Fortnightly Mailing

Scottish pupils to sit public exams online

According to the BBC, school pupils in Scotland will sit exams online for the first time. Using systems provided by the Bradford company BTL, 120 pupils and students in schools and colleges across Scotland will sit a public multiple choice exam in biotechnology, described by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) as a "significant milestone" in modernising exams.  (Thanks to reader Che Osborne, for this, who works for BTL.)

To graduate from secondary school you'll need to complete at least one online course

According to the 20/4/2006 US Chronicle of Higher Education, the State of Michigan will require all high-school students in the state to take at least one course online before they can graduate, apparently because making students conduct some of their education over the Internet will better prepare them for college and the workplace, which relies more and more on online tools. Further details in the Chronicle's "Wired Campus".

Home Computer Initiative - will it be resurrected?

It looks as if the UK Government is rethinking its decision - see report in previous issue of Fortnightly Mailing - to scrap the Home Computing Initiative.  According to and article by Martin Veitch IT Week: 

In an interview with IT Week, a Treasury spokesman confirmed that the original scheme had been scrapped because it was being abused and that a replacement for the HCI more targeted at the “elderly and very poor” is under discussion. However, there is “no concrete timetable” for the putative scheme.

“We are looking at how we can best use the resources of HCI but avoid the abuses we were witnessing of people buying third home computers or iPods,” the spokesman commented.

See also this 3/4/2006 press release from the TUC, in which TUC General Secretary welcomes signs of a rethink.

JISC uses blog to support the Digitisation Programme

Earlier this month the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which works with further and higher education on the use of ICT to support teaching, learning, research and administration, began using a blog to provide an interactive news and views forum to support JISC's Digitisation Programme.

In the short term it is intended to be a space in which interested parties can post comments and questions before the Town Meeting on April 21 and a platform for coverage of the meeting on the day.

In the longer term it will be a place on which to post new information about the programme and projects and where those involved can comment and debate.

FE White Paper - the personalisation virus is spreading

March 2016 - some dead links, I am afraid. Seb.

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Readers in England with an interest in FE will know that on 27/3/2006 the Government published a White Paper on the reform of the Further Education sector. There are links to the White Paper and various associated documents on the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) web site, and the Trades Union Congress has published a balanced assessment of/briefing about the White Paper.

I had a look at the White Paper from the point of view of e-learning. The term "blended learning" is absent: hopefully it is drifting out of use. But "personalisation" is in with a vengeance, with almost all of the White Paper's references to e-learning made in the context of personalisation. This is not surprising given the way that the term permeates UK Government educational thinking at present, with one of the four strands of the DfES Technology Group now led by a "Programme Director for Personalised Content". Maybe as a result of having co-written a report on personalisation in presentation services for JISC a couple of years ago I am sceptical about the current policy emphasis.

Firstly, where is the evidence that (whatever the term means) personalisation will improve the efficacy of public education? Secondly, there is a lot of vagueness about the meaning of the term, with definitions varying from the (perfectly acceptable, general) "the antithesis of impersonal", to the more technically focused "automatically structured to meet the needs of the learner".

Although the White Paper uses the term overall mainly in the former sense, it also uses it in the second sense, making the assumption that e-learning has a major role to play in providing a personalised experience. Developing a clear framework which explains what is meant by "personalised" in the context of educational policy would help, and it would go some way to reduce the risk of absurd/naive "snake oil" claims being made for this or that online content's (or this or that technical system's) capacity to make learning personalised.

[I showed a draft of this post to David Jennings, whom I've worked with on various projects, including writing the Draft for Public Comment for British Standard BS8426 - A code of practice for e-support in e-learning systems (8-page handout - 150 kB PDF), and whose web log I sometimes link to. He made the following point about personalisation, which I agree with. "The idea that technology can second-guess the needs of learners is superficially attractive but riddled with problems; I've never seen evidence of it being done effectively and with consistent accuracy; if it's done inaccurately it just undermines the transparency of the system and the users' control, which makes things worse."]

Was Gordon Brown right to scrap Home Computer Initiative?

Probably, but perhaps not so suddenly.

The Home Computing Initiative (HCI), which is said to have made it much easier for people in employment to get hold of a PC, got scrapped without notice in last week's Budget. During its two years of operation around 0.5 million people from over 1000 individual employers - spread acorss the public and private sectors - had taken advantage of the scheme, with high levels of take up in organisations like the Post Office, and with HCI playing a role in some workplace e-learning strategies. The links below provide a round-up of reactions to the decision, which have caught the businesses that have been making money from the scheme on the hop. The underlying issues seems to have been that:

• HCI schemes could not be accessed by workers on the national minimum wage, because it is unlawful to operate a salary sacrifice scheme that takes an employee's hourly rate below the national minimum wage;
• the scheme is alleged to have been abused, with people using it to purchase games consoles or second PCs;
• vendors were able to operate with better margins on their sales than in the open market;
• larger organisations claimed to gain large business benefits from the improvements in ICT fluency which the scheme brought about, at the tax-payer's expense.

