Fortnightly Mailing

Videos of keynote and invited speaker sessions at the 2009 ALT conference

Over the last few weeks Matt Scholes has been working with colleagues in ALT (where I work part-time) to edit the video recordings from the 2009 ALT conference, and to get these made available on the Web.

Hopefully we've got the format for these videos about right within the budgetary and technical constraints we faced; and the "wide-screen" format has enabled us to combine the video of the speaker with a reasonably legible view of their presentation in one screen, without needing to switch between them.

Paul Krugman - How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” - John Maynard Keynes

Via Peter Norvig, here is a beautifully written piece from the 6 September 2009 New York Times by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman. There are shades of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist's description of capitalism in this excerpt:

"I like to explain the essence of Keynesian economics with a true story that also serves as a parable, a small-scale version of the messes that can afflict entire economies. Consider the travails of the Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op.

This co-op, whose problems were recounted in a 1977 article in The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, was an association of about 150 young couples who agreed to help one another by baby-sitting for one another’s children when parents wanted a night out. To ensure that every couple did its fair share of baby-sitting, the co-op introduced a form of scrip: coupons made out of heavy pieces of paper, each entitling the bearer to one half-hour of sitting time. Initially, members received 20 coupons on joining and were required to return the same amount on departing the group.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the co-op’s members, on average, wanted to hold a reserve of more than 20 coupons, perhaps, in case they should want to go out several times in a row. As a result, relatively few people wanted to spend their scrip and go out, while many wanted to baby-sit so they could add to their hoard. But since baby-sitting opportunities arise only when someone goes out for the night, this meant that baby-sitting jobs were hard to find, which made members of the co-op even more reluctant to go out, making baby-sitting jobs even scarcer. . . .

In short, the co-op fell into a recession."

Progressive austerity and self-organised learning

I've worked on and off with David Jennings for nearly 15 years, starting with unsuccessful efforts in the mid 1990s to get Sheffield-as-a-City to take the Internet more seriously, and including Living IT [slow to load from The Wayback Machine] a project with MANCAT, The Sheffield College, and FD Learning, to make a suite of wholly online courses about how to use the Internet.

More recently we've pitched for and won various contracts concerning e-learning, standards, web site usability, social networking to support professional development, and so on.

Why the throat clearing? To provide a context for my pointing to a longish piece that David Jennings has written - Progressive austerity and self-organised learning - which I think is worth taking the time to read, and to make comments on it. (Though I've not switched off comments on this post, I encourage you to respond there not here.)

For the record and leaving aside my scepticism about "collapsonomics" (which reminds me too much of The Limits to Growth and Protect and Survive) I agree with some but not all of David's argument.

I particularly like the way David tabulates some "Literacies for self-organised learning" using lists by Guy Claxton and Howard Reingold (I'd be for including Claxton's "characteristics of a confident explorer/researcher" in many recruitment specifications), but I think David underplays the importance of accreditation of learning and of qualifications generally (this is more than the issue of compliance training that he raises towards the end of the piece).

Secondly learners in many contexts at many levels (medicine, catering and hospitality, car maintenance, marketing, say) need to learn in real "vocational" environments. These are generally anything but "lightweight" to provide.

Finally, though we are programmed to learn, for many it helps a great deal to receive the right formative feedback, and to be asked what Dylan Wiliam calls "hinge questions" [150 kB PDF - see page nine]; and in this respect the "self-organised" learning that David argues for  is not sufficient. 

What I think we do agree on is that the "information environment" has become far more "lightweight", with the bypassing of institutions, libraries, teachers, publishers, experts etc, and the establishment of an apparently open environment in which motivated people can learn a great deal on their own. (I put quotes round the term "lightweight", because the technical infrastructure that sits behind and supports the information environment is anything but lightweight.)

But you can make up your own mind by reading David's piece.

Using Twitter and Yahoo Pipes for electronic voting, by Martin Hawksey

Here is a plausible description by Martin Hawksey from the JISC RSC for Scotland North and East which explains how to use Twitter as a classroom voting tool.

Quest to Learn - a newly opened 12 to 18 school relying 100% on games-based learning

The 5 September 2009 Economist reports on the opening of Quest to Learn, a new publicly funded school in New York. Closing excerpt:

The school plans to admit pupils at the age of 12 and keep them until they are 18, so the first batch will not leave until 2016. If it fails, traditionalists will no doubt scoff at the idea that teaching through playing games was ever seriously entertained. If it succeeds, though, it will provide a model that could make chalk and talk redundant. And it will have shown that in education, as in other fields of activity, it is not enough just to apply new technologies to existing processes—for maximum effect you have to apply them in new and imaginative ways.

There is plenty else of interest and value on the Institute of Play's web site, including this list of references relating to game-based learning.

Internet connections sacrosanct in France? "The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man."

[Updated24/10/2009 - despite the decision below, the French Government has introduced a "cut-off" provision, albeit, only on the say-so of a judge.]

Excerpt from article in the Independent:

"Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said the members of a watchdog to oversee application of the digital clampdown would be named in November and the first warnings would go out "from the start of 2010."

The law sets up an agency that will send out an email warning to people found to be illegally downloading films or music.

