Fortnightly Mailing

What is a professor's body for?

You will find the answer between 10 and 12 minutes into this TED talk about creativity and the education system by Sir Ken Robinson.

With thanks to Nicky Ferguson for the link to the whole talk.

Mark Wesch: students as multi-taskers

Via New Zealander Louise Starkey's Teaching in the digital age, I came across this 5 minute video by Mark Wesch, from Kansas State University.

The $75 laptop

Pixel Qi, led by ex One Laptop Per Child CTO Mary Lou Jepson, is a "spin-out" from OLPC:

"What computing can be, the XO laptop was just the first step.  Pixel Qi is currently pursuing the $75 laptop, while also aiming to bring sunlight readable, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, cellphones and digital cameras."

What is becoming clearer by the day is that the toughest "digital divide" nut to crack concerns connectivity rather than devices. Currently there is a commendable push in England to ensure that school pupils can be online from home irrespective of parental income. The price of devices is falling very fast, driven by the market and by the arrival of next generation devices like OLPC and the Asus EEE, which cost about as little as a middling mobile phone. Connectivity is a much bigger challenge, for at least reasons:

1. firstly, remote areas are still out of reach of broadband, and wireless coverage is concentrated on where there is money to be made;
2. the monthly cost of a connection remains stubbornly high;
3. poorer households often have no fixed line, nor the credit rating to obtain one, even if they could afford to pay;
4. municipal WiFi networks (which might provide free access to a basic service) have been less successful than anticipated in the places they've been tried.

Ultimately Internet access in a developed economy like the UK's must be seen simply as a citizen's entitlement, like getting a drink of mains water. The challenge for Governments and public authorities is to bring this about. (Maybe some kind of public/private partnership based on FON  - in which broad-band customers with local WiFi make this available to people nearby - or an equivalent of it, will provide one of the solutions).

Microsoft Vista and Office 2007: Becta says "review the findings of the report before considering any large-scale investment or deployment"

On 9/1/2008 Becta published its review of Microsoft's Vista and Office 2007 products. This "draws conclusions on whether to upgrade, how to upgrade and document interoperability between home and school, recommending that schools and colleges review the findings of the report before considering any large-scale investment or deployment". Full report [291 kB PDF]. ZDnet coverage of the issue. The key recommendations from Becta's report are in the continuation post below.

Technophobe teachers wasting millions?

Blunt 7 January 2008 article in The Times by Nicola Woolcock asserting that "teacher technophobia" is behind the extensive failure of schools to make effective use of ICT, despite the billions of earmarked funding spent on ICT in schools by the UK government. The article coincides with the annual BETT exhibition and brochure-fest. Extract:

"State schools spent £1 billion on cutting-edge information technology last year but 80 per cent of them are failing to make full use of it, according to experts.

Pupils now handle equipment worth thousands of pounds, with some using laptops, interactive whiteboards or hand-held smartphones. The Government claims that Britain is a European leader in installing IT in the classroom.

However, Becta, the Government’s adviser on IT in schools, says that many teachers are intimidated by the equipment and struggle to cope, and that children have a better understanding of how it works.

Britain is one of the biggest spenders per head on technology in schools worldwide, according to Becta — formerly the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency — and the amount is growing each year. Yet Andrew Pinder, its chairman, said: 'We are achieving nothing like the impact that we should from this technology. We spend more than other countries but not enough schools are using technology effectively.'"

Pinder's views do not seem to have changed much since his appointment as the chair of Becta (see this discussion on a keynote he gave at the Oxford Internet Institute in November 2006). I agree with him on the need to do things on a large scale to get the costs down and the quality up, and to avoid parallel reinventions or purchasing of the same wheel in countless small units, be these colleges and schools, or LEAs.

But the "teacher technophobia" angle seems to reveal a bit of a blind spot, and, possibly, a reluctance to take account of research such as Becta's own eSIR study. In the developed world, ICT permeates middle class citizens' lives (including teachers') generally. So perhaps the real problem is the way that "technology for my work" is often so different from "technology for my life". The reason that you use Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, The Trainline, etc etc is because these services help you with the "stuff" of your life. The key to getting ICT used in schools is to have it designed, supported, and run in a way which helps learners, schools, and teachers with the "stuff" of education. That this is not the case in many schools is a complex issue, which should not be reduced to "teacher technophobia".

