Fortnightly Mailing

A new blog from the UK's Intute educational resources service

Thanks to Emma Place for sending this link to the new Intute Blog. Intute is a free online service providing access to a curated database of web resources for education and research.  Intute's blog is written to be "relevant to staff in UK universities and colleges who are interested in the use of Internet resources in education and research".

Clayton R Wright's comprehensive listing of educational technology conferences

Via ZaidLearn and Stephen Downes, and attached here, is Clayton R Wright's terrific listing of educational technology conferences world wide. Wright has been compiling this list, and issuing it every 6 months, for nearly ten years as a "spare time" activity. Now that is true amateurism.

Peoples-uni.org - an open access initiative for public health

Guest Contribution by Dick Heller

Dick Heller recently retired as Professor of Public Health at the University of Manchester, UK, where he developed a fully on-line Masters course in Public Health. Previously Dick was at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he was part of the International Clinical Epidemiology Network  (INCLEN).

Let me tell you about http://www.peoples-uni.org/ which aims to develop educational content around Open Educational Resources, freely available on the Internet, to help with Public Health capacity building in low- to middle-income countries.

Local universities offering public health education may be oversubscribed for face-to-face courses and fees for overseas universities, including e-learning distance programmes, are higher than can be afforded by most potential students in these countries. Internet-based e-learning has the exciting potential to deliver high quality learning resources anytime and anywhere, and although access is by no means universal it is improving quickly.

There is an ever expanding range of high quality on-line education resources freely available through the Internet, and a number of universities are putting educational material on-line for open access, although they do not include either teaching or accreditation of learning. Peoples-uni.org aims to provide educational context around the materials freely available on the Internet. A number of national and international partners have agreed to be part of this, and momentum is building.

We are starting with Public Health, building towards Masters level courses, and are piloting our first course module on Maternal Mortality currently. We have a large interest in accessing this course and the pilot is going very well. Draft course modules on Maternal Mortality and Child Mortality can be seen on http://moodle.cawd.net/course/category.php?id=68.

We are hoping for collaborations to develop to assist with this initiative, and plan to keep costs low enough to allow access by those who will benefit. Any groups or individuals who wish to join the initiative in any capacity will be welcome.

Dick Heller -  dick.heller "AT" manchester.ac.uk

Subtitled version of Common Craft explanation of RSS

Here is a helpfully subtitled version of Common Craft's April 2007 4 minute video explanation of RSS, aimed at the lay user. 

[With thanks to Kate Butler.]

Virtual video cutter - creates small chunks of content from longer streaming audio or video files

One of the drawbacks of video and audio in learning materials is that typically "the bit you want" is buried deep inside a file. In a conversation during a conference I attended last week, Robert Schuwer of the Open University of the Netherlands mentioned SURF's Virtual Video Cutter. This is an impressive web-based tool for making snippets from streaming media files.

The tool has comprehensive instructions in Dutch, English, and Spanish. I usually struggle with this kind of thing, but managed quickly to make usable snippets from MP3 (audio) and MP4 (video) files, and to save these locally in a format that enabled me subsequently to open them and play them locally; though the actual asset seems to be stored (for how long?) on a SURF server. One of the nice features of the Virtual Video Cutter is that it enables you precisely to specify the start and finish time of the snippet, and easily to alter this.

If readers know of other web-based tools that do the same kind of thing, post a comment below.

[SURF is, broadly, the Dutch equivalent of the UK's JISC.]

Marc Andreessen on OpenSocial: a new universe of social applications all over the web

[Updated 13.30 1/11/2007; 2/11/2007]

In the mid 1990s Marc Andreessen was one of the originally developers of Netscape, the browser that enabled the World Wide Web to take off in the mass way that it did. In June I wrote something about Ning, a promising looking commercial platform for supporting social networks which Andreessen founded with Gina Bianchini.

Here is a 31/10/2007 "top level technical" piece by Andreessen about Google's about-to-launch OpenSocial, which seems to provide a way for suppliers of social networking applications to make their applications work with each other, and for developers of individual components for social networking applications to make them work on any participating social networking platform. There is also a follow up post by Andreesson, with a screen-cast showing OpenSocial in action, for which thanks to Simon Grant; and this piece in the New York Times (via The Register) picks up on the fact that MySpace and Bebo, two of the largest social networking services are tied into OpenSocial.

Today Google is itself silent on OpenSocial, but from the tone of Andreessen's piece, that will change very soon. (It has). Expect serious concerns to emerge about privacy and the sharing/re-use of personal data.

The principal requirements of plain English style, by William Strunk in 1918

If you need a terse guide to writing style, try this one from 1918 by William Strunk.

"It aims to give in a brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. The numbers of the sections may be used as references in correcting manuscript."

[Thanks to Dick Moore for this.]

Thinking like a vegetable: how plants decide what to do

Terrific 1 hour talk [link to IPTV Archive] given in London on 24/10/2007 at the Royal Society by Ottoline Leyser, which explains, clearly and engagingly, how brainless plants process information about their environment, and use hormone signals to integrate information and regulate their behaviour.

Wide range of interesting stuff in the October 2007 ALT Newsletter

The Octboer 2007 issue of the ALT-N, the newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) - for which I work part time - has several interesting articles, including:

• a piece by Sanjesh Sharma about Djanogly City Academy's structured and successful use of ICT;
• a case study by Federica Oradini and Gunter Saunders about the introduction of e-portfolios at Westminster University;
• a report by Bob Banks from Becta's 17/9/2007 "Harnessing Technology" Research Forum;
• a detailed article by Jim Farmer about the the growing provision by US text book publishers of accompanying on-line support materials, and its impact on student success;
• a report from Howard Hills comparing the use, uptake and impact of e-learning in colleges with businesses generally.

Puncturing the hype: large-scale analysis of MySpace users and their behaviours, by Mike Thelwall

Mike Thelwall is Professor of Information Science in the School of Computing & Information Technology at the University of Wolverhampton. He has recently published a fascinating piece of "work in preparation" about MySpace users - Social Networks, Gender and Friending: An Analysis of MySpace Member Profiles [250 kB DOC], which he is happy for people to quote and cite.

The analysis uses two nice big data sets, and a third, much smaller one. The large data sets were obtained in the following interesting way:

"The raw data for this article are three samples of MySpace public user profiles. Each MySpace user has a personal identification number, and these numbers are apparently given out in sequence. We identified approximately the last ID issued by MySpace on July 3, 2007 and for the first collection selected every 10,227th ID starting at 1,939 (a random starting point) to give a large total sample size (20,064). The profile page associated with each of these user IDs was then downloaded via the URL http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid= followed by the user ID. These profiles were downloaded at a rate of 8,000 per day over three days to avoid overloading the MySpace server. This is the 'all members collection', and encompasses MySpace users from a wide variety of joining dates. "

"The second collection is the 'July 3, 2006 members collection' and consists solely of users who joined on July 3, 2006, as identified by trial and error through MySpace ID ranges, selecting 10,000 IDs (90,306,349 to 90,316,348). These were downloaded over four hours on July 17, 2007 starting at 2.30am central U.S. time in an attempt to access the data when most users were asleep in order to (a) minimise impact upon the MySpace servers and (b) capture comparable data."

The article draws many useful insights, and represents the data visually with great clarity. Here is a small selection:

• ".... (half of the users had not checked their account for at least two and a half months), because they had given up MySpace, had a pattern of infrequent checking, or had switched to another MySpace account ."
• "Excluding users with 0 or 1 friends on the grounds that they are probably mainly inactive users, the median length of time since the last logon was approximately one week (8 days)."
• "In simple terms, it seems that about a third of members give up immediately, a third become regular users and the rest log on occasionally."
• Users lie about their ages: "The surprisingly high number of centenarians could be due to children signing up their oldest living relatives but certainly reflects joke ages for at least some: several claimed to want children 'someday'; and there are examples in the data like 'Kevin' (apparently 102) who appears to be about 13 from his picture and has a typical teen action-packed MySpace profile."
• "A large majority (77%) of users were from the U.S., although – surprisingly - the UK was in second place (5%), followed by Canada (2%), Australia, (2%), the Philippines (1%) and Mexico (1%)."
• "The median number of friends is 1, and the median number for users who have at least 2 friends is 27."

Thelwall concludes:

"If there is a typical MySpace user then she is probably 21, single, with a public profile, interested in online friendship and logging on weekly to engage with a list of mixed but majority female 'friends' that are predominantly acquaintances (including bands). This is a very different profile to those of the teen users frequently discussed in the contemporary press, and so it seems likely that public perceptions of MySpace are at variance with reality."

Note. After writing this piece I came across dana boyd's extensive and up-to-date Research on Social Network page, which contains a link to Thelwall's paper, and a lot of other material besides.