Fortnightly Mailing

"Motion charts" - Data animation tool for Google Docs

You may have seen (and wondered at) some of Hans Rosling's talks, in which he uses Trendalyzer (the Gapminder Foundation's data visualisation tool) to draw conclusions from complex time-series. Last year Google bought Trendalyzer and some or all of the team that designed it joined Google. In the last few weeks Google seems to have implemented the tool - now renamed Motion Tool - along with a couple of others - as standard components of Google Docs. The addition of these features begins to differentiate Google's spreadsheet from Microsoft Excel in a particularly profound way, as you will see if you look at this sample spreadsheet and motion chart.

JISC Learner Experiences of e-Learning: Half way through the phase 2 research - Guest Contribution from Ellen Lessner

The second phase of the research into the learner experience of e-learning is one year old, with most projects due to finish in March 2009.  Phase 2 of this programme is made up of 7 research projects, with a "Support and Synthesis" project running in parallel.  On the public area of the project wiki you can get a good idea of the work that’s been done so far.  While the 7 projects are doing their individual research, the Support and Synthesis project has run 4 support workshops which have enabled the project teams to work together while focusing on the issues surrounding data collection, methodology and dissemination outputs.

You may have seen the publication from the first phase of the research - In Their Own Words available from the JISC website, and you may have seen coverage of LEX here in Fortnightly Mailing. There continues to be considerable interest in the many aspects of this phase of the project; not only the possible findings but the different types of data collection (video and audio), the methodologies used by the range of projects and the model of support used by the Support and Synthesis project.  We’re now at the stage where a variety of themes are just beginning to emerge.

Evaluating what learners are doing with technology is obviously important and there are a number of UK projects, mainly HE centred, focusing on this theme.  For example, the Higher Education Academy has funded a project, running from January to July 2008, called the Experiences of E-Learning Special Interest Group (ELISIG), for those involved in investigations and evaluations of learners' experiences of e-learning.  An initial ELISIG workshop held in March 2008 was attended by over 40 people.   

For more information on the Learner Experience Projects,   contact Ellen Lessner, Project Manager, Support and Synthesis Project or Sarah Knight, JISC Programme Manager.

UK National Archive of Educational Computing

Richard Millwood is maintaining a National Archive of Educational Computing web site:

"This is the (emerging) web site for the UK National Archive of Educational Computing, documenting the development of learning technology through its invention, application, policies, practices, organisations and people over the last half century."

Richard is looking for sponsorship, and is organising a conference in London on 9 July at the Institute for Education - A one day conference sharing hindsight about learning with technology to provide insight for now and the future. He is also looking for volunteers. Here is Richard's list of options for volunteers:

• 1 SAY WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT - identify your own interest / experience strengths and perhaps join a relevant 'decade' team;
• 2 TELL A STORY OR TWO - create personal, descriptive, narrative and interpretive material about the history of educational computing - there is a form for submitting your story on the website in the Stories section ( http://www.naec.org.uk/stories )
• 3 CONTRIBUTE STUFF - add text, photos, sounds, movies and links to other stuff on the net - contact me if you wish to add to this web site directly;
• 4 EDIT THE MATERIAL - contribute by searching, scanning, writing, reviewing and organising the team effort;
• 5 ADVISE ON CURATION - tell us how we should organise material, describe good practice for all the above;
• 6 ORGANISE MEETINGS - help support events to enjoy doing this work together;
• 7 FIND SUPPORT - formulate further plans, seek funding and sustain the effort.

A4 leaflet about NAEC [60 kB PDF].  Flyer about 9 July conference [60 kB PDF]. Link to volunteering form.

The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It

 

Source: Yale University Press

Updated 4/5/2008

My copy of Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It arrived yesterday. Zittrain, whose talk What would you install on one laptop per child? talk Steve Ryan summarised in Fortnightly Mailing in August 2006, argues that the Internet is on a path to lock-down, "ending its cycle of innovation, and facilitating new kinds of control". As locked appliances like iPhones and Tivo recorders eclipse the PC, and if Net neutrality ends, then the Internet and the devices we use to access it are in danger of losing their "generativity": that is, their capacity for being tinkered with, openly innovated with, and used generally in ways not envisaged by their suppliers.

