Fortnightly Mailing

OU to make course content "open", and to collaborate with the University of Manchester

Two major developments, which look like a sign of a major differentiation within UK HE, have been reported in the last month by the UK's Open University.

Firstly it has announced that it will partner with the University of Manchester (the UK's largest, formed last year by the merger of UMIST and Manchester University) to develop and offer combined degree programmes, "focussed initially on overseas student markets".

Secondly, that supported by a £2.56m grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, it will start to make its course materials freely available for reuse by teachers and students anywhere, paralleling MIT's OpenCourseWare (which continues to be part-funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation).

The following links provide some of the details, and in the continuation post there is a link to the OU's application to the Hewlett Foundation, including an extract containing one of the document's many references to Moodle, the Open Source VLE that the OU recently decided to use as its main platform.

• job vacancies in the Open Content Initiative (OCI);
• details of OU's OCI plans;
• OU 28/2/2006 press release about its partnership with the University of Manchester;
• 10/3/2006 Guardian article about OCI by Alexendra Smith.

New UK specification on web site accessibility

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has just published a new "Publicly Available Specification" that has been developed by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in collaboration with BSI. According to BSI the specification is:

• applicable to all public and private organizations that wish to observe good practice under the existing voluntary guidelines and the relevant legislation on this subject;
• intended for use by those responsible for commissioning public-facing websites and web-based servicesoutlines good practice in commissioning websites that are accessible to and usable by disabled people;

and gives recommendations for:

• the management of the process of, and guidance on, upholding existing W3C guidelines and specifications;
• involving disabled people in the development process and using the current software-based compliance testing tools that can assist with this.

You can buy the specification on line from BSI for £30.  Although this is much cheaper than most standards from BSI, and although people who work for organisations with a direct or indirect subscription to BSI publications should be able to access the specification free of charge, I am certain that uptake of the specification will be far smaller than if it had been made freely available on the web.

Jane Knight joins Learning Light

Jane Knight is now Head of Research for Learning Light, a not-for-profit Government funded start-up in Sheffield, for which I contributed to two reports last year. Learning Light aims to become a European Centre of Excellence for e-Learning. The e-Learning Centre, a huge, full, and successful resources web site which Jane Knight has built up since the mid-1990s, will become part of the Learning Light web site. Currently the Learning Light site seems not quite ready to roll, with its registration system disabled. But you get the feeling that inside the site there is quite a lot of interesting stuff, for example a 5 page document written specially for Learning Light by Jay Cross - Learning Light and E-learning Version 3.0 [50 kB PDF].

Economist special report on "Open source" business

Here is an accessible and informative, and not particularly software-oriented, 3 page Special report on Open-source business in the 18/3/2006 Economist Magazine, drawing heavily on The Success of Open Source by Stephen Weber, which I reviewed in Fortnightly Mailing Number 60. The web-based version of the report contains several links to additional resources, including to CAMBIA, an international, independent non-profit research institute pioneering Open Source Biology and Informatics to support Patent Transparency.

Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture

Fascinating unedited record from a talk about MySpace, by danah boyd (sic), who is a PhD student in the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She gave the talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Conference in February 2006. Here is an extract from its introduction:

I have been following MySpace since its launch in 2003. Initially, it was the home to 20-somethings interested in indie music in Los Angeles. Today, you will be hard pressed to find an American teenager who does not know about the site, regardless of whether or not they participate. Over 50 million accounts have been created and the majority of participants are what would be labeled youth - ages 14-24. MySpace has more pageviews per day than any site on the web except Yahoo! (yes, more than Google or MSN).

There is plenty of other interesting research into young people's informal learning with digital media taking place at Berkeley.

6/4/2005. See also this 21/3/2006 essay by danah boyd, which compares MySpace with an earlier social software service called Friendster.

Updated 20060406

New version of Fortnightly Mailing under development

This new version of Fortnightly Mailing is under development and is due to launch properly on 24 March 2006.

Most of the content here is identical to that in Fortnightly Mailing Number 61, published in January.

If you spot errors, or issues, please comment below.

Thanks.

Seb Schmoller

Machine translation

You may recall something I included last June on machine translation. This two minute audio clip from Web Search as a Force for Good, a speech given at Stanford University by Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Search Quality, on 7/11/2004, sheds light on how the company is developing machine translation. It is using the huge processing power available to it, alongside the increasing body of digitised works (EU documents, out-of-copyright novels, millions of titles being digitised for Google Book Search, etc.) that are available in multiple languages, already translated by professionals. Google is definitely getting somewhere. This 2005 evaluation of the output from several machine translation systems from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology has Google's translations "winning" in all the categories evaluated.

Wellcome Trust breaks new ground on open access

From a 15/12/2005 press release issued by the Wellcome Trust, which funds a large amount of medical research:

Three publishers, Blackwell, OUP and Springer, have today announced changes to their license conditions that will provide for research published in their journals to be immediately available on line and without charge to the reader.

Interview with Michael Stevenson

6/1/2006 Times Educational Supplement interview with the DfES Director of Technology/Chief Information Officer, who worked previously for the BBC - necessary but not gripping reading for people in the UK with an interest in public sector e-learning. This extract gives you a little of the flavour.

Industry has a really nitty gritty understanding of what works for people. It is critical that we bring those insights into government. Secondly it is in industry that we will see the innovation. If we really care about personalised content than I think it will be industry that gets us there: industry that works with government; industry that works with research labs and universities; industry that works with teachers and learners.

The technology areas (yes, there are two) of the DfES web site have some of Stevenson's reflections, and 4 e-learning case studies. [I had a hand in the early stages of the course described in the third of these.]

Records and ramifications

The London Review of Books has published an excellent, considered, thorough article by John Lanchester. It is more comprehensive than this week's interesting BBC Money Programme documentary about Google, notwithstanding the latter's slightly chilling interview with Google's Marissa Mayer (Google's VP for Search Products). Her phrase, apropo of privacy, that "we do need users to be aware that there are records and ramifications" stuck in my mind, along with her general coyness under questioning - about 20 minutes into the programme.