Fortnightly Mailing

The bombing of Gaza: Gideon Levy in Haaretz

This piece by Gideon Levy in the 31/12/2008 web version of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and the response it stimulated, caught my eye, and is in contrast to the anodyne discussion of Israel's actions in the mainstream UK media. It ends:

"Maybe if they [the pilots] were to confront the results of their "wonderful work" even once they would regret their decisions, they would reconsider the effects of their actions. If they were to go just once to Jerusalem's Alyn Hospital Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Center, where for nearly three years Marya Aman, 7, has been hospitalized - she is a quadriplegic who runs her wheelchair, and her life, with her chin - they would be shocked. This adorable little girl was hit by a missile in Gaza that killed almost her entire family, the handiwork of our pilots.

But all of this is well hidden from the pilots' eyes. They are only doing their job, as the saying goes, only following orders like bombing machines. In the past few days they have excelled at this, and the results are there for the entire world to see. Gaza is licking its wounds, just like Lebanon before it, and almost no one pauses for a moment to ask whether all this is necessary, or unavoidable, or whether it contributes to Israel's security and moral image. Is it really the case that our pilots return safely to base, or are they in fact returning to them as callous, cruel and blind people? "

Huddersfield University makes its library usage data freely available

On 12/12/2008 Huddersfield University published a large swathe of its library usage data under an open license, along with a full explanation of why and how. Excerpt:

"Since 2005, the University of Huddersfield has provided book recommendations within its library catalogue, driven by mining of the historical circulation usage data.

At the time of writing, the library has details of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a period of 13 years. The mining of this data has proved both beneficial to our students (via recommendation services and easy access to personal borrowing histories) and to the library (via usage analysis to inform stock management).

Involvement with the JISC TILE Project led to a decision to release a sizeable portion of the usage data in the hope that it might prove beneficial to others. The released data represents about 70% of the total circulation data available -- only items with low circulation and/or no ISBNs have been omitted."

Copyright and related rights policy issues

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has a web site - Intellectual Property Office - Copyright and related rights policy issues - summarising current policy issues relating to Copyright in the UK.  An example is this summary of where things currently stand on the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, with a link to a summary of responses made under last year's consultation. The latter shows the deep divide that exists between users and rights holders, and it will be interesting how this is addressed in the forthcoming second consultation, which will include proposals for changes to the law in the area of copyright exceptions. (In case it is of interest, here is ALT's response to last year's preliminary consultation [~50kB PDF]¹.)

¹ Disclosure: I am employed part time by ALT.

Andrew Gowers (of the Gowers Report) disparages the current Culture Secretary's call for copyright extension

Andrew Gowers used to be editor of the Financial Times and he subsequently led the Government's Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, which proposed some beneficial changes in IP law. On 14 December 2008 the Financial Times carried an Opinion piece by Gowers criticising the current Culture Secretary Andy Burnham for suggesting that the Government will consider extending copyright for recordings to 70 years from the present 50. "All the respectable research shows that copyright extension has high costs to the public and negligible benefits for the creative community," says Gowers.

With thanks to the Open Rights Group, which I helped found, for highlighting this article.

Pearson buys Fronter

The Bookseller and others report the acquisition by Pearson of Fronter. So now Pearson, one of the world's largest publishing business, with a market capitalisation of around $5bn, owns in Fronter, a highly regarded VLE supplier as well as eCollege, a US supplier of VLE services to (mainly US distance) education providers, which it acquired last year. Who should be worried about this? My guess is that the smaller suppliers of VLEs to schools in the UK will feel a bit threatened; and if Pearson decides to move in the direction of HE, then it definitely has the weight and international presence to give companies like Desire2Learn and Blackboard a run for their money.

"In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" ...

... is not the title of the 2009 Association for Learning Technology¹ conference, and it would have been a step too far to so name ALT-C 2009, which will take place between 8 and 10 September 2009 in Manchester, UK.

Instead we chose a different phrase from WB Yeats and named the conference "In dreams begins responsibility" - choice, evidence, and change. The calls for proposals for research papers, short papers, workshops, posters, demonstrations, and symposia has now been issued and are available at ALT papers page on the ALT-C 2009 web site. Individual documents are as follows:

• Call and Guidelines for Research Papers [10 page 59 kB PDF file]
• Research Paper Template [4 page 53 kB DOC file]
• Call and Guidelines for Short Papers, Posters, Symposia, Workshops and Demonstrations [10 page 60 kB PDF file]

Key dates

1. Proposals accepted from late December 2008
2. Deadline for receipt of proposals: midnight UK time on 16 February 2009
3. Bookings open during May 2009
4. Presenters' registration deadline 29 June 2009
5. Earlybird registration deadline 6 July 2009
6. Bookings close on 14 August 2009

¹ I am employed part time by ALT.

The death rate of "NEETs", and the educational performance of looked after children

I spent some time this week at a stock-taking overnight workshop organised by Becta, which focused on the "Harnessing Technology" strategy for England. I'm not going to report from the workshop, bar to mention two statistics that were referenced by one of the workshop speakers, both of which will stop you in your tracks.

