Fortnightly Mailing

Problem-based learning - York Law School's guide for students

This Guide to problem-based learning, which draws heavily on a similar guide written by students at Hull York Medical School, provides an impressive and comprehensive overview of an approach to (HE) course design and delivery that is used throughout the undergraduate law course at York University. Via Hull Work Medical School I came across this long list of probably a bit dated links to resources about Problem Based Learning maintained (?) by the University of Maastricht.

Are there too many UK communities and professional bodies supporting workplace e-learning?

Prompted by a piece by Donald Clark which touches (I think rightly) on the problem of "too many membership organisations in the e-learning space", Clive Shepherd lists some of the reasons why rationalisation might be hard, without dissing the idea, and pulls together a useful two page list of the organisations concerned [60 kB PDF]. Clive invites comments on the list, and I am assuming it will evolve a bit, so its URL might alter. In the continuation post below I've included the comment I wrote (from the point of view of my employer the Association for Learning Technology) in response to Donald.

WolframAlpha: changing the face of information retrieval? Report from webinar with Stephen Wolfram

Updates

5/5/2009. Perceptive reflection by David Weinberger on the importance (or lack of it) of WolframAlpha.

28/4/2009. Here is some informative and sceptical discussion about WolframAlpha on Slashdot.

29/4/2009. NB. On Tuesday 28 April, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will hosted a face-to-face and remotely accessible preview of the WolframAlpha system. Participants included WolframAlpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law. Here is David Weinberger's contemporaneous report from the session, and here is a link to a 55 minute interview by Weinberger with Wolfram.

16/4/2009 - "Making 'expert level' knowledge accessible to everyone" - Stephen Wolfram

I signed up for a preview of WolframAlpha, and today I took part in a webinar presented by Stephen Wolfram, in which he put the very impressive WolframAlpha through its paces by feeding its search field with a wide range of brief (English) queries e.g. "next solar eclipse in Chicago" - including from participants - generating, quickly, elegantly presented well-structured answer-screens, with facts, data, graphs, time-lines, and links to sources of data (but not images). Think of it as a "CIA world fact book" that can generate its fact-sheets flexibly and on the fly, about a huge

Formative "e"-assessment - useful project report

I had a very minor hand in a short JISC-funded project to scope a "vision of formative e-assessment". The project report [50 pages, 2.7 MB PDF] deserves to be widely used.

It contains is a coherent two-page synopsis, a clear summary of nine key points from a review of the literature, and there are constructive discussions of the term "formative" (how assessment can be used formatively rather than formative assessment per se) and of what "e" can add to formative assessment.

Alongside these there are extensve links to the various outputs of the project, for example the project Wiki, which is a repository of material associated with the activities and events of the project, and the output section of the project blog which provides an overview of the key presentations made by a range of speakers throughout the project.

A very welcome aspect of the report (and the whole project) is its focus on learning rather than on tools, and nearly half the report is given over to a sample of "design patterns" in the domain of formative e-assessment produced - think of these as a "theory informed" recipes, in various stages of development - which the project developed over a series of one-day workshops.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

Here is a current article by Google's Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira [376 kB PDF], from the IEEE's March/April issue of Intelligent Systems. It is intelligible to a lay person, and it contrasts lucidly two broad approaches to extracting meaning from information. Though the article does not use the terms, you might describe these two approaches as taxonomic and statistical. These excerpts - the second is the concluding paragraph - give you a flavour:

"The biggest successes in natural-language-related machine learning have been statistical speech recognition and statistical machine translation. The reason for these successes is not that these tasks are easier than other tasks; they are in fact much harder than tasks such as document classification that extract just a few bits of information from each document. The reason is that translation is a natural task routinely done every day for a real human need (think of the operations of the European Union or of news agencies). The same is true of speech transcription (think of closed-caption broadcasts). In other words, a large training set of the input-output behavior that we seek to automate is available to us in the wild. In contrast, traditional natural language processing problems such as document classification, part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition, or parsing are not routine tasks, so they have no large corpus available in the wild. Instead, a corpus for these tasks requires skilled human annotation. Such annotation is not only slow and expensive to acquire but also diffi cult for experts to agree on, being bedeviled by many of the diffi culties we discuss later in relation to the Semantic Web. The first lesson of Web-scale learning is to use available large-scale data rather than hoping for annotated data that isn’t available. For instance, we find that useful semantic relationships can be automatically learned from the statistics of search queries and the corresponding results  or from the accumulated evidence of Web-based text patterns and formatted tables, in both cases without needing any manually annotated data."

