Fortnightly Mailing

A free online version of Stanford University's introduction to artificial intelligence

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Between 26 September and 16 December, with 10 hours study needed per week, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig will teach a wholly online version of the "standard" Stanford University "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence".

The course - CS221 syllabus - will be taught "concurrently around the web", with short videos, on-line marked quizzes, a mid- and end-term exams, and eight automatically graded homework assignments. Students taking the online version will therefore be graded according to the same grading criteria as students taking CS221 at Stanford.

I am tempted, partly because I am particularly interested in whether mathematics-based courses, where the medium is not the message, can be successfully delivered on line. But the question is: will what I can remember of A and S level mathematics from 1970, and from the first year of the physics part of a natural sciences degree in 1972 (I then switched to economics....) suffice for the stated prerequisite that "a solid understanding of probability and linear algebra will be required"?

I shall find out soon enough.

The future of learning and technology

Here is a candid, authoritative and reflective 25 minute talk by BP's Nick Shackleton-Jones, with plenty of memorable lines that will stick in your mind. The focus is on "corporate learning", but Nick's views are relevant much more widely.

Blackboard agrees to be acquired by an investor group led by Providence Equity Partners

In April 2011 announced that it was considering proposals from would-be buyers, appointing Barclays Capital to help it decide what to do. I was away on holiday for two weeks from late in June, and have been reading some of the commentary about Blackboard's decision to be acquired i.e. to move from being a publicly quoted company to a privately held one. Providence Equity Partners have wide interests in education, media and telecommunications businesses. Some are complementary, for example Sungard and Ascend Learning; others are rather less so, for example Warner Music Group, AutoTrader, and the World Triathlon Corporation.

Here are three informative posts commenting on the change, which, if it goes through, will take effect later this year:

2 July 2011 - Investment bankers and Blackboard's Future - by Jim Farmer;

7 July 2011 - Blackboard's Next Chapter - by Ray Henderson, president of the company's teaching and learning division, Blackboard Learn;

14 July 2011 - The Blackboard acquisition - two views - by Michael Feldstein.

NHS reforms - a view from the sharp end

A friend writes to me; and when I ask if can publish it anonymously, says  "yes, why not?".

The NHS: well, the Futures Forum report is submitted on Tuesday and the rumour is that Cameron and Clegg will make announcements very soon thereafter. Cameron's speech earlier this week was clearly, in my view, giving some ground. Competition only when it can be justified, emphasis on integration, other clinicians to be involved in commissioning, variable timetable for GP commissioning consortia to make the grade, A&E and 18 weeks targets effectively restored (and this should be milked by Labour as tantamount to acknowledgement of the huge achievement of eliminating waiting times). But - how will this be reflected in next week's announcement and then in legislative changes?

It's pretty clear from what I pick up that Cameron regrets having got into this mess - yet again, the Tories are not trusted with the NHS - and hasn't that been a political fault line for them time and again - his attempt to rehabilitate the Tories NHS position has now failed spectacularly - the question here is whether the electorate will remember. It's also clear that most of what they want to do simply does not need a 350 page bill - indeed, most of it could be achieved with little change to primary legislation.

Meanwhile, the financial/efficiency challenge gets tougher and tougher. It's not that there are no efficiency opportunities - there are, and they add up to many £ billions. But delivering them requires fundamental change, much of which needs to be led nationally (for example: changing GP contracts to make them accountable for the financial consequences of their clinical decisions, thereby creating the leverage to eliminate completely unwarranted variations in long term condition management, prescribing and referrals; facing up to the reality that greater centralisation of specialist services will be safer and more efficient - and hence accepting that this means some local hospitals will cease to have 24/7 A&E, full on paediatrics etc etc).

There is a real sense of fiddling while Rome burns - every ounce of our energy should be devoted to protecting patient safety, improving quality, securing efficiency - and yet we spend loads of time on so called "transition". But - a current saying is that too much tooth paste is out of the tube, and simply calling a halt a least some of the changes the Tories have launched is not feasible. But we could consolidate, and then focus on the real issues.