Links

• Confederation of British Industry press release;
• Save HCI campaign web site, run by a company whose business has been associated with the supply of HCI PCs;
• BBC coverage;
• HCI Alliance, comprising Intel, Microsoft, and BT;
  
• Articles in the Register, generally taking the line that business has taken advantage of the scheme. "Anyone can get a cheap PC made in China, marketed from Texas, on similar terms to the government scheme anyway, except that with interest free credit, it's theirs to own. How much of the benefit of this subsidy was going to the participating multinationals who don't need any help improving their grip on the British market?" MPs botch HCI rescue (28/3/2006).  HCI admits failing poor (28/3/2006).  HCI traders fight for the right to PC tax breaks (27/3/2006).

World Economic Forum - Interview on the Global Information Technology Report 2005-2006

The World Economic Forum (the one that brings political and business leaders together in Davos each year and claims simultaneously to be impartial and non-partisan, but committed to entrepreneurship) has just published its Global Information Technology Report. This shows that the US, Canada, and Taiwan have jumped several places up a "Network Readiness" ranking based on an assessment of:

• the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community;
• the readiness of the community's key stakeholders - individuals, business and governments;
• the usage of ICT among these stakeholders.

The UK has risen from 12th to 10th place.

The full report costs £65, and is available from Palgrave Macmillan, but you can read its summary [66 kB PDF], as well as a transcript of an informative interview with Augusto Lopez Claros, who is one of the report's authors. [20060917 - link broken - intend to fix it.]

Just for the hell of it, and in less than 30 seconds, I used irows, which I described in Fortnightly Mailing 20060324, to create an HTML version of the ranking, and this appears in the continuation post below.

Perceptive comments from Bill Thompson about "Web 2.0"

I thought this 25/3/2006 piece by Bill Thompson, who writes on technology issues for the BBC, provides a thoughtful perspective on how the World Wide Web is changing at the moment, and on why he is gradually losing his scepticism about the importance of the so called "read/write Web", or "Web 2.0", as exemplified by services like Writely, or Flickr, and, increasingly, by Google services such as Page Creator.

An important issue for Thompson is the extent to which users have to but their trust in (i.e. give their personal or other important data to!) the companies that provide  these services. For example I've been quite taken with an interesting and attractive "Web 2.0" service called Box.net, which provides an advertising-free remote back-up service, enabling you to access your stuff from any networked device that runs a browser. So far so good - especially since so many people are so poor at back-up, and could get much better at it using a service of this kind. But this 2/4/2006 extract - emphasis added - from Box.net's Terms of Service makes me a bit wary, even assuming that I was content that my data was safe day-to-day with the company.

Box.net reserves the right to terminate without notice your password, account or use of Box.net service and delete any data within Box.net service if you fail to comply with this Agreement or for cause of any other nature. You may terminate your user account upon notice to Box.net at any time. Upon termination by Box.net or at your direction, you may request a file of your data, which Box.net will make available for a fee. You must make such request at the notification of termination to receive such file within thirty (30) days of termination. Box.net shall have no obligation to maintain any data stored in your account or to forward any data to you or any third party.

Myguide - a "radically simple" way of using the internet

The DfES describes myguide (known also as the Cybrarian Project) as a new online facility to provide a 'radically simple' way of using the Internet... which will ... consist of an uncluttered interface that people can personalise to suit their needs and tastes, an equally simple and intuitive email facility, and support in searching for information and using services of interest to them.

A pilot myguide service is now available. At the time of writing (2/4/2006) and for several days subsequently the account creation process and email system were not functioning, but when I looked in some detail at the service a couple of weeks ago I felt that it was neither uncluttered, nor simple, nor intuitive, nothwithstanding the extensive stakeholder involvement there has been in its development.

New format for Fortnightly Mailing

This is the first edition of Fortnightly Mailing in a new format, which I've created using some web log software called Typepad. I've taken the plunge for several reasons.

1. Producing Fortnightly Mailing as a hand-crafted HTML page and RSS file has been very time consuming.
2. Typepad enables me to write pieces as and when I've thought about what I want to say, rather than at infrequent intervals.
3. For the growing number of people who keep an eye on Fortnightly Mailing using RSS, Typepad's RSS feed is far superior to the best I could manage by hand.
4. One of the most common responses I got to last year's readership survey was that I provided no easy way for you to respond to or take issue with what I had written. Typepad provides space for you to make comments.
5. Individual items have their own unique URL in the event that you decide you want to bookmark something, or send it to someone.
6. I want to provide "guests" with the opportunity to write occasional guest contributions. This is much easier to do in Typepad than with the previous system.

You can provide me with feedback on the new version by sending me an email, or by commenting directly on this post. Be warned that despite my best endeavours Fortnightly Mailing will continue sometimes to appear rather sporadically, though hopefully this will be less of an issue than it has been over the last 6 months.