Fortnightly Mailing

Workshop on 29 August about Open Source software in libraries

Last year I did some work in a commission from JISC as part of a team that included Eric Lease Morgan, Head of Digital Access and Information Architecture at Notre Dame University in the US.  Eric will be running a 90 minute workshop about Open Source software in libraries as part of Digital Libraries à la Carte 2007, a modular 5 day course that "prepares librarians for the future" at Tilburg University in the Netherlands during the last week of August 2007.  According to Eric,

"Workshops in the course are designed for any type of person who works in a library. They will help you learn about the current and immediate future of computing in libraries. The workshop have something to offer everybody. They are not strictly designed for computer types. The only prerequisites are an open mind and the desire to learn."

 

Lorcan Dempsey on Google's "Universal Search"

You may have noticed that Google's search results have looked different from earlier this month, especially if you are searching in English, using google.com, with results returned across its major services from a single search.

Here, for example is the result for searching on mount everest, with links to web, maps (useless actually!), and images, all from the one search result.

Lorcan Dempsey, who used to work for JISC and is now Chief Strategist for OCLC (a giant worldwide library cooperative), has written a thoughtful piece about Universal Search, which is what the new development is being called, albeit not by Google. (Take particular note of some of the experimental features that can now be reviewed in Google Labs.)

One angle on these changes concerns user training. Conventional wisdom has it (had it?) that users need training on new software. An alternative approach - as in this case - which avoid the hassle of having to maintain help files or other documentation, is to change what is already superficially very intuitive software gently and incrementally, and assume that users will find out how to use the new features more-or-less of their own accord, helping each other out if they get stuck.  Of course that option was not really open when software was distributed and installed locally by the user. Once software is hosted "up in the sky somewhere" then it is: and my guess is that most readers will not have even noticed what is, behind the scenes, a very big change to how Google works. If they've not noticed, they definitely did not need any training.

OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web' - Ariadne article by Andy Powell and David Recordon

This reasonably un-technical overview of OpenID from the April issue of Ariadne, by Andy Powell (Head of Development at the Eduserv Foundation) and David Recordon (Advanced Products and Research Group at VeriSign), is worth reading in full. It includes screen-shots of an OpenID authentication, and plenty of references, and it also touches on the "phishing" security issue I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

Firebug - a useful add-on for Firefox

Firebug is an add-on for the Firefox browser. It takes a few seconds to install and once installed you can easily switch it on an off. When switched on, Firebug puts several tools at your disposal. You can, for example, look at the HTML of the page you are viewing, or check what files a particular page consists of, and how long each took to download. You can use it to examine the structure of a web page, understand how its tables are organised, and look in detail at any cascading style sheet the page might use; and by pointing to a particular part of a web page you can review the code that makes the page function.

Thanks to Dick Moore for sending me details.

The externalisation of meaning. "Google TechTalk" by David Weinberger about "Everything in miscellaneous".

Below is the starting point for a 50 minute talk, followed by 10 minutes of questions, given at Google on 10/5/2007 by David Weinberger. I'll know in while if the talk is a précis of Weinberger's  just-published book Everything is Miscellaneous. The central point of the talk is that there is now no one right way of ordering the world; furthermore, that whereas physical things (books, stuffed animals, tools, CDs, journal articles) have to be put somewhere logical - both in space and in a physical catalogue - so that you can find either them or the record associated with them, this is not the case for digital things, which can be anywhere, and whose classification is much less relevant, provided you can search for and find them.  The talk is an exploration of the changes that flow from this: to cut a long story short and to cruelly oversimplify, Weinberger's thesis is that the fundamental change that is taking place is the "externalisation of meaning", by which he means that:

1. it is now simpler for citizens to organise or search digital things as they themselves decide, rather than for them to be classified for them;
2. the links between digital things, and the tags and other attributes that people give them create a rich layer of meaning that can be drawn upon by others;
3. the difference between data and meta-data is disappearing (except the the extent that meta-data is "what you know", and data is "what you are looking for";
4. through Wikipedia and blogs and similar there is an increasingly public negotiation of knowledge, in which experts are decreasingly the arbiters of authority.

See also Nothing is miscellaneous, about the Hawley Collection of tools in Sheffield.

Does Pearson's purchase of eCollege give it the muscle to compete with Blackboard?

Long article by Scott Jaschik from the 15/5/2007 issue of Inside Higher Education about Pearson's purchase of eCollege - a US supplier of VLE services to (mainly US distance) education providers. Pearson, best known in the UK for its ownership of the Financial Times and Penguins, has a huge text-book business, and its purchase of eCollege (alongside its even bigger acquisition from Reed Elsevier of some of the publishing and assessment parts of Harcourt) brings its recent spending in this area to around $1.5 billion. The article hints at further rationalisation and consolidation between educational technology and educational content businesses, and sees eCollege, backed by Pearson as much more serious competition for Blackboard, though Blackboard's share price, today 50% higher than 3 months ago, continues to rise; and there are also interesting insights in some of the comments on Jaschik's article. For example Jim Farmer, who wrote a guest contribution in Fortnightly Mailing last year about the "post patent" environment for e-learning, highlights the extensive use made by students in the US of text-book publishers' supplementary on-line content and formative tests (to which they get time-limited access when they purchase a text-book), and the possibly greater utility of such content and tests than that provided through institutional VLEs. Chair of Becta Andrew Pinder's October 2006 call for education to "organise industrially" for it properly to exploit ICT seems to be being heeded........

OLPC Laptops arrive in Uruguay: where flooding has caused a state of emergency

Via Stephen Downes comes this link to a report by Scott Gilbertson on the issue of 150 OLPC laptops to all the children in the small Uruguayan town of Villa Cardal. Meanwhile, further North there is a state of emergency owing to disastrous floods. In Mercedes, in the Soriano Department, where my uncle lives  - he is known, indirectly, to participants in the Collaborative Approaches to the Management of E-Learning (CAMEL) project and its various "spawnings" - the Rio Negro rose by 9.8 m earlier this month , and was still 8 m above its normal level several days after it reached its peak. In a neighbouring department (Durazno) the River Yi, which feeds the Rio Negro, was 13 m above its normal level. Some parts the country had an average of over 10mm of rain per hour for 3 whole days Below are pictures of some street scenes in Mercedes.

ALT Journal - Vacancies for Editor and Deputy Editor

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) for which I work part time, is advertising to fill vacancies for an Editor and Deputy Editor for the ALT Journal. The closing date for responses is 1/6/2007, with interviews to be held on 22/6/2007 (by phone or face-to-face, depending on the location of short-listed candidates).

To express an interest, download the details (28kB pdf).

These are important, high profile roles for the Association, which would give the people appointed a terrific opportunity to make their mark, and develop the ALT Journal in new and interesting ways, at a time when ALT is growing, and when the world of academic publishing is changing fast.

Please feel free to forward this message to people you know whom you think would be interested.

The Ghost In The Browser - Analysis of Web-based Malware

Scary, recently published, dense, 9 page paper [0.5 MB PDF] by Niels Provos, Dean McNamee, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Ke Wang, and Nagendra Modadugu of Google. BBC report. Abstract:

"As more users are connected to the Internet and conduct their daily activities electronically, computer users have become the target of an underground economy that infects hosts with malware or adware for financial gain. Unfortunately, even a single visit to an infected web site enables the attacker to detect vulnerabilities in the user’s applications and force the download a multitude of malware binaries. Frequently, this malware allows the adversary to gain full control of the compromised systems leading to the ex-filtration of sensitive information or installation of utilities that facilitate remote control of the host. We believe that such behavior is similar to our traditional understanding of botnets. However, the main difference is that web-based malware infections are pull-based and that the resulting command feedback loop is looser. To characterize the nature of this rising thread, we identify the four prevalent mechanisms used to inject malicious content on popular web sites: web server security, user contributed content, advertising and third-party widgets. For each of these areas, we present examples of abuse found on the Internet. Our aim is to present the state of malware on the Web and emphasize the importance of this rising threat."

WizIQ: brokering contact between learners who want to pay for on-line tuition and teachers who want to be paid to provide it

WizIQ caught my eye via Clive Shepherd's web log. It is a North Carolina based service for brokering contact between learners who want to pay for on-line tuition and teachers who want to be paid to  provide it, with, in addition, a web-based collaboration environment for each to use. WizIQ appears to be a spin-off from, or part of a business called Sikhya Solutions LLC, based in Raleigh in the US, and Chandigarh in India. (Sikhya is also the business behind Authorgen, the Flash-based simultaneous collaboration environment used by WizIQ.) The business model behind WizIQ is obscure.