Though this is a scholarly book by the Oxford University Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, it is also a gripping one, if Chapters One to Three  are anything to go by (I was less taken with the Conclusion, partly because of its already dated references to OLPC ). It gives a much less naïvely glowing and optimistic perspective on the Web than you sometimes get from Internet commentators; for which reason it ought to be widely read by IT and non-IT policy people.

The whole of the book is available on line and for comment, though rather slowly, with access to already commented-on sections seemingly slowed further by the use of a third party captcha system; and a Creative Commons licensed version is promised on Zittrain's web site at http://www.jz.org/.

Notes - 4/5/2008

• Piece by Jonathan Zittrain in the 4/5/2008 Times Online
• Unsatisfactory review by Tom Standage in the 27/4/2008 Times Online

Jane Hart's "25 tools – a professional development resource"

25 tools – a professional development resource,  by the indefatigable Jane Hart, is divided into 8 categories, ranging from “bare essentials”, via “share content with others”, to “develop and manage courses”.

Each tool is tagged by whether it requires downloading and installation on your own computer, or runs as a hosted service, or both; and for each Jane provides several simple activities to help you find out about the tool itself, and about the technology behind each tool.

One might take issue with a few of Jane’s choices (for example, from my exposure to both I am fan of EditMe over PBWiki); and possibly the resource could be rationalized a bit.

But Jane deserves thanks and congratulations for bringing this ambitious set of materials into one place.

Might there be a point in putting some or all of the activities into a collaboratively editable form to enable users to contribute to their maintenance and development? If yes, I'd be game to contribute.

Richard Stallman interviewed by Michael Reilly in the New Scientist

Richard Stallman "left MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1984 to develop the GNU operating system", which later merged into Linux. "He has been the GNU project's leader ever since" and has "dedicated his life to advocating the use of free software and campaigning against software patents and restrictive copyright laws". I was luck enough hear Stallman in Sheffield in October 2003 (when he spoke intently and engagingly, without notes, for over an hour, whilst nursing a badly broken arm); and though this interview in the 12/4/2008 New Scientist is no substitute for hearing him in person, it does give you the gist of Stallman's position.

Google Docs - available offline

Updated 26/4/2008

Around this time last year I wrote about Google Gears, which enables browser-based applications (like Google Reader) to work when you are off-line.  From April this year Google has begun (for individual users of Google Docs) to switch on the ability to use Google Docs when off-line. My guess is that the roll-out is being done geographically: with UK users some way down the queue, and I noticed that my access had been enabled on 26/4/2008. But If you have not got access, Google's own help pages give you a feel for what is envisaged (note the security warning....) , as does this 31/3/2008 explanation and video by Google's Phillip Tucker.

OLPC: Good, Bad or Ugly? Hands-on report by Geoff Stead and the Tribal m-learning team

After all our enthusiasm for the One Laptop Per Child initiative (OLPC) it was amazing to be able to spend the last two weeks testing one out for real (thanks Seb!).

So what is it really like?

The lunch-on-the-move quick read version

We, the Tribal m-learning team think the OLPC X0-1:

• is inspirational, embedding good educational ideas and collaboration;
• solves several big technology challenges;
• is great fun, but pretty slow;
• is full of first-generation quirks;
• has an amazingly rich seam of support info on the OLPC wiki;
• leads the field in several key directions, but might be superceded quite quickly?

One quirk worth mentioning is that almost everyone who tried to open it first time ... couldn't! To avoid this, and other basic blunders we have made a bluffers guide to the OLPC  to be released shortly ...

The sit-down-and-eat longer read version

There are so many competing views and agendas around this little green machine that we felt the best way to review it would be collaboratively. We got the entire Tribal learning technologies team in on the act, including animators, UI designers, teachers, academics and programmers. We also enlisted the real experts: our kids! (aged 6, 9 and 11).

