Fortnightly Mailing

Peoples-uni: Building Public Health capacity using Internet-based e-learning

Peoples-uni has a new web site and is beginning to enrol students for six four-month on-line course modules starting in October:

• Foundation Sciences of Public Health: Introduction to Epidemiology Research Methods, Biostatistics, Evidence Based Practice
• Public Health Problems: Maternal Mortality, Preventing Child Mortality, Disaster Management and Emergency Planning

All of the modules, which are accredited by the UK Royal Society for Public Health, use Open Educational Resources. The cost per person per module in the current intake is USD50.

For more on Peoples-uni, see this November 2007 Guest Contribution by Dick Heller.

FreeMyFeed - a simple way to subscribe to an authenticated feed

I'm involved in project with a username and password protected web site. The project web site (provided by BaseCamp) has an RSS feed which enables users easily to keep up with changes to the site. The snag is that the feed is authenticated, which means that my preferred feed reader (Google Reader) cannot display the feed. FreeMyFeed solves this problem, by providing an alternative URL for the BaseCamp RSS feed, which Google Reader can display. FreeMyFeed has a promising looking approach to privacy:

"Usernames, passwords, feed URLs and feeds are never stored on the server. Usernames, passwords and feed URLs are only parsed from the alternate URL to retrieve your RSS feed on the fly from the original source and then are discarded."

With thanks to Neil Smith of Knowledge Integration for telling me about this solution.

BBC Radio 4 "PM" to cover sleep apnoea and road haulage at 17.30 on Saturday 13 September

Source: BBC

Sometime between 17.30 and 18.00 on 13 September, BBC Radio 4's Saturday edition of "PM" will consider the problem of sleep apnoea amongst HGV drivers. The coverage stems in part from my family's 22 August 2008 media release, posted here on Fortnightly Mailing, following Coroner Sumner's issuing of a Rule 43 Report to the Lord Chancellor calling for a toughening of the rule and procedures governing sleep apnoea and road haulage. Interviewees are likely to include my nephew's father, sleep apnoea expert Dr Dev Banerjee, as well as Colin Wrighton, the driver of the lorry that killed my nephew, who is now himself campaigning for action on the problem.

Anand Rajaraman: Google's Chrome, and the "cornerstone of privacy on the Web"

Anand Rajaraman's Google Chrome: A Masterstroke or a Blunder? has some interesting insights. Excerpt:

"The cornerstone of privacy on the web today is that we can use products from different companies to create isolation: desktop from Microsoft, browser from Mozilla, search from Google. These companies have no incentive to share information. This is one instance where information silos serve us well as consumers. Any kind of vertical integration has the potential to erode privacy."

Nicholas Carr: is Google God or Satan?

Nicholas Carr's The Omnigoogle is worth the 5 minutes it will take you to read in full. It concludes:

"God or Satan? When you control the economic chokepoint of a digital economy and have complements [that is, subsidiary services that do not cost you much to provide, and which complement your primary business] everywhere you look, it can be difficult to distinguish between when you're doing good (giving the people what they want) and when you're doing bad (squelching competition). Both Google and Microsoft have a history of explaining their expansion into new business areas by saying that they're just serving the interests of "the users." And there's usually a good deal of truth to that explanation - though it's rarely the whole truth.

Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you'll find that either comforting or not."

A quick review of Google Chrome. Guest Contribution by Dick Moore.

Minor revisions 5/9/2008

First glances are promising: the integrated search and address bar works well as do the visual representation of most common visited sites, and bookmarks as thumbnails.

When Chrome encounters a poorly written website (or one that it is unable to cope with) then it is the tab that crashes and not the browser, though in testing I have not been able to cause a crash (a good sign in itself). Chrome’s privacy mode, called "incognito" will be of benefit to anyone wishing to browse on a shared computer: it ensures that no history or cookies are kept locally. (Internet Explorer 8 also has this feature called "inPrivate Browsing".)

Chrome’s interface is quite stark but its ability to go full screen and minimal would suggest that its intended use is as a means to access web based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail.

In a very rough test, Chrome was significantly faster than both Internet Explorer 7 and an "un-tuned" installation of Firefox.

