Fortnightly Mailing

Alan Cann - using FriendFeed as a personal learning environment for science students in HE

Three months ago I started to use FriendFeed for lightweight blogging, telling myself I would use if for 3 months and decide whether or not to stick with it. The three months is up and on balance I am impressed with it - in particular at the scope for people to comment on posts, and the ability to pull RSS feeds into and out of FreindFeed. I now include some of the FriendFeed posts I write in the emailed version Fortnightly Mailing. (My main plea is for other users to be selective about what they pull into their own FriendFeed, and, in particular, not to include stuff from Twitter if they are Twitter users.)

Today, through FriendFeed, I came across this interesting piece by Alan Cann Leveraging FriendFeed for authentic science education. Excerpt:

"Using the Facebook paradigm, they will create a Friendfeed account, subscribe to RSS feeds, bookmark and share items and build a network. We will use FriendFeed as a feedback channel to guide them. Assuming FriendFeed is still around, this should work much better than our past approach to building a PLE. (They'll also use other tools, but their PLE will be based around FriendFeed, which will be the main communication channel, vertically and horizontally)."

Alan's "assuming FriendFeed is still around" comment stems partly from the fact that just after I started to use it, FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook. Who knows what Facebook's plans are for the product.......

Making money from free digital content - Cory Doctorow experiments

I've had a soft spot for Cory Doctorow because of his wonderful 2001 diatribe Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. With a Little Help is a print-on-demand book of short stories by Cory Doctorow that explores - in the manner of its publication - several different "freemium" models for turning a free, digital object into profitable and physical objects. Cory explains - in his column in Publishers Weekly, and on his blog.

Related: 7 May 2007 piece in Fortnightly Mailing.

All Party Communications Group comes down firmly against disconnection as a way to stop illegal filesharing

The UK "All Party Parliamentary Communications Group", chaired by John Robertson MP and Derek Wyatt MP, has just published the report of its recent inquiry “Can we keep our hands off the net?”. Exerpt:

"We conclude that much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available."

"We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this approach to dealing with illegal file-sharing should not be further considered."

The report covers a much wider range of issues, with a set of pragmatic recommendations relating to issue like: ISPs' role in preventing the spread of malware and spam, the need for minimum guaranteed speeds of broad band connections to be advertised, and for consistent default standards of child-protection filtering on mobile internet connections.

(With thanks to Steve Ryan for sending me a link to the report.)

THE-QS World University Ranking - a US perspective that takes account of country size: Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer

When the 2009 Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings of the world’s universities were published 8 October, Editor of the THE-QS rankings, Phil Baty wrote: “America's superpower status is slipping as other countries' efforts to join the global elite begin to pay dividends.” And he could have written the U.K. universities continue to improve their rankings.

OLPC laptops - a year of mass use in Uruguay / Android: coming from behind

Two informative pieces in the 3/10/2009 Economist. The first - "Education in Uruguay - Laptops for all" - provides quite an upbeat, though "warts and all" summary of Uruguay's deployment of nearly 400,000 OLPC laptops (nearly all of the country's primary school pupils now have them), pointing out that government's ambition that laptops will improve the overall standard of education "will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects", and that the introduction of laptops should "prompt a shift away from rote learning towards critical analysis".

The second - "The boom in smart-phones" - describes the rise of the Open Source operating system Android, emphasising how Android has enabled "cut-price Chinress firms such as Huawei and ZTE to enter the smart-phone market which they had previously stayed out of for lack of the necessary software". The article suggests that within four years half of handsets sold will be "smart", and that almost all will be so by 2015. (I think these figures relate to worldwide supply, in which case the switch will be quicker in the UK.) The changes this will cause in the role of technology in learning (and, perhaps more importantly, in its organisation and control) will be profound.

