Fortnightly Mailing

Dan Hill on the new State Library of Queensland

Two impressive posts by Dan Hill about the State Library of Queensland, one from the perspectives of a user - "The best public library I’ve seen anywhere. Certainly superior to the Bibliothèque National de France, far superior to the British Library, and superior even to the otherwise peerless Seattle Public Library, to name but three I’ve studied in person. And despite having a fraction of their budget, I’d guess." - and the other with some intriguing visualisations of the library's "wifi ambience", along with some atmospheric and very classy sketches of laptop users at work.

European debut for OLPC XO1 laptop

Updated 09.10 17/11/2008

According the BBC, OLPC is planning to sell XO1 laptops in Europe via Amazon from 17 November. (If you search Amazon for OLPC you get a related result [124 kB PDF], dominated by a competitor's product.) Although it is unclear from the Amazon web site, the machines will apparently be sold under the "Give One, Get One" scheme that the OLPC organisation has already run in the US, with £275 securing one XO1 for you and contributing one XO1 for use in less developed countries by OLPC.

11/4/2008 review of OLPC in Fortnightly Mailing by Geoff Stead of the Tribal Group.

Could the UK become a world leader in e-learning?

The UK's Department for Innovation Universities and Skills has launched a public discussion on a report commissioned from Sir Ron Cooke [300 kB PDF], about how the UK might become a world-leader in higher education e-learning¹. DIUS is eager to encourage discussion of this report, to which ALT contributed, and in partnership with JISC, a blog has been set up to record public comments on Sir Ron Cooke's report.

Personally I think that though the report's "The experience of Ufi/learndirect in providing high quality e-learning should also be built upon." is a correct sentiment to express, not enough is made of the need to examine and build upon the experience of Ufi/learndirect, one of the UK's few really successful large scale on-line learning interventions.

Readers who are enthusiastic about open educational resources will be pleased, as I am, at the overall strong emphasis on OER: "It is taken for granted in the research process that one builds on the work of others; the same culture can usefully be encouraged in creating learning materials." But, having nailed its colours so strongly to the OER mast, with five OER-related actions, of which this is one example:

"A comprehensive national resource of freely available open learning content should be established to provide an “infrastructure” for broadly based virtual education provision across the community. This needs to be curated and organised, based on common standards, to ensure coherence, comprehensive coverage and high quality."

I believe that the report somewhat skims over the profound cultural and organisational change that will be needed in HE if use of OER is to become really widespread, with the proposal for the setting up of a number of "distributed centres of excellence" in OER being insufficient to bring about the kinds of changes that are envisaged.

^1. ALT, for which I work part-time, provided extensive comments on drafts of Ron Cooke's report.

Precautionary registration of domains. Derek Morrison highlights the importance of YouTube "channel ownership"

In 2001 when I worked for The Sheffield College - http://www.sheffcol.ac.uk/ - I initiated a complaint to Nominet concerning an abusive registration of the domain http://www.sheffcol.co.uk/. The result of this [50 kB PDF]  was the compulsory transfer to The Sheffield College of http://www.sheffcol.co.uk/ from its owner. Excerpt:

"In light of the foregoing findings, namely that the Complainant has rights in respect of a name or mark which is identical to the Domain Name and that the Domain name, in the hands of the Respondent, is an Abusive Registration, the Expert decides in favour of the Complainant. The Complainant’s requested remedy is transfer, and accordingly the Expert directs that the Domain Name, sheffcol.co.uk, be transferred to the Complainant."

At that time organisations were in the process of learning the importance of precautionary registration of domains relating to their brand. (Since that time, The Sheffield College seems to have let its ownership of the sheffcol.co.uk domain lapse.... to poor effect.)