An interesting and potentially very important week or so ahead for the NHS.

Educational Technology Conferences for June to December 2011

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The tireless Clayton R Wright (pictured) has published an updated version of his comprehensive listing of close on 800 educational technology and related education conferences worldwide.  A Word 2003 format is used to enable people who do not have access to Word 2007 or higher version and those with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference proceedings.  The list is on the ALT Open Access repository at http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2106/.

Stopping link rot - keep your posts useful with the "WebCite this page" gadget

I've been writing Fortnightly Mailing since 2002. I've long ago stopped keeping to the discipline of publishing a fortnightly list of posts; and @sebschmoller and FriendFeed have got a bit in the way of writing proper posts such as this one. Occasionally vanity gets the better of me and I look at the access statistics for Fortnightly Mailing. Yesterday I noticed several hits from Google to a 2006 posting highlighting an article by Paul Black and Christine Harris.

When I looked at the posting - here is an archived view of it - all of its links were broken, making it worse than useless. All readers will have experienced this problem when searching and finding an apparently relevant piece about something they are interested in, but with key links broken. 

I've since fixed things in the orignal by going through the fiddly and time-consuming process of finding extant versions of the three documents in question and linking to these.  Instead of storing up trouble for the future, I've linked to archived versions created in moments with the service provided by WebCite, using the free "WebCite this page" gadget that I had already installed on my browser toolbar. The gadget allows a user, in seconds, to:

• go to a URL;
• click on the gadget;
• copy and paste the WebCite archive's URL of the orginal resource to wherever they want to use it.

Obviously it is a matter of judgement when to take this approach. My ground rule is going to be: if I am linking to a resource that I think others may want to use long term, or which I fear is likely to be short-lived at its current location, then I will include a WebCite link to the resource instead of or in addition to a link to the resource itself.

Comments on the feasibility and value of this approach are welcome.

Salman Khan - turning learning inside out with video / building "a global one-world classroom"

Here, Salman Khan gives a jaw-dropping TED talk, chaired by Bill Gates in March 2011.

Below the talk I've included as text a striking extract from the talk, from 12.5 minutes in:  striking because of Khan's emphasis on data and on teachers' need to use it, because of the ambitious conclusion (I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom .... that's essentially what we're trying to build), and most importantly because of Khan's comment about the dubious concept of giftedness.

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible.

Tim O'Reilly's "Perspectives on Open"

This is a link to a slideshare version of a talk given yesterday by Tim O'Reilly to the Open Courseware Consortium conference. Below the presentation is the transcript of O'Reilly's talk. A transcript of this kind - speaker's notes not what was actually said - cannot convey the full meaning of a talk, but, that said, it was a thinner brew than I had been hoping for, especially from points 30 onwards where O'Reilly turns his attention to Open Education. (In contrast, the transcript's earlier potted history of free software is meatier.) The talk itself, if it is made available, should be worth listening to and watching. I hope to post a link to it here.

Lessig: Just how badly have we messed up the architecture of access to scientific knowledge?

Very badly, as this 50 minute talk given by Lawrence Lessig on 18 April at CERN shows, followed by concrete suggestions about what to do about it. Lessig hits the nail on the head about how restricted access to scientific knowledge actually is, unless you happen to be a member of the "intellectual elite"; and if you are a member of the intellectual elite (a tenured professor in a rich-world university, or a student at one) the restriction on access is obscured from you.

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.

"Permitted to only give medical treatment to Jews"

My grandfather was a paediatrician in Berlin. He was transported to Terezin in October 1942, where he died within a month, aged 63. One of my sons just sent me this image of an enamelled plaque from the door of a Berlin physician's surgery. The title of this post is a translation of "Zur ärztlichen Behandlung ausschließlich von Juden berechtigt", and thanks to MD for help with this.

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