Fortnightly Mailing

Sloan-C Wiki - examples of student-generated content, including one from the University of Reading.

The dependable Sloan Consortium has just published a new area of its Effective Practives wiki that showcases specific examples of how student-generated content can be used effectively in online education. So far there are seven examples, including one each from Japan and from the UK. There is also a link to a short essay about student-generated content.

Computer assisted legal education - report from talk by John Mayer

Comprehensive report by David Weinberger from 13 March lunch-time talk by John Mayer at the Berkman Centre at Harvard about the work of CALI (Centre for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction). The section on podcasting caught my eye, and reminded me of some things that Jim Farmer mentioned during a face-to-face discussion we had a few days ago. In summary:

• Podcasting lectures does not result in law students skipping lectures.
• Students who attend lectures listen to podcasts of the lectures they've been to.
• Lecturers listen to their own and each others' podcasts.
• Students listen to the podcasts of lecturers who are not teaching them, to get a different angle.
• A cheap and cheerful reporter's recording device - with a cheap lapel microphone and good data-compression, "tuned" to capture speech - is the best way to record, rather than using the microphone at the lectern.

16 bits per second - the bandwidth of consciousness

Nørretranders caption: Küpfmuller's diagram of the information flow through a human being: from the senses through the brain (and consciousness) to the motor apparatus. The thick line shows how many million bits from the senses are sent via nerve connections to the brain, which has a very high bandwidth. From the brain the information is sent to the body, which manages about the same amount of information as the senses receive. The thin line shows how the consciousness processes a very little proportion of this information.

I've written previously about  The user illusion, cutting consciousness down to size by Tor Nørretranders. The diagrams and captions above and below are taken from the book's sixth chapter "The Bandwidth of Consciousness", and for me they and the evidence that Nørretranders presents are a revelation, in that they emphasise how little we can consciously take in at a time; and hence how designers of e-learning materials need to avoid creating cognitive overload.

25 November 2012 note. Today this 5.5 year old post was linked to from Ycombinator, causing a large spike in traffic. You may want to read and possibly contribute to the discussion that has developed there.

Nørretranders caption: An overview of the information flow through a human being, drawn by up by the Erlangen School (Frank, Lehrl, er al.). A so-called organogram. Just as Küpfmuller's diagram it shows that more information goes in and out of humans than consciousness perceives.

BBC suspends Jam, its flagship online learning web site

Amended 15/3/2007; update (below) 17/3/2007. Correction and amendments to 17/3/2007 update, made on 7/4/2007, in response to a request from Lewis Bronze, CEO of Espresso Education Ltd.

Donald Clark and the Guardian Online note the BBC's decision to suspend Jam, its expensive, ambitious, error-ridden and strangely designed e-learning web site. From the beginning it smacked to me of adults imagining what children like, and seemed to have been produced with an eye on visual complexity rather than on effective on-line learning. Notwithstanding that around 170,000 people had registered to use it.

"The BBC Trust has today decided to suspend the online education service, BBC Jam, with effect from 20 March 2007. The Trust has requested BBC management to prepare fresh proposals for how the BBC should deliver the Charter obligation to promote formal education and learning, meeting the online needs of school age children. Once completed, the Trust will subject BBC management's proposals to a full Public Value Test, including a market impact assessment by Ofcom."

"The Trust's decision follows extensive discussions with Government and the European Commission about how to address allegations from some in the industry that Jam is damaging their interests."

But there are 200 jobs at risk, 170,000 registered users will lose a service that (?) they've been making use of, and any work that they have saved, and a lot of procured and ready-to-launch content, developed with, say, £75m of public funding, may now never be used. 14/3/2007 BBC management press release. 14/3/2007 BBC Trust press release, from which the above excerpt is taken.

17/3/2007. There is plenty of interest (puns notwithstanding) on the Web about the BBC decision, some of it highly critical. See, for example, BBC in a fruitless jam, by John Connell, and Why does toast always land with the Jam side down?, by Ewan McIntosh.  And you may also be interested in the stance taken in 2002 by the companies that originally objected to and won stringent conditions in the January 2003 BBC/Government decision for the BBC to become a major producer of on-line learning content, funded by the public through their TV license fees. For example here is a quote - reported in The Register - from Lewis Bronze of Espresso Education Ltd from that time:

"The opportunity provided by broadband technology should allow a torrent of educational content to flow - instead, the BBC's current proposals will give us a desert. The BBC's current proposals for their free to air digital curriculum will massively curtail the choice available for schools. Using £170 million of the public's licence fees destroys a competitive market, deprives children and teachers of choice and diversity, and kills off the UK educational software industry."

Note. Other posts about BBC Jam:

• 19 March 2007 - BBC Director General Mark Thompson on Jam, in October 2006.
• 17 March 2007 - BBC Jam. We need usage data.
• 14 March 2007 - BBC suspends Jam, its flagship online learning web site.

