Fortnightly Mailing

Jeff Han's multi-touch, mult-user eight foot wide display/interface

In the continuation post below is an impressive 4 minute video of Jeff Han demonstrating his company's eight foot wide multi-touch, multi-user display/interface, and you can read more about touch screens in this 4/9/2008 piece in the Economist. An early prototype for the screen was developed by Han at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Once you've got the general idea from the video, skip to the final minute for Han's insights into the difference between 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional interfaces.

With thanks to Dick Moore for pointing out the video.

Carly Shuler's "Pockets of Potential - Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning"

Carly Shuler's 2009 Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning [600 kB PDF] for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop (from which the diagram above is taken) provides a  cool-headed overview of the potential of mobile technologies for children's learning, and ends with some US-oriented "a multi-sector action plan to transform
mobile learning from a state of uneven and scattered innovation into a force for dynamic educational impact".

New Becta "Emerging Technologies for Learning" service

Becta's new Emerging Technologies for Learning web site describes itself as follows:

"Bringing together news, articles, research, views and opinions on emerging technologies for learning The Emerging Technologies for learning area draws together news, research, analysis and views around technology developments and trends relevant to education. It aims to provide an environment for debate on technology futures within the education community and those serving it, encouraging dialogue and building shared understandings about the future."

The site badly needs its RSS feeds to be available on every page (they can be found here, and this is the overal feed); and its editorial policy needs making clear. Specifically:

• who is writing it?
• what are its editorial policies?
• what if any process exists for drawing its editors' attention to "stuff" that needs covering?

By way of a relatively minor design quibble, users need to drill into the site too much for comfort. For example, to escape from the site's events listing to the web site of a listed event requires rather too many clicks. But overall, a definite improvement on what went before.

Mobilising the minds of the masses - Anil Ananthaswamy in the New Scientist

Source: txteagle

"The total amount of idle time literate, English speaking mobile phone subscribers have within the developing world is estimated to be more than 250,000,000 hours every day. Given high rates of unemployment and marginal income sources, much of this population would greatly benefit from even an extra dollar per day."

Interesting article in the 14 February 2009 New Scientist by Anil Ananthaswamy. The article is partly about Nathan Eagle's txteagle, a service that "allows rural Kenyans to earn airtime and money by performing small tasks such as translation and transcription using their mobile phones" (from whose site the above excerpt is taken), but it develops into a more general discussion about mobile phones, and the credit they hold, as payment-transaction devices in less developed countries, using Safaricom (a mobile-phone based banking system) as an example.

Nathan Eagle is a research scientist at MIT and his Nokia-funded work on "reality mining" is also of interest.

Love the brain you are with

I made this diagram for a talk last month, based on Richard Sennett's description in The Craftsman of a thought experiment by the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith. Its point? Evolutionary change is very slow when compared to cultural change. Cultural change is very slow when compared to technological change. Don't get too carried away with recent technological developments. In effect, "love the brain you are with".

John Medina's "Brain Rules"

John Medina - source: John Medina's web site

"Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It's (sic) text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads — all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones."

Amended 22/2/2009 and 2/3/2009

I enjoyed John Medina's excellently implemented, thoroughly referenced, browsable and entertaining  Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School partly because it complemented some of my prejudices. 

I did my teacher-training in 1976-1977, and the proportion of the 1-year full time course devoted to the science of learning was small. (Sure, 30 years ago less was known about the subject than is the case now.)

Medina's web site could not have been produced in 1976 (either technically, or from the point of view of its science), but one would hope that teachers and others will be making a point of using it now, whilst retaining plenty of the natural scepticism we evolved for life as hunter gatherers. (One of Medina's points is that our brains and bodies evolved to make us fitted for life as hunter gatherers, and his 12 "rules" are built on that assumption.)  One thing Medina's slick web site would benefit from, though it would be costly to manage, is some space for (peer reviewed) challenges to the science that underpins his "rules". For a 2 March 2009 overview of Medina's site see this post by Donald Clark.

Related posts:

•  9 September 2006 Come dance with me, whispers the neuroscientist to the teacher;
• 12 March 2007 Useful terse articles by Itiel Dror about the science of learning;
• 14 March 2007 The bandwidth of consciousness;
• 4 January 2008 Baboon Metaphysics. The Evolution of the Social Mind.
  

Ma.gnolia - when a service "up in the cloud" goes wrong

Last year I was involved in project that used, to good effect, the social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia. The nice thing about Magnolia was its support for OpenID and the way that small groups could form around narrowly focused bookmarking endeavours, without the clutter of "mass" services like Delicious. Thankfully the project is long finished. Otherwise the data-loss described in this rueful message from the founder on the Magnolia web site would now be causing problems.....

"Web 2.0-style" resource discovery comes to libraries

My friend David Jennings wrote an interesting piece for the ALT Newsletter about "Web 2.0-style" resource discovery in libraries. David's report summarises the discussion at a workshop ALT*organised last December for the JISC-funded TILE project. Excerpt:

“'You looked at The Complete Essays by Montaigne; you might also consider The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader edited by Whitlock.' Most of us are familiar with Amazon’s gently pushy way of suggesting further purchases. If you’re a music fan, you may have tried “scrobbling” each song you listen to into the massive Last.fm database of listener behaviour. In return for this gift of your data, you get to explore the habits of others who share some of your tastes, and you get a series of recommendations for other music you might enjoy.

If it works for retail and leisure, might this same approach also be applicable for libraries and learning?"

The short answer seems to be "yes it very well might".

*I am employed part time by ALT.

Universal design - building web applications for everyone

I've been reading Universal Design for Web Applications by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May. Chisholm and May's main point is that the proportion of users that are accessing the Web using a mobile device is growing fast, with many of these users having no access whatever to a conventional large-screen device. So making web sites work on mobile devices is no longer an option unless you want to exclude a large number of potential users. Universal Design provides concentrated and apparently feasible - if fiddly - advice on how to make web applications that conform to the Level A "Success Criteria" of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, taking account of W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0.  One weakness that struck me was the book's rather superficial treatment of content management systems (CMS) - like TypePad that I use for Fortnightly Mailing, and how a user-in-the-street should tackle ensuring conformance when their CMS does not do this by default - as in the case of TypePad.

Previous relevant Fortnightly Mailing posts:

• Test the mobile-readiness of a web site - 1 June 2007;
• Sharp critique of WCAG 2.0, with comments by Stephen Brown and Jonathan Grove (whom I have asked fix the dead link) - 25 May 2006;
• Improving the accessibility of your web site - 9 May 2006.

Here Comes Everybody: how change happens when people come together - Clay Shirky's 3/2/2009 public lecture at LSE

Clay Shirky gave a publice talk at LSE entitled Here Comes Everybody: how change happens when people come together on Tuesday, and Steve Ryan sent me a link to the 45 minute talk and 45 minutes of discussion, which LSE has made available as an MP3 [42 MB]. Abstract:

"Clay Shirky, one of the new culture's wisest observers, steer us through the online social explosion and ask what happens when people are given the tools to work together, without needing traditional organisational structures. As online communication becomes ubiquitous, Shirky unpicks fundamental issues that are increasingly the source of much debate in particular in the media, in business, and in government, all of whom are grappling to make sense of the new social revolution. He argues that the conundrum is not whether the spread of these social tools is good or bad, but rather what the impact will be, for better or for worse."