"So, follow the data. Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data. Represent all the data with a nonparametric model rather than trying to summarize it with a parametric model, because with very large data sources, the data holds a lot of detail. For natural language applications, trust that human language has already evolved words for the important concepts. See how far you can go by tying together the words that are already there, rather than by inventing new concepts with clusters of words. Now go out and gather some data, and see what it can do."

Top 5 internet priorities for any next Government

Via Owen Bader, Tom Steinberg from the excellent organisation - see * below - mySociety (link to 50 minute video, and to interesting Gordon Brown phone call on the bus story)  provides a list of the top 5 major things any government of any developed nation should be doing in relation to the Internet, as Tom sees it at the start of 2009.  Three in particular caught my eye:

"2. Free your data, especially maps and other geographic information, plus the non-personal data that drives the police, health and social services, for starters. Introduce a ‘presumption of innovation’ – if someone has asked for something costly to free up, give them what they want: it’s probably a sign that they understand the value of your data when you don’t.

3. Give external parties the right to interface electronically with any government or mainly public system unless it can be shown to create substantial, irrevocable harm. Champion the right fiercely and punish unjustified refusals with fines. Your starting list of projects should include patient-owned health records, council fault reporting services and train ticket sales databases. All are currently unacceptably closed to innovation from the outside, and obscurity allows dubious practices of all kinds to thrive.

5. When people use your electronic systems to do anything, renew a fishing license, register a pregnancy, apply for planning permission, given them the option to collaborate with other people going through or affected by the same process. They will feel less alone, and will help your services to reform from the bottom up."

* mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives. Examples of mySociety systems include FixMyStreet and TheyWorkForYou. See also this link to the work of software developer Chris Lightfoot, who died two years ago, and who contributed to many of mySociety's projects.

Macintosh OS X on a netbook for £400 - Guest Contribution by George Roberts

OK, I don't think you can call it a "Mac netbook" but this is how I got Mac OS X 10.5.6 to run on a Dell mini 9. It was easier than I thought.

Blurring the lines between net-books and e-book readers

The main brain behind the wonderful screen on the OLPC laptop was Mary Lou Jepsen. The screen had a low power consumption, high screen resolution, and worked well in direct sunlight. Jepsen's start-up company Pixel Qi is tackling the design and production (by manufacturers not by Pixel Qi) of cheap, but above all, highly functional screens. Here Jepsen provides a brief update:

"We are making screens that are more readable than regular laptop screens, and our studies show they are as comfortable to read as electrophoretics in existing ebook readers. But these screens also update quickly, show video, are sunlight readable and (with the backlight on) show full color. In addition, our display screens integrate with touchscreens of many different varieties (an analyst I know is aware of over 200 different efforts by various companies in new and improved touchscreens)."

10/1/2008 - The 75$ laptop.

Giving a boost to Carol Twigg's work on how to ensure technology interventions are (cost) effective

Donald Clark has been reading and summarising - to good effect -  Carol Twigg's work for the National Centre for Academic Transformation. (See Favourite e-learning research; Carol Twigg's research on cost-effectiveness; Effective learning through e-learning; reducing drop-out rates.)

On 7/9/2005 Carol did a keynote at the 2005 ALT Conference in Manchester. At the last minute, Carol was unable to attend the conference in person, so she delivered the speech remotely. A technical issue between the US and the UK prevented her from using the microphone in the studio she was in, so she did the whole keynote with a mobile phone. Despite this she held the attention of 500 people for an hour. Stunning. Carol's slides from her presentation, and my summary of Carol's answers to questions after her keynote are here on the ALT web site.

As an aside, I think that there is more than a streak of "not invented here" in relation to UK attitudes to Carol's work; ALT^* and others have been regularly referencing  the work in responses to policy consultations; but the underlying "points of fact" that the National Centre for Academic Transformation has established have tended either to be ignored, or marginalised with explanations as to why "it ain't like that in the UK".

^*Disclosure. I work part time for ALT.

Brewster Kahle - the man behind the Wayback Machine

Last week's Economist Technology Quarterly carried a two page spread about Brewster Kahle, the Internet entrepreneur and philanthropist behind the Internet Archive / Wayback  Machine. Below is  a 20 minute December 2007  TED talk by Kahle. Slick it ain't (Kahle looks to be the kind of person who simply does not do slick), but the overview provided into the scale of, and processes behind, Kahle's endeavor to create a free, online collection of human knowledge makes it worth watching in full. Fittingly, one of the three copies of the Internet Archive, is in Alexandria.