Fortnightly Mailing

Test the mobile-readiness of a web site

More and more use is being made of the Internet by mobile phone users. Most web sites work badly with mobile devices, and designing web site to work better is tricky: there is a wide range of devices and browsers; testing the site on even a small proportion of the possible combinations is not a viable proposition.

Furthermore, mobile users are generally paying for their data - so big or graphics rich pages are costly (as well as usually pointless) to view. Finally, mobile Internet users behave differently from users of Macs or PCs. For example, they may not know how to enter text into their browser, or the may be slow at doing it. Users tend to find things by searching and then navigating.

dotMobi controls access to the ".mobi" top-level domain. It also publishes Style Guides for developers of mobile web sites. These seem largely to be based on the output from the World Wide Web Consortium's Mobile Web Initiative; and generalising a bit glibly, the way to make a web site work for mobile phone users is to:

• use well-formed mark-up that conforms to the relevant W3C standards;
• follow a few very specific design rules concerning the maximum size of images, the positioning of navigation links, and the use of Cascading Style Sheets to control format rather than tables;
• test it on the entry-level, older phones, that are still in widespread use.

(For much more on all this, see this 31/5/2007 talk by Icelander Gummi Hafsteinsson, Google's Mobile Applications Product Manager.)

dotMobi has several useful tools on its web site.  For example, you can subject a URL to a fairly comprehensive test of how well it is likely to work with mobile devices. Or you can access a clever emulator of a couple of different mobile phones [JAVA enabled browser needed] enter a URL, and see how that URL is likely to render in either of the phones. Fairly badly in the example given....

Several readers of Fortnightly Mailing know a lot about "mobile learning". Comments on the way they or the projects with which they are familiar have got content to work reliably on mobile devices will be very welcome.

Ning - a platform to support social networks. One to watch.

I chanced on Ning, a commercial platform for supporting social networks, albeit with at least one free option.

One of the founders of Ning is Marc Andreessen, the original founder of Netscape (the  first "proper" browser, which Microsoft tried hard to destroy, but which now lives again as Firefox). The other is Gina Bianchini who has had a more conventional, though stellar,  business career.

The Ning for business page , and the FAQ area are good places to begin assessing Ning. The former gives you a clear sense of prices and of the underlying business model. It also starts with the disarming:

"Depending on your needs, we may be a great option for you. If not, we're happy to recommend some other companies that may be a better fit."

The Ning entry on Wikipedia is also informative.

The FAQ area has an unusually well-organised feel, with, for example, semantically meaningful URLs, and an impressive overall "design tone", on which a great deal of  care has been lavished. (In passing I also noticed that some though not all of the code for the site is valid, something which always makes me well-disposed towards a service.) From what I could make of it a user can take the code of an existing Ning social network site that they like, and use this as a starting point for their own network. This is explained technically in Ning's description of its underlying architecture. Shades of Tim O'Reilly's 1999 essay "Where the Web leads us", of which this is a short extract:

"Perhaps even more important, both the technology and the Internet ethic made it legitimate to copy features from other people's web sites.  HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pages that were used to implement various features on a web site could be easily saved and imitated. Even the CGI scripts used to create dynamic content were available for copying. Although traditional computer languages like C run faster, Perl became the dominant language for CGI because it was more accessible. While Perl is powerful enough to write major applications, it is possible for amateurs to write small scripts to accomplish specialized tasks. Even more important, because Perl is not a compiled language, the scripts that are used on web pages can be viewed, copied, and modified by users. In addition, archives of useful Perl scripts were set up and freely shared among web developers. The easy cloning of web sites built with the combination of HTML+CGI+Perl meant that, for the first time, powerful applications could be created by non-programmers."

Of course judging a service by how it describes itself is unwise. You have to have used it. So if any readers of Fortnightly Mailing have experience of Ning it would be great if they would post a comment with their assessment of it, especially from the the point of view of its role or potential role in learning.

Using your browser off-line with "Google Gears" - the shape of things to come

If you use Google Reader for your RSS feeds, you may have noticed that you can access the content behind the feeds when you are off-line. This is a (rare) example of a web application working off-line inside your browser; and for users of laptops and other mobile devices who are frequently away from a good (or any!) internet connect, this kind of functionality makes a real difference.

Yesterday Google launched Google Gears, for Mac, Windows, and Linux, in very early "beta", aiming at developers wanting to make web applications that will work off-line.

There is an explanation of what Google has in mind in this description by Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson. At the moment the development is not that relevant to "ordinary users", and this piece is mainly pointing out the way things may be moving. But even now, if you install Google Gears, you seem to get some additional functions within Google Reader. Don't ask me what they are yet......

Are US teachers being left behind?