Chrome is Open Source, which will surely mean that, as with Firefox, a wide range of plug-ins get developed.

Download and installation were very quick and easy, with bookmarks and tabs picked up from Firefox. As yet there are no Mac or Linux versions, but these will surely come.

Privacy considerations

For the more paranoid, the combined search and address bar suggests that every address we type will be recorded by Google, thereby enabling Google to collect even more data on which sites users visit, and thus Google better to target advertising at individual users. The privacy options give you some control over the "pass-back" of usage information to Google ; and the fact that Chrome is Open Source should allow the more technically capable to confirm that these privacy options work.

Overall, if you interested in a lightweight web browser, Chrome is well worth a look; and it is bound to get better. I will be comparing Chrome with Firefox over the next few months. For the moment I am not planning to take Firefox, with its invaluable range of plug-ins, off my PCs.

You can download chrome at google chrome download. Meanwhile there are lots of YouTube demos sprouting up. Personally I quite liked the comic strip that Google uses to describe the engineering thinking behind Chrome. This is at Read about the Technology

Dick Moore is Director of Technology at Ufi learndirect

Nicholas Carr on Google's new browser Chrome + my three halfpenny worth

Nicholas "The Big Switch" Carr is quick with a brief calm first reaction to Google's release of a test version of its Open Source browser. My three halfpennyworth is that we should expect Chrome to work well with Google Aps (Documents, Spreadsheets, Google Mail, Sites etc), where Google thinks there is substantial not-generated-by-advertising revenue to be had from organisations (and ISPs) outsourcing to Google their email (and, in the case of organisations) the software for writing, and the storage for, their internal content; and with Google Gears.

Itiel Dror and Stevan Harnad: the Web is the "Cognitive Commons"

Itiel Dror, who will be speaking at the 2008 Association for Learning Technology Conference (disclosure: I work for ALT half-time) on Wednesday 10 September in Leeds, sent me a chapter from a forthcoming book edited by him and Stevan Harnad - "Distributed Cognition" - which will be published - not sure when - by John Benjamins. The final sentence of the abstract (below for reference) struck a particular cord. You can also access the whole chapter in various formats including PDF and HTML from the University of Southampton's ePrints Server.

"'Cognizing' (e.g. thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state. Systems without mental states, such as cognitive technology, can sometimes contribute to human cognition, but that does not make them cognizers. Cognizers can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology, thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other cognizers. Language also extends cognizers' individual and joint performance powers, distributing the load through interactive and collaborative cognition. Reading, writing, print, telecommunications and computing further extend cognizers' capacities. And now the web, with its network of cognizers, digital databases and software agents, all accessible anytime, anywhere, has become our 'Cognitive Commons', in which distributed cognizers and cognitive technology can interoperate globally with a speed, scope and degree of interactivity inconceivable through local individual cognition alone. And as with language, the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental states, and on our very nature."

Some Blackboard and Desire2Learn bits and pieces

Source: Blackboard Inc. Sneak Preview of Project NG

Several Blackboard- and Desire2Learn related items come my way in the last few weeks, but holiday absence prevented me from using them. 

First, two long posts by Jim Farmer on Michael Feldstein's e-Literate blog:

• 11 August - about Blackboard software licences;
• 27 August - about Blackboard's financial performance (with some discussion about the company's UK market share, based on a comparison between UCISA's 2005 and 2007 CIS surveys).

Second, a slick and impressive promotional video from Blackboard about its "Next Generation" product - known as Blackboard NG - which has been described to me by someone on the inside of Blackboard as "light years ahead of Blackboard 8.0" (see also Nial Sclater's description of a talk about NG in Manchester earlier this year). I watched each of its eight "chapters".

The inexorable shift to online learning, in US HE at least

Mixed = at least one online and one onground class

Fall enrollments '04 = 4,396  ~~  Fall enrollments '07 = 4,855

For the first time I have a reason to use an animated gif/chart, and with its author Ray Schroeder's permission. Ray writes, about the University of Illinois at Springfield:

"The next click of that chart will move us to a place where fewer than 1/3 of our students are taking only on-ground classes.  Forgive my bias in thinking that what we are seeing at UIS will spread among the rest of the 500 regional state universities. "