A written warning is sent if a second offence is registered in six months and after a third, a judge will be able to order a one-year Internet rights suspension or a fine."

Here is an English translation of the 10 June 2009 decision of the French Constitutional Council [90 kB PDF]. As I understand it, the decision had the effect of overturning French Government plans to allow ISPs to cut off copyright infringers from the Internet. The decision is interesting because it makes such a clear connection between Internet access and a French citizen's right (enshrined in 1789) freely to communicate ideas and opinions. In effect, the ruling asserts that even if a citizen's use of the Internet may involve copyright infringement, that should not of itself entitle an ISP to cut off the citizen's connection. Excerpt:

"12. Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 proclaims : "The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man. Every citizen may thus speak, write and publish freely, except when such freedom is misused in cases determined by Law". In the current state of the means of communication and given the generalized development of public online communication services and the importance of the latter for the participation in democracy and the expression of ideas and opinions, this right implies freedom to access such services."

The French approach contrasts with the 25 August UK Government announcement [50 kB PDF] that in respect of "subscribers alleged by rights holders to be infringing copyright" it is now "considering the case for adding into the list of technical measures [to be at the disposal of ISPs] the power, as a last resort, to suspend a subscriber's account". The Digital Britain team strive in the Government's Digital Britain Forum to keep discussion of these issues civilised and open - 25 August 2009 and 27 August 2009 - but reaction is mainly hostile.

Google Docs now has translation between any pair of 51 languages as standard

Updated 31/8/2009

If you use Google Docs, the "Tool" drop-down allows you to produce a machine translation of the document into any of 51 42 languages, including, as of today, Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish. For more on the newly available language pairs, see this 31/8/2009 piece in the Google Research Blog by Franz Och, Principal Research Scientist. Excerpt:

"We're very happy that our technology allows us to produce machine translation systems for languages that often don't get the attention they deserve. For many of the newly supported languages ours is the only mature and freely available translation system. While translation quality in these languages will be noticeably rougher than for languages we've supported for a longer time like French or Spanish, it is most often good enough to give a basic understanding of the text, and you can be sure that the quality will get better over time."

A new strategic direction for the OU - OUeU?

The Open University has revised its strategic direction, with a decision taken to operate in five business areas. One of these "OU Supported Open Learning" is where most of the OU's current activity takes place. The plan is to grow the other four, and you get the feeling that the OU is aiming to be, as a monolithic entity, the heavyweight "eUniversity" that UKEU spectacularly (and predictably?) failed to become.

Here are all five in full:

1. OU Supported Open Learning — UK awards offered by the OU to students in the UK and other parts of the world (principally in Europe) through supported, blended open learning. This constitutes the traditional business of the OU.
2. OU Online — UK awards offered wholly online by the OU to students in the UK and throughout the world. Provision will initially be at postgraduate level.
3. OU Plus — UK or local awards and courses offered to students through or with partners who substantially augment and enhance the OU contribution. These will include organisations and companies drawn from the private as well as the public sector, operating internationally as well as within the UK. In the UK, they will include employers who will be engaged with the OU in the development of re-versioned and co-funded provision.
4. OU Freemium — new businesses deriving income from open educational resources (OER) and associated services. This business area was previously called OU for Free and has been re-titled to stress the need to monetise OER in order to create a sustainable business model. It includes OpenLearn, SocialLearn, iTunesU and Open Research Online.
5. OU Services — the sale of OU educational and research products and services throughout the world, usually on a for-profit basis. These are products and services created through the disaggregation of elements of the foregoing business areas and include not only OU course materials but also, and increasingly, stand-alone services, such as educational and careers guidance, credit rating and accreditation (where it is appropriate and profitable to do so), and academic consultancy and the licensing of intellectual property.

The state of the LMS market - shades of Napoleon's march to Moscow

Here is a wonderful diagram from a report by Michael Feldstein from a "Delta Initiative" webinar about the state of the LMS market. 

The diagram reminded me of Joseph Minard's "Carte Figurative" of Napoleon's march to and retreat from Moscow:

Source: Edward Tufte.

Digital Britain Implementation Plan

13/8/2009, updated 29/8/2009

Here is the August 2009 Digital Britain Implementation Plan [214 kB PDF]. It describes 18 projects, with varying degrees of sketchiness, and with occasional references to amounts of funding attached to different measures. The sketchiness stems in part from the fact that the different projects consist of actions from the June Digital Britain report, which were not organised into projects. The 18 project areas are as follows, and I've made bold those that I think will be of interest to readers of Fortnightly Mailing (you may also want to run your eye over Donald Clark's 29/8/2009 shot-from-the-hip comments on each):

1. Digital Economy Bill
2. Digital Inclusion/Participation
3. Digital Skills
4. Current and Next Generation Broadband
5. Spectrum Modernisation
6. Digital Radio Upgrade
7. Video Games
8. Illegal File Sharing
9. Contestable Funding
10. Public Service Content
11. Independently Funded News Consortia
12. BBC/Independent Production in the Nations
13. Digital Security
14. Personal Digital Safety
15. Online Consumer Protection
16. Digital Government (including establishment of "G-Cloud")
17. Digital Delivery Agency
18. Other Relevant Activity