The good:

• The XO is all about sharing. It has a great visual representation of available local networks, and of the people in your group. This is all about kids doing stuff - and building stuff - together, the collaboration is hard-wired into the system.
• Seymour Papert lives on. The XO includes great tools (like pippy and turtleart) to help everyone develop basic programming - and from that problem solving skills.
• The interface is interestingly different, without being counterintuitive ... even for those of us wedded to the Windows / Mac metaphors.
• The XO includes inspirational technology solutions to many 3rd world equipment problems that until now were ignored by the mainstream, but that we can all benefit from. Things like:
  • good protection from the elements (especially dust and spillage), as well be being very robust;
  • fantastic screens that can even be used in direct sunlight;
  • flexible power use and generation (very low power use, and you can plug it in just about anywhere or even generate your own power by sun or friction);
  • mesh networking: a combination of powerful wireless connections (can travel over 1km!) and ad-hoc networking help get many users sharing a single Internet connection;
  • no license fees, and endless scope to customise the software (thanks to a cut down Linux OS and open source apps);
  • good extensibility, with plug-and-play for standard USB peripherals (useful for an extra mouse and keyboard if you have got grown-up fingers - the keys are tiny!).
• Useful fold-back screen and mouse / tab controls on the screen casing. What it really cries out for in this mode is a touch screen, though.
• This device, more than any other we have seen, is all about kids. All about sharing. All about communicating and problem solving - in fact all about learning. OLPC should be a wake-up call for the first world as well ... why aren't we giving our kids the same tools?

The bad:

Slow and Unresponsive. This may sound ungrateful for such a cheap device, but bad responsiveness very quickly becomes a barrier. You can load multiple apps, but with two or three running at the same time the delays between mouse-movements and on-screen responses get so slow that many apps become unusable. Even drawing a single line in Paint results in a series of disconnected bits.

The ugly:

The interface (both software and hardware) suffers from many small irritants that you would hope get resolved in later releases. Individually they are just "quirks", but together they do start to make the "collaborative" nature of the OLPC development more visible. Some of our pet peeves are:

• The mouse pad: it looks like there are 3 mouse-pads, but only the central one works. You finger has no cue that you have moved onto one of the not-working pads so you keep "loosing your mouse". The pads need raised lines to separate them.
• The mouse buttons: need to stand out a little more. They are sunk-in, so tricky to use.
• Integrating with Sugar: the Linux interface being used (called Sugar) lets you access the main menu by moving your mouse to the 4 corners of the screen. A great idea, but several of the bundled apps also use the corners of the screen for menus and icons, which means the menu pops up by mistake when you want to use them!
• Webcam is off to the side of the screen, so the only way to get your face in shot is to lean over sideways! (Why not put it on top?)
• Even our veteran Linux developers struggled to find out how to upgrade what. It needs a single application to display all the technical information. For example: hardware version, software version, flash player version, security settings etc. Without this it is very fiddly to upgrade.

Overall we loved the X0 - but want more:

We love the fact it has had so much philanthropic energy put into it, and the bold, exploratory and collaborative ideals it encompasses. But we were frustrated enough with the speed and some of the interface quirks to give it the thumbs down until the next version gets released. If those get sorted, and it gets a touch-screen added, it will be one amazing device!

Review by Geoff Stead and the team at www.m-learning.org. Their blog is at moblearn.blogspot.com.

Alan Becker's Animator vs Animation is not to be missed

Thanks to Julia Duggleby and Jan Leatherland for this link to a wonderful 2006 animation by Alan Becker.

The Kiss Communicator: human-computer interaction in the year 2020

Kiss Communicator - by IDEO

"Being human" - with the strapline "Human-computer interaction in the year 2020", and edited by by Richard Harper, Tom Rodden, Yvonne Rogers and Abigail Sellen, is an elegantly designed 51 page report [2.3 MB PDF], published by Microsoft Research in 2008. Whilst I'm sure I'll not be using the Kiss Communicator - a concept prototype that allows you, by squeezing and blowing on the device, to "blow a 'kiss' to your beloved even when in another part of the world", the report does set the scene for how the computing may change in the next 10 or 20 years, in the developed world at least.