Baboon Metaphysics - the Evolution of the Social Mind

Photograph by Keena Seyfarth of baboons making a water crossing

Over Christmas I read Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's Baboon Metaphysics - the Evolution of the Social Mind,  a wonderful long term field study of baboons in Botswana's Okavano Delta. I did not know that baboons make capable goat herds, successfully matching a couple of dozen kids to their mothers, with strong motivation to keep mother/kid pairs together; nor that a baboon named Jack the Signalman had a long and successful career in the late 1800s working the signals on the railways in Uitenhage between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, with an official employment number and a daily allocation of rations from the railway company.

These stories provide a backdrop to the book proper which works step by step from a description of baboon life to an analysis of baboon thinking, self-awareness, and motivation, based on complex observations and on experiments in the wild. (The experiments are well-described in Frans de Waal's review linked to from the bottom of this post.) 

Stunning "MIT Lecture Browser" indexes recordings using speech to text conversion

[Updated 14/1/2008]

Thanks to Carolyn Kotlas and INFOBITS for highlighting the stunning MIT Lecture Browser. Use it to search a large body of MIT OpenCourseWare video assets, scroll through a machine-generated - and reasonably accurate - transcript of the audio to the asset (a lecture, say), and then navigate accurately to the point in the lecture that interests you. For reasons I cannot yet fathom, I could not get the video to play in my browser, but even without this I was gripped by the Lecture Browser's underlying utility, even without being able to play the video properly, [14/1/2008] though following the advice in the comment below I have now solved the problem.

For more on the browser, follow these links:

• Lecture Browser "About" page;

• November 26 2007 MIT Technology Review article by Kate Greene.

Last year's (and some of this year's) predictions

Stephen Downes has a sharp and useful look-back at last year's annual round up of predictions in eLearn Magazine. Scary, when 10 minutes ago I rather tentatively supplied eLearn with 100 words worth of predictions "for innovations and new directions in e-learning" for 2008. Stephen concludes "that there are two major types of predictions: one, which identifies a current trend, and says it will continue; and the other, that identifies something novel or unexpected. It seems clear that the former predictions are easy and safe and not especially useful. The latter, while not as safe, were much more useful to people". My predictions are squarely in that former "less useful" category:

1. Effective use of RSS by learners, teachers, and learning providers will become more normal. Meanwhile the off-line capabilities of browser-based applications like Google Reader will grow, making a big difference for users with only intermittent Internet access.
2. The hype surrounding social networking will abate, with a greater understanding developing about when social networking supports learning, and when it is a distraction.
3. Many more people will break free from Windows or OSX based systems, and begin to rely instead on cheaper, lighter, disk-free devices, with their "stuff" stored somewhere on the Internet rather than locally.

In the US, young adults are the heaviest users of libraries

Apart from teaching me that being in my mid-50s I am a "leading boomer", Information searches that solve problems - How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help [187 kB PDF], published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on 30/12/2007, counters the view that Internet access is driving out library use - in the US at least:

"Libraries meet special needs. Young adults in Generation Y (age 18-29) are the heaviest users of libraries when face (sic) these problems. They are also the most likely library visitors for any purpose. Most of those who visit libraries to seek problem solving information are very satisfied with what they find and they appreciate the resources available there, especially access to computers and the internet."

"Who uses libraries, not just for problem solving, but for all purposes? Major finding: 53% of American adults report going to a local public library in the past 12 months. The profile of library users shows an economically upscale, information hungry clientele who use the library to enhance their already-rich information world. Gen Y again leads the pack again. Public library patrons are generally younger adults, those with higher income and education levels, and those who are internet users. Parents with minor children living at home are very likely to be patrons. There are no significant differences in library usage by race and ethnicity."

Meanwhile, the Independent reports on library closures in England.

May 2006 dialogue on Fortnightly Mailing about libraries.

With thanks to Lorcan Dempsey and George Siemens for flagging this Pew report.

OLPC laptops arrive in Arahuay, Peru

Optimistic coverage by Frank Bajak in the 30/12/2007 Washington Post about the impact in Peru of an initial delivery of OLPC XO laptops in the village of Arahuay. (The Peruvian government has ordered 270,000.)