Fortnightly Mailing

Becta reports Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading - 19 October 2007

Here are three extracts from a 19/10/2007 Kable's Government Computing news item:

"The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency has referred Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading for alleged anti-competitive practices in the schools software market Becta, the government's education ICT partner, made the complaint on 19 October 2007. It also relates to concerns over Microsoft's policy on document interoperability."
...

"The agency's main concerns surround the limitations Microsoft places on schools using its subscription licensing arrangements and the potential interoperability difficulties for schools, pupils and parents who wish to use alternatives to Microsoft's Office software, including "free to use" alternatives."
...

"Becta advised schools that have already entered into a school agreement licensing model to consider their renewal and buyout options alongside the OFT's findings. Schools and colleges should only deploy Office 2007 when there is satisfactory interoperability with alternative products."

Becta's own press release.

Institute for Fiscal Studies monthly public finance bulletin

Some subscribers to Fortnightly Mailing are in roles where access to a regular low-volume, neutral commentary on the state of the public finances is valuable.

One good way to get this is by subscribing to the Institute for Fiscal Studies monthly Public Finance Bulletin, which provides a monthly three-paragraph update.  Here, for example is the update for October.

Headline Comparisons

• Central government current receipts in September were 4.6% higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase over last year's levels of 6.1% for the year as a whole and of 6.8% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. The latest figures show an increase over last year's levels of 4.9 % for the year to date.
• Central government current spending in September was 5.4% higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase over last year's levels of 5.1% for the year as a whole and of 4.1% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. The latest figures show an increase over last year's levels of 6.3% for the year to date.
• Public sector net investment in September was £1.2bn, or 68%, higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase of 13.1% for the year as a whole and an increase of 19.5% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. Together, public sector net investment during the first six months of 2007-08 has been £10.3bn, which is 10.8% higher than in the same months of 2006-07.

Bill Dutton - a political scientist's perspective on the Internet

The pace of change on the Internet is so fast, and there is so much snake oil around, that it is hard to keep a sense of perspective. Bill Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, does us a service in the text of his 15/10/2007 inaugural lecture Through the Network (of Networks) - the Fifth Estate [300 kB PDF]. In it he argues, in a thorough, reflective, and evidenced way, that just as printing led to the creation of an independent institution that has become known as the ‘Fourth Estate’, the Internet is leading to the 'Fifth Estate' which Bill describes as "a new form of social accountability" which is "enabling people to network with other individuals and with a vast range of information, services and technical resources..... in ways that can support greater accountability not only in government and politics, but also in other sectors", and which "could be as important – if not more so – to the 21st century as the Fourth Estate has been since the 18th".  It is worth taking the time to read the whole document; and if you have comments on it, the place to put them is on Dutton's blog.

TagCrowd - make your own "tag cloud" from any text

 

academic academy account acl administration administrator adult advanced adviser advisor advisory application assessor assistant associate based blended business campaigns care careers category cel centre chief co co-ordinator coach college commercial commissioning communications consortium consultant content coordinator corporate course curriculum department deputy designer development director divisional doctoral e-learning e-strategy early education elearning england enterprise environment esol events executive facilitator faculty fe general greek head health iclt ict ilt improvement information innovation instructional instructor iv jorum key le lead leader leadership learner learning lecturer libraries library life lrc management manager managing marketing mathamatics maths mobile national network officer on-line online operations ordinator partnerships performance plp policy practitioner principal professional programme project projects proprietor quality research resource resources sales school science section senior service services skills social software sport staff strategic student suport teacher teaching team technologies technologist trainer training tutor vice virtual vocational vpash wales work years

The other day I needed to make a "tag cloud" to give people at a conference an at-a-glance view of the kinds of people in the audience. I used TagCrowd, feeding in a text file, and then extracting the cloud as an image file, in a roundabout way. TagCrowd produces the HTML for a tag cloud with ease, but if you know of an alternative that generates the cloud directly as in image file, please post a comment below.

Freebase: lowering the barriers for participation in the Semantic Web. Guest contribution from Phil Rees.

Freebase is a web application that organisations and individuals use to easily publish information on-line, in a semantic structure, collaboratively.  Contributors from around the world can use the application to structure and edit any topic in the system or define meaningful links and relationships between topics.  All of the information in Freebase is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which means it can be reused for any purpose without going through a copyright clearance process.  To encourage the reuse of information, Freebase has made some programming tools available to ease the creation of web applications that extract live data from the system.