Database of web based office tools and applications

This page of around 250 web based office tools and applications (a.k.a. "Office 2.0 Database") - via Scott Wilson's work blog. You will be amazed at how many there are and the range of functions that they cover.  14.3.2007. Thanks to Ismael Ghalimi of IT|Redux for pointing out that there is a new version of the Office 2.0 Database at http://o20db.com/, with over 450 tools and applications.

Useful terse articles by Itiel Dror about the science of learning

Updated 19/3/2007, 11/4/2007, 23/5/2007, 26/1/2009

Sheffield's Learning Light (a not for profit company set up with Government and EC funding to serve as a "centre of excellence in the use of learning technologies in the workplace and in organisational learning best practice") has published some interesting 3-4 page briefings by Southampton University's Dr Itiel Dror about the science of learning. Currently these are freely available, and it will be a shame if they are removed from public view, not least because their production has been publicly funded they have now been removed from public view. Fortunately, all of them remain available as a single PDF file, from from the im+m site. Titles are as follows:

1. It is not what you teach, but what they learn that counts!
2. Shall I Remember? How learning technologies should facilitate, but too often hinder, memory;
3. The architecture of human cognition paves the way to efficient and effective learning;
4. The three C’s of learning: Control, Challenge and Commitment - this is the one to read if you've only time to read one of them;
5. Meta-cognition and Cognitive Strategy Instruction - when I first looked (12/3/2007) there were some errors in an illustrative quiz in this document which reduced its impact somewhat - (19/3/2007) all but the "mootest" has now been corrected;
6. Cognitive awareness.

Yochai Benkler - The Wealth of Networks

Updated 26/3/2007

Two years ago I mentioned Yochai Benkler's essay Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production, which "offers a framework to explain large-scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods". Last year Benkler, who is an academic lawyer at Yale University, published The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (also freely available under a Creative Commons license), and reviewed here by Paul Miller in the Financial Times.  Here is a post by David Weinberger written during a talk on 5 March 2007 by Benkler, from where I stumbled onto this Wiki, which has been set up as "an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment" based on The Wealth of Networks. (Coming to it cold it is not immediately obvious whether and if yes how the Wiki is succeeding in the task.)

26/3/2007. If you can bear the over-long welcoming remarks, listen to and watch Benkler's 70 minute "Freedom in the Commons" lecture available from this page on the Duke Law School web site.

That Quiz - Maths Test Activities

Thanks to Iain Howie for this link to That Quiz - Math Test Activities, which describes itself thus.

"ThatQuiz is a free online resource for math practice and testing. It was written in the summer of 2004 and later expanded according to teacher needs and requests. The original goal was to provide easily accessible software for schools which were not fully utilizing the computers they had in their classrooms. The site has also become popular for students who want extra math practice at home. Although the first tests available were most suitable for elementary school students, new areas have been added for higher grades: algebra, angles, triangles, probability and geometry. All users have access to all of the tests without registration. There is no reason for students to register since the additional features are only useful for teachers. Registration is free and teachers who choose to register receive record-keeping of scores for their classes. They have access to more precise test-generation tools, can create single tests with questions from different categories, can create matching and multiple choice questions, and can access a public test library ."

The site is also available in Spanish.

Tools for colleges to self-assess their e-learning activity

Section from DSA "output grid", where F = Fully adequate; L = Largely adequate; P = Partly adequate; N = Not adequate.

Since January I've had a smallish role in a Sero Consulting Ltd project for the Scottish Funding Council to produce a Baseline study of e-activity in Scotland's Colleges. The main tools that colleges will be using during this study - in particular an Excel-based "Development Self-Audit" Workbook, and an Introductory Handbook - are accessible from the Sero web site. Published under a Creative Commons license, they are based on a simplified version of Stephen Marshall's eMM Process Assessment Workbook and have been prepared with input from Stephen.

Web 2.0 - Discontinuity or Continuity? Guest Contribution by Frances Bell.

Frances Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Salford Business School: she blogs at elgg.

Paraphrasing Churchill (Russia becomes Web 2.0),

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Web 2.0. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is economic interest."  (adapted from http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/31000.html)

development and activities around the Internet continue to intrigue and excite those who engage with them; but the economics are less clear. As compared with the dotcom peak of March 2000, IT shares are -63.10% (according to S&P 500, Feb 2007), but +16.57% compared with March 2003. Tim O'Reilly's  definition of Web 2.0 started with a statement that cried out "fresh start":

"The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web."

So what is Web 2.0? Is it really something new? In a later definition, O'Reilly linked back to Tim Berners-Lee's original Web that he says is "is one of the most 'Web 2.0' systems out there".