Back-links to related pieces:

• 26/9/2009 - The "mobilely accessible" Internet - global overview;
• 20/2/2009 - Using mobile technologies to promote children's learning;
• 2/10/2008 - Android: phones are PCs, only smaller and with more stuff on them;
• 4/8/2007 - Smartphones "are the PCs of the developing world";
• 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
• 1/6/2007 - Test the mobile-readiness of a web site;
• 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa: a "simple sort of eBay for agricultural products;
• 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
• 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
• 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.

E-Learning "debate" 2009: Stephen Downes hits the nail on the head

I passed through Oxford between Bristol and London yesterday and attended a slightly pretentious debate organised by the elearning company Epic in the Oxford Union, a debating club run by the students of Oxford University that has has been graced in its time by world leaders and, more recently, by fascists and Nazi-holocaust deniers. (I make it sound as if I'd not have gone if I'd not been passing through: curiosity and the need to fly the ALT flag would have got the better of me.) The event served as a (probably effective) marketing and PR exercise for Epic - nothing wrong with that - but I do not think that it did much to advance participants' understanding; and the quality of some of the four pre-invited speeches on each side of the slightly silly, and heavily defeated, "This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow" - was very variable, with Ufi's Kirstie Donnelly giving a particularly good account of herself.  Given his distance from the event, Stephen Downes makes some prescient observations.

Need random numbers? Plenty of enhancements to Mads Haahr's RANDOM.ORG.

Mads Haahr's RANDOM.ORG is classy site devoted to the provision of "true" random numbers. It has developed quite a bit since I described it in 2007, though its use of atmospheric noise to generate random numbers rather than a mathematical algorithm is unchanged.

The widget below (a beta) is just one of the tools available from the site. Others include a random location generator that integrates with Google Maps, a random password generator, and a random jazz scale generator.

The mobilely accessible Internet - global overview from the Economist

Source: Economist special report on telecoms in emerging markets

Finishing the job is a useful overview of mobile phone uptake and Internet access world-wide and how these are expected to change. It also contains an OLPC-oriented discussion about whether it will ultimately be phones or "netbooks" that become the dominant means by which users access the Internet. (Phones are in the ascendency, it seems, though the boundary between them is getting increasingly blurred.) Excerpt:

"On the face of it, those in the mobile camp seem to have won. Mobile phones are now seen as a vital tool of development, whereas Mr Negroponte’s laptop project has failed to meet its ambitious goals. But although his engineers have so far only managed to get the cost of their elegant laptop down to about $150, they have shown what is possible with a low-cost design, and helped create today’s vibrant netbook market. If netbooks do indeed become the preferred devices to access the internet in the developing world, Mr Negroponte will have had the last laugh. But if those netbooks turn out to be, in effect, large mobile phones with keyboards that access the internet via mobile networks, as also seems likely, Mr Quadir and his camp can claim to have won the day. Technological progress in devices and networks seems to have rendered the debate moot: the important thing is that internet access will be on its way to becoming as widespread as mobile phones."

More on self-organised learning

David Jennings has written a second instalment on self-organised learning in part responding my reservations. Dougald Hine comments (I mostly agree with him) that workplaces usually (often?) provide better vocational learning environments than institutional ones. When and if time permits I want to link this discussion with some points made by David Price


David Price - Co-founder of Debategraph: Thinking deeply together (click on thumbnail to run 28 minute video). Other ALT-C 2009 videos.

at the ALT conference (drawing on Clay Shirky) about the "cognitive surplus" in the heads of learners, and the scope there ought to draw value from it - thereby reducing the net cost of provision - by basing learning activities on finding real world solutions to problems.

Using PSPs for learning in a Birmingham primary school for the deaf

Here are two superb ~8 minute videos in which Alison Carter, deputy head teacher of Longwill School, talks comprehensively, clearly, and passionately about the benefits flowing from pupils' use of Sony PlayStation portable devices. These talks deserve to be widely viewed.

Part 1

With thanks to Jenny Ellwood from East Birmingham City Learning Centre for telling me about this work.