Clive Shepherd's "top picks" from Patti Shank's "The Online Learning Ideas Book"

Clive Shepherd posts his "top 12 picks" from the 95 ideas listed in Patti Shank's newly published The Online Learning Ideas Book. Reading a list like Clive's makes you realise how hard (futile?) it probably is to try to develop a formal language or syntax with which to describe learning design or to model learning, though the Open University of the Netherlands and IMS are trying, with Educational Modelling Language and IMS Learning Design.

Millions being wasted on a deserted Second Life? [Updated 26/6/2009]

Source: Schome web site - see link below

[Updated 24 September 2007, on 5 October 2007, and on 26 June 2009]

Roughly this time last year I wrote about Cyber One: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, a course being offered by Harvard Law School and the Harvard Extension School using the "virtual world" Second Life as a vehicle. Around the same time business interest in Second Life was picking up, with the 28/9/2006 Economist publishing a 3 page explanatory feature, which emphasised the value of Second Life for teaching and learning.

During the last year there has been much interest in Second Life in UK Higher Education. For example, the Eduserv Foundation ran a well publicised and successful conference on Second Life in May. Meanwhile, Nature has an island - Second Nature - in Second Life and is reportedly trialling integration between Second Life and external research databases; and in June 2007 the BBC broadcast an edition of its influential Money Programme from within Second Life. [BBC press release. BBC news coverage.] [24/9/2007] Link to some optimistic comic-style explanations produced by the OU's Schome Project of how Second Life can provide a challenging environment for learning. [5/10/2007] Link to a thoughtful piece about immersive environments, written as a report from a recent "serious games" conference, by John Helmer, Marketing Director at Epic plc [27/6/2009] at the time this post was originally written.

Personally I found "being" in Second Life generally disquieting and completely unmotivating, thinking "why would anyone want to spend time in here?"; and talking last weekend with my 21-year-old son and one of his friends (both Internet-savvy, Facebook- and Myspace-using, web-site creating, CAD or graphics-fluent individuals), we were laughing at the way our lack of interest in Second Life made us sound like "left-behind" old fogies. 

Maybe we are not completely wrong in our disinterest. Here is a highly sceptical article about Second Life by Frank Rose in the 24/7/2007 issue of Wired. Excerpt:

"Then there's the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn't much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden's in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM's Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27."

3 million broadband customers are encouraged to share their WiFi

I've been a member of the FON community more or less since its inception. With a 34.44 Euro (and, in the early stages, free) wireless router from FON we make our broadband freely available to anyone within reach of our router. FON members get free access. Non-members pay an hourly rate.

FON, which is a business not a philanthropic operation, is impressively international in its tone.

According to  FON, BT, the UK's biggest provider of ADSL broadband, has announced that it is integrating FON into BT, and is inviting more than 3 million customers "to join the enormous global community of people sharing their WiFi".

The cynic in me says there must be a catch?

A reader comments by email: "I don't think there's reason to be cynical. I presume BT gets a split on the daily fees Fon charges non-Fon members for using a Fon member's wifi. I think and assume it's a straightforward commercial, money-making deal for BT. And for Fon."]

[8/10/2007 update: see The Register's "BT says its WiFi kibbutz is not targeting 3G".]

Autumn 2007 interviews about artificial intelligence

"In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk."

7 similarly structured recent interviews with leading thinkers about (enthusiasts for?) artificial intelligence  have been published on the SIAI web site. Each is available as a video, downloadable video or audio, and, most helpfully, as a transcript. Interviewees range from confident to quite cautious about the imminence of the "singularity" that will result from the creation of a smarter-than-human artificial intelligence, with Google's Peter Norvig at the cautious end of the spectrum. Scan reading the transcripts gives you a good sense of the spread of opinion.  If this kind of thing interests you, then this 15 page summary [1.3 MB PDF] of the issues surrounding the singularity, from which the extract below is taken, is worth reading.

"The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. Several technologies are often mentioned as heading in this direction: Artificial Intelligence, direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, and ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.  A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human."

Becta's process for giving new shape to the e-strategy for education in England

Clickable thumbnail of larger image from Becta document

Harnessing Technology: Learning in the 21st Century, a Call to Action [8 pages, 3 MB PDF] - has just been published by Becta as the introduction for a series of policy seminars concerning the e-learning strategy. These take place between September and November 2007, and they lead up to a National Conference to be run by Becta on 6 November (election, if called, permitting).  Click on the thumbnail image above to see the timetable, process, and some of the people involved.

Thanks to Jacob Blandy for extracting these images from the Becta document.