOS via the RSS feed to Ray Schroeder's informative Online Learning Update which I keep an eye on. YouOS is the work of Jeff Mellen, Joe Wong, Sam Hsiung, and Srini Panguluri, of a Palo Alto start-up company called WebShaka. (WebShaka was originally funded on a very modest basis by Y Combinator, which does what looks to be semi-benevolent small-scale seed-funding for startups.)    

YouOS describes itself as:

"a web operating system that lets you run diverse applications within a web browser. Small applications like sticky notes or clocks. Large applications like word processing, mp3 players, and instant messaging. Even better, it's very easy to tweak an existing application or write your own."

There is a longer piece about it - basically a 3 page "manifesto" - which is worth taking the time to read in full.

Easily the most striking thing for me about YouOS (though the programming technicalities are beyond me) is that YouOS provides an environment in which users can create applications that run in YouOS; and that these applications are available for other users to rate, reuse, extend, and improve; with a set of tools available to help them do it. Think of it as a Wikipedia-style open source software development environment. 

One of the reasons why the World Wide Web took off was that users could "view source" in their browsers to see the HTML behind a page, and they could reuse, extend, and improve it - essentially you could teach yourself how to produce web content by looking and experimenting. And programmers could do the same with "scripts" (that is programmes) written in Perl.  (For much more on this see Tim O'Reilly's 1999 essay "Where the Web Leads Us".)

YouOS takes the same approach.

Of course at the moment, YouOS is not a fully functioning environment. It is only a few months old. Its owners describe it as experimental. It is probably being run on a shoe-string, though you would guess that investors are now knocking at WebShaka Inc.'s doors.  But my instinct is that YouOS shows one way in which the Internet, and the services that are provided across it, will develop, with user-generated software, as well as content. Try the YouOS demonstration, or create yourself an account.

Afterthoughts

1. A Virtual Learning Environment made in YouOS would certainly be in rather strong contrast to Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, or Sakai.
2. You could imagine an interesting tie-up between the One Laptop Per Child and YouOS, especially in countries like Ethiopia that are investing heavily in network infrastructure.

Anonymity online as the default

David Weinberger writes a long, fluent, and searching piece about anonymity online, arguing for anonymity to be the norm online, just as it is in "face-to-face" life.

Here is an extract:

"Before we have all this clear, we're going to have to make some decisions. My fear is that we are in the process of building a new platform for identity in order to address some specific problems. We will create a system that, like packaged software, has defaults built in. The most important defaults in this case will not be the ones explicitly built into the system by the software designers. The most important defaults will be set by the contingencies of an economic marketplace that does not particularly value anonymity, privacy, dissent, social role playing, the exploration of what one is ashamed of, and the pure delight of wearing masks in public. Economics will drive the social norms away from the social values emerging. That is my fear."

(One can dream of being able to write like that.....)

Online learning during disasters and emergencies

Some years ago I enabled a couple of colleagues from The Sheffield College to attend a workshop at Penn State University, funded by the Sloan Foundation. The workshop produced these excellent guidelines on managing the workload of on-line tutors [85 kB PDF], and my colleagues returned from it full of praise for the skillful way the workshop had been run and the quality of the contributions.

Hats off to the Sloan Foundation for funding a workshop next month in New Orleans concerning the use of Asynchronous Learning Network (ALN) technologies to permit continued delivery of university courses during disasters and other emergency situations. I have included, for information, the full invitation in the continuation post, with Ray Schroeder's permission.

Should organisations now put public knowledge and knowhow on Wikipedia instead of publishing it themselves? Views requested.

This 21/7/2006 article in the Times by Ben MacIntyre caught my eye whilst reading a free copy of the Times on a train. It shows the way that Wikipedia is becoming mainstream, and it gets to what for me is a "nub" issue: if I know and care about something, should I contribute to the relevant Wikipedia entry? 

Here is an extract:

The second point is that Wikipedia is here to stay, gradually improving, and growing more influential by the minute. If there is a subject that you know and care about, then it is becoming an intellectual duty to ensure that the entry on Wikipedia is as accurate as possible.

Many years ago, I wrote a book about a Victorian crook called Adam Worth, a subject so obscure that no one had ever written a book about him before, or since. When I found an entry for Worth on Wikipedia, I was at first astonished, then flattered to find the book cited in the references, and then slightly infuriated: whoever had written the entry had plainly read my book and summarised it, but added several small but irritating errors.

At first, I ignored the mistakes. This was only Wikipedia, after all. But the landscape of knowledge has changed since then, and I have joined the club. Wikipedia should always be taken with a pinch of salt. But the more we contribute and revise, the less salt we will need. We are all Wikipedists now.

For me the answer is "it depends how much I care", and as indicated previously, I've  found myself compelled to make several additions and a few changes to Wikipedia's History of VLEs, because I am so narked that Blackboard Inc. seems to have patented ideas and methods that I and loads of others helped in a small way to create, for the public good.

An interesting side effect has been the informal learning that I've done in the process - both about the history of VLEs, and about the way that Wikipedia works.

I'm now pretty well convinced that "the place to put stuff" that might be of value to others is on Wikipedia, rather than, say, on an organisation's web site. Here is an example: