Fortnightly Mailing

The digitally literate learner and the appropriation of new technologies and media for education

Here are the slides from John Cook's well-attended inaugural lecture at London Metropolitan University this evening. John's talk - you get quite a clear grasp of it from the slides - was a nice mix of the personal, the practical, and the theoretical; and in listening to it you got the sense that John has been thoughtfully "plugging away" on learning technology research that is making a real difference to learners from non-traditional backgrounds. (John is based at London Metropolitan University, which is said to have more black and ethnic minority students than the whole of the UK's "Russell Group" of elite research led universities.)

John's argument (this is written live, and is bound to be doing him disservice)  is roughly as follows:

• connected mobile devices are everywhere;
• young people in the developed world are digitally literate;
• they spend several hours per day on the Net (often using a spectrum of devices rather than just one);
• their digital literacy enables them to communicate and manipulate (images, data, etc) in ways that really are  new and different;
• informal learning is endemic, and for many is more important in its overall impact than formal learning;
• context/location aware mobile devices provide a powerful way to enhance learning;
• the learning environment is the loosely coupled set of tools, services, and information resources that learners choose to access, rather than the institution's VLE.

India's National Mission on education through ICT

Here is the 9/1/2009 official announcement of the Indian Government's National Mission on education through ICT, which has a focus on equipping teachers in the use of ICT in teaching and learning. The full text is below as two JPG files.

Measurement Lab - helping you find things out about your broadband connection

Measurement Lab is a joint initiative by the Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and Google. Excerpt:

"Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet. When an Internet application doesn't work as expected, how can you tell whether the problem is caused by your broadband connection, the application or something else? It can be very difficult for professional network administrators, let alone average Internet users, to answer this sort of question today. Transparency has always been an essential component of the Internet's success, and Internet users deserve to be well-informed about the performance of their broadband connections. For that to happen, researchers need resources to develop new analytical tools."

The tools currently or soon to be available via M-Lab are:

• Network Diagnostic Tool to help you test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed;
• Glasnost to test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled;
• Network Path and Application Diagnosis to diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks;
• DiffProbe (coming soon) to determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic;
• NANO (coming soon) to determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.

Thanks to Dick Moore for highlighting this.

Fond memories of Keith Duckitt

Keith Duckitt's step-daughter Sara Powell has made a fitting web site with photographs and tributes to Keith, who died on 3 October 2008.

Academic Earth - founder Richard Ludlow answers some questions

Richard Ludlow, founder of the video-lecture sharing Academic Earth, preferred answering some questions to writing a Guest Contribution, which was fine by me.

My questions and Richard's responses are below.

How we make websites (for the BBC)

Thanks to David Jennings for sending a 29/1/2009 link to a presentation by Michael Smethurst about how (some of) the BBC's web sites are designed and built.

University of the People - providing low cost online degree courses worldwide

The University of the People will "open its doors" (i.e. take enrolments for a September 2009 start) in April 2009. According to the organisation's web site:

"The University of the People is a nonprofit organization devoted to providing universal access to quality, online post-secondary education. The organization, founded by Shai Reshef, is comprised of volunteers from all around the world. Many of these volunteers are appointed faculty at universities; others are active professionals-business administrators, librarians, computer programmers, economists, and educators. They share the belief that all people should have the opportunity to change their lives and contribute to their communities, as well as the understanding that the path to societal and individual prosperity is through education. We are certain that our collective efforts as volunteers can be decisive in developing and executing the programs through which millions of people previously denied access to higher education will be able to earn accredited academic degrees."

UoP (a not-for-profit)  is coy about costs:

"The University of the People plans at this stage to charge only nominal application fee ($15-$50) and examination fees ($10-$100), which will be adjusted on a sliding scale based on the student's country of origin."

and will start with two degree courses, a BA in Business Administration and a BSc in Computer Science, running over ~four years for full-time students. Currently, UoP says it "intends to apply for accreditation from recognized authorities as soon as possible".

Shai Reshef, the founder, is a serial entrepreneur with a very strong track record in making this kind of thing work. For example, a Netherlands-based for-profit company Reshef chaired, and which was subsequently sold to Laureate Inc. [PDF], was the delivery partner for a range of Liverpool University online masters courses.

How to write in the age of distraction

For all you writers out there, Cory "Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" Doctorow's Writing in the Age of Distraction has some sharp advice summarising how to avoid being "info-whelmed" when writing to deadlines. Via dana boyd.

Doctorow's five-minute video Writing a Novel is in the same vein.

(Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, from 2001, is here.)

Updated with the Doctorow video, 26/4/2012, with thanks to @jjn1.

Economic implications of alternative scholarly publication models

Very meaty report to JISC - Economic implications of alternative scholarly publication models [286 pages, 2.25 MB] - published today, by John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen, Peter Sheehan, Charles Oppenheim, Anne Morris, Claire Creaser, Helen Greenwood, Mark Summers and Adrian Gourlay, which examines the costs and benefits of three alternative models for scholarly publishing, namely: subscription publishing; open access publishing; and self-archiving.

Difficult to gut it (while sitting in the meeting in which it was tabled) in the absence of a good executive summary, but here is an extract from the JISC media release about the report:

"The research centred on three models which include:

• Subscription or toll access publishing which involves reader charges and use restrictions;
• Open access publishing where access is free and publication is funded from the authors' side; and
• Open access self-archiving where academic authors post their work in online repositories, making it freely available to all Internet users.

In their report, Houghton et al. looked beyond the actual costs and savings of different models and examined the additional cost-benefits that might arise from enhanced access to research findings.

The research and findings reveal that core scholarly publishing system activities cost the UK higher education sector around £5 billion in 2007. Using the different models, the report shows, what the estimated cost would have been:

• £230 million to publish using the subscription model,
• £150 million to publish under the open access model and
• £110 million to publish with the self-archiving with peer review services plus some £20 million in operating costs if using the different models.

When considering costs per journal article, Houghton et al. believe that the UK higher education sector could have saved around £80 million a year by shifting from toll access to open access publishing. They also claim that £115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to open access self-archiving.

In addition to that, the financial return to UK plc from greater accessibility to research might result in an additional £172 million per annum worth of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone."

Google Research Awards - call open to staff in universities worldwide

There is a Google research award call open to full-time faculty members from universities worldwide. Awards are typically for one year in the range from $10K-$150K.

"Areas that are of particular interest include (but are not limited to):

• Economics and market algorithms
• Education innovation
• Geo/maps
• Health
• Information retrieval, extraction, and organization
• Machine learning and data mining
• Machine translation
• Mobile
• Multi-media search and audio/video processing
• Natural language processing
• Policy and standards
• Security and privacy
• Social systems
• Speech
• Structured data and database management
• Software and hardware systems infrastructure
• Human-computer interaction"