This interesting, though long post by Derek Morrison in Auricle "On the video - a reflection on YouTube and friends (part 2)" shows how easy it now is to register "channels" on YouTube, and, by implication, the importance of education providers seeing the registration of such channels as something to manage, rather than treat passively. Derek writes:

"What I find a bit surprising is that many HEIs don’t seem to view ever-growing services like YouTube as an important part of the virtual landscape. When that perception is compounded with a lack of naming convention then there is some risk that others will occupy the space. For example, a visit to http://uk.youtube.com/OxfordUniversity will not illuminate any aspect of the Oxford University’s brand. In that case the University of Cambridge’s, as yet unpopulated, YouTube channel may be a wise move. So what to do? It took me just 5 minutes to register the following YouTube accounts:

• http://uk.youtube.com/UniversityPoppleton
• http://uk.youtube.com/PoppletonUniversity
• http://uk.youtube.com/AuricleDotOrg
• http://uk.youtube.com/AuricleOrg"

Data visualisation - many methods, neatly categorised

Ralph Lengler and Martin Eppler come up with this elegant if a bit contrived periodic table of visualization methods. The methods are organised into six broad (and to some extent overlapping) categories, and according to whether they help:

• visualise a structure or process;
• give overview or detail (or both);
• "divergent" or "convergent" thinking (quotes added).

Studs Terkel - a moving obituary

I'm rarely moved by reading the Economist. This obituary of Studs Terkel, who died on 31 October, was an exception.

Obama and Biden on broadband access and net neutrality

Updated 9/11/2008

Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Technology Policy, on the Office of the President Elect web site, is was (until it ceased to be accessible....) positive on two important issues (emphasis added):

Protect the Openness of the Internet: A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.

Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Barack Obama believes that America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access. As a country, we have ensured that every American has access to telephone service and electricity, regardless of economic status, and Obama will do likewise for broadband Internet access. Obama and Biden believe we can get true broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.

and less so on two others:

Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad: The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that in 2005, more than nine of every 10 DVDs sold in China were illegal copies. The U.S. Trade Representative said 80 percent of all counterfeit products seized at U.S. borders still come from China. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will work to ensure intellectual property is protected in foreign markets, and promote greater cooperation on international standards that allow our technologies to compete everywhere.

Protect American Intellectual Property at Home: Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. Barack Obama believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.

Via David Weinberger.

Roy Pea at Becta's 6/11/2008 Research Conference

Source: NSF LIFE Centre

Vanessa Pittard gave a candid and impressive introduction today to this year's Becta Research conference. She and her team at Becta seem really to be getting to grips with building up and funding a long-term and wide-ranging policy-relevant research effort, one important aspect of which is the longitudinal approach that is being taken. The latter is now providing a much clearer understanding of what is happening on the ground in schools and colleges and how this is changing over time. (See Harnessing Technology Review 2008: The Role of technology and its impact on education. Summary; full report.)

Roy Pea from Stanford University gave the main keynote at the conference, focusing on the Report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning¹, which I covered in September, which takes a long term, detailed, cross-sectoral view of what is happening at the intersection between learning and technology, and how this might affect provision in the long term. (Later this month a video of Roy's talk will be available on the Becta web site.)

The NSF report's focus is on learning in the sciences (broadly defined) rather than the humanities, but the implications of the report are not restricted to learning science.

Server-side data visualisation tools from Google

I do not pretend to understand the detail of this, but Fortnightly Mailing reader Rob Hindle definitely does, and saw fit to send me a link to this 3/11/2008 posting on the Google Code Blog.

Getting parents to pressurise schools to up their game with ICT

According to Becta:

"Schools that integrate technology well across the curriculum and wider school life have reduced absence rates and achieved a higher percentage of A*-C grades at GCSE level."

Assuming this is true, and the reader's first reaction is to ask "compared to what?", it is quite a big leap of faith to conclude that effective integration of technology across the curriculum is the cause of the reduced absence rates or higher achievement levels. Instead, it might be a product of the schools which integrate technology effectively being well led or well managed or having good teachers. (Becta, elaborates more on this issue in various places, and here is a slightly extended summary of its evidence.)

I'd be interested to know what others make of this new feature on Becta's "next generation learning" web site, which enables you to find out if schools near you have the ICT Mark. (The image above shows the paucity of ICT Mark schools near where I live in Sheffield.) Becta implies that having the ICT Mark provides a proxy for how well a school is integrating technology into the curriculum, and urges parents to pressurise schools to get it:

"As your school is not listed you should ask about their ICT plans and whether they plan to work towards the ICT Mark."

Certainly this is a not a standard approach for a Government Agency to be taking, but given Becta's remit "to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning" you can see the rationale for it. 

Research comparing the performance of schools with ICT Mark with those without it would be of interest, if any reader is aware of any.