The first concerns young adults who are not in employment, education, or training (known in education-speak as NEETs).  Work in a major English city shows that one in six male NEETs are dead within 10 years of leaving school.

The second concerns looked after children. Whereas well over half of children in England leave school with at least 5 grade A*-C GCSE passes at school, only around 16% of looked-after children achieve this¹.

These two figures set in context the practical and policy challenges facing Ed Balls, Secretary of State at the Department for Children, Schools, and Families (DCSF) last July, at the launch of the new department, who said (and I am sure means) :

"Our aspirations are straightforward and ambitious: every child deserves to be safe and loved and have a healthy and happy childhood, free from harm; and every child should have the chance to make the most of their talents and fulfil their potential. To do this, we must provide excellent universal services for all children and their families be able to identify potential problems early, before things go wrong; and when children are at risk, do something quickly to help children and their families get back on track."

¹ As an aside, someone mentioned to me that looked-after children in Germany have a better-than-average educational performance.

David Wiley's "Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education"

In 1998 my enthusiasm for openness was given a boost (or started?) by David Wiley and the Open Content license that he developed. At that time the use of such licenses, which have been superseded and absorbed by Creative Commons, was very rare. (The LeTTOL course was originally published under an Open Content License, though this seems no longer to be the case.) Ten years later, David Wiley's influence has grown a great deal, and his 85 slide presentation Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education deserves to be widely viewed, though you can only follow Wiley's argument to a certain extent from his slides; and without that you cannot develop a critique or endorsement of it.

[With thanks to Dan Barker for highlighting this.]

Sleep apnoea and road accidents - our memorandum of evidence to the Transport Select Committee

[This post is tagged "nothing to do with e-learning...]

Earlier this year the Transport Select Committee began an Inquiry on Road Safety. The then Chair of the Committee, Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, who sadly died in April of this year, helpfully agreed to allow my family to submit a memorandum of evidence, well beyond the closing date, concerning the problem of undiagnosed sleep apnoea and the large numbers of vocational drivers suffering from it. 

Our evidence is now available on the Parliament UK web site. One of the things we called for was for the  Health and Safety Executive, with its responsibilities for minimising work-related death and injury, and with its powers to insist on action by employers to prevent risks to non-employees (that is, road users at risk from drivers suffering from sleep apnoea), to play a much more prominent role in relation to work-related fatal road-traffic accidents and their prevention. The Transport Select Committee's  report, published on 15/10/2008, makes scant reference to sleep-related road accidents, and none to sleep apnoea, but it is nevertheless good to see that the report highlights, in paragraph 110 the anomaly that "the vast majority of work-related deaths are not examined by the Health and Safety Executive, purely because they occur on the roads", and calls for the Government to "review the role of the Health and Safety Executive with regard to road safety to ensure that it fulfils its unique role in the strategy beyond 2010".

Mick Waters on personalisation: "unless pressed, I never use the word"

In previous posts I've been sceptical about personalisation (April 2006; October 2006; January 2007 ; March 2007).  On 17 November the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee took oral evidence from Mick Waters and Teresa Bergin (respectively Director of Curriculum and Director of the Diploma Programme at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority), Professor David Hargreaves (Associate Director for Development and Research, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, and a past chair of Becta), and Tim Oates (Director of Assessment Research and Development, at the major examining body Cambridge Assessment). The uncorrected record of evidence must make uncomfortable reading for those still wedded to use of the term. Here are some extracts.

Hargreaves: 'We have been struggling with this definition for four years, and I have concluded that it is a total waste of time trying to find a tight definition-it does not work; there are too many of them. In that sense, my sympathies are entirely with Mr. Heppell. The current thing from the Department quotes the definition given in the Gilbert report on teaching well in 2020, of which I was a member: "It means strengthening the link between learning and teaching by engaging pupils-and their parents-as partners in learning." In my view, that is well-intentioned waffle. It is well intentioned, but it means nothing. In fact, many schools will say that that is what they do. There is no implication of action at all. '

Mick Waters: 'Unless pressed, I never use the word, because I think that it has become one of those things that everyone says but hardly anyone does.'

Professor Hargreaves: 'When you cannot define it, the best thing to do is to not use it. I agree with Mick. I think that it has outlived its usefulness. When Tony Blair made the original challenge back in 2004, it was a very real challenge. Today, our interest is in how to redesign the whole experience of schooling, so that our young people achieve more and find their education a good one. Personalisation was a useful way forward at a certain period, to draw attention to something. I am personally sorry that the Department has a thing called "personalised learning", as though it is a thing we can identify. It is not. "Personalised" was always the wrong word; it was always a process of personalising, as in the business world. It is past its usefulness. We would be much better looking for words on which we can find more agreement-such as curriculum, choice and entitlement-than having the debate strained. Frankly, I wish the Department would drop the concept.'