Participants at Blackboard's "Educational Leadership Forum"

On 16/5/2007 Blackboard Inc. hosted an "Educational Leadership Forum" at the National Press Club in Washington DC. Blackboard's Peter Segall introduced a panel of 4 US experts in technology enabled learning, which was moderated by Adam Newman of Eduventures, in front of a small invited audience. Like Desire2Learn at its Personalisation and innovation in education "round table" at the UK Education Show on 22/3/2007, there was no "sell" of any kind. Panel members were:

• Susan Patrick (who has been Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education);
• Ken Kay (President, Partnership for 21st Century Education);
• Don Knezek (CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education);
• Debra Sprague (Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education, George Mason University).

The panel's focus was on how America's school, college, and university students are faring in today's global economy.

I found it helpful to listen (rather than watch) the whole 90 minute panel discussion - below as a Google video - partly because it shows how much overlap there is between US and UK policy concerns, and how insularly we examine these. (You'd put money on none of the panel members having read the UK 2020 Gilbert Review - [216 kB PDF].) Take particular note of Sprague and Knezek's comments (about 33 minutes into the video below) on the impending teacher crisis, and on the importance of close integration between schools and universities on teacher training; and on the discussion between Kay and Sprague (about 47 minutes in) about the (ill?)preparedness of long serving staff in university teacher training departments to prepare trainee teachers to use technology in pedagogically effective ways.  The discussion of the globalisation of teaching (about 52 minutes in), and about the failure of schools to build on the digital skills that learners have (about 100 minutes in) are also interesting.

With thanks to Jim Farmer who was at the session, for telling me about it.

Learning research: how much grasp of it do you have?

I'll not tell you whether I did better or worse than the average blind monkey on Will Thalheimer's quiz on learning research, (which I found via Donald Clark's link to Thalheimer's excellent People remember 10%, 20%... Oh Really?), but I learnt quite a lot from doing the quiz, despite its slightly frustrating questions, and then reviewing the discussion about the quiz on Thalheimer's blog.

A free source of real random numbers from Mads Haahr

Maximinus - Bronze/Silver Tetradrachm from RANDOM.ORG web site

Mads Haahr from the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin has since 1988 run RANDOM.ORG, a site providing anyone on the Internet with a source of true random numbers, generated from atmospheric noise via a radio receiver rather than "pseudo-randomly" by a computer algorithm. The earliest version of the generator is shown below - there is a reason for the bottles - and if this kind of thing interests you, you can find out more on the site's history page. From the site you can do things like flip coins (with a classy selection of coins from which to choose), roll dice, and generate random numbers for several different state lotteries.

Version 1 of RANDOM.ORG, 1998-2001

How much longer for Andy Duncan, Chief Executive of Channel 4?

On 18/1/2007 Andy Duncan, boss of public service TV company Channel 4, issued a defence of "Celebrity Big Brother" against allegations of racism. Here is the URL for a BBC TV recording of Duncan's statement. For a more extended view of a man with his heels dug in, see this searching 29/1/2007 20 minute Channel 4 News interview by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, in which (in relation to the remark "I think she should fuck off home....  She can’t even speak English properly anyway") Duncan asserts  that Channel 4 "could not be certain the intent was racist". 20 weeks later Ofcom published its heavily critical report of its Content Sanctions Committee's investigation in Big Brother  [250 kB PDF] investigation.   Paragraphs 8.1 to 8.39 are the ones to read to get a palpable sense of the absurdity of Duncan's defence.  It is hard to see how Duncan, whose basic salary, according to the BBC, was £622k, including a performance-related bonus, and who will also be in line for a £450k long service bonus later this year,  will last much longer at the head of Channel 4.

Learning Technologist of the Year Award - open to individuals and teams

ALT, for which I work part time, has launched the inaugural Learning Technologist of the Year Award. The Award is open to individual members of ALT and to individuals and teams based in ALT member organisations worldwide.

The Award's overall purpose is to celebrate and reward excellent practice and outstanding achievement in the learning technology field.

The award will be judged by a panel chaired by Gilly Salmon, Professor of E-learning & Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester, and presented in Nottingham at the ALT conference on 5 September 2007, by Dr Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.

Prizes will be as follows: 1st prize £1000; 2nd prize £600; 3rd prize £300.

The closing date for applications is 20 June 2007. Short-listed applicants will be interviewed (in person, by phone, or using web-conferencing) on 19 or 20 July 2007, and will be informed of this, if required for interview, by email on 29 June 2007.

Full details of the award are in the Rubric [15 kB PDF] and the Application Form [35 kB DOC]. Closing date 17.00 UK time on 20/6/2007.

Educause software patents resource centre

Educause has a US-oriented Patent Resource Centre which I came across via Michael Feldstein's e-Literate. The Resource Centre links to a wide range of mostly US-oriented resources, including the regularly amended wikipedia page on software patents, which has helpful links that differentiate nicely between US and UK patent law.

Ecolanguage - combining ideas from economics and from ecology in the same animated diagrams

Lee Arnold sent me a link to 13 YouTube videos of presentations made using "Ecolanguage", an  animated graphic language that provides a standard way of combining economics and ecology in the same image, using 25 symbols, organised into 6 categories. Below is a video that explains the language: