Fortnightly Mailing

Development of measures of online privacy concern and protection for use on the Internet

Pre-print of an interesting study by Tom Buchanan, Carina Paine, and Adam Joinson [100 kB PDF] to appear as an article in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. The aim of the study described is to develop a robust, reliable measure of privacy concerns and behavior suitable for administration as a short questionnaire via the Internet. Abstract:

"As the Internet grows in importance, concerns about online privacy have arisen. We describe the development and validation of three short Internet-administered scales measuring privacy related attitudes (‘Privacy Concern’) and behaviors (‘General Caution ’and ‘Technical Protection’). In Study 1, 515 people completed an 82-item questionnaire from which the three scales were derived. In Study 2, scale validity was examined by comparing scores of individuals drawn from groups considered likely to differ in privacyprotective behaviors. In Study 3, correlations between the scores on the current scales and two established measures of privacy concern were examined. We conclude that these scales are reliable and valid instruments suitable for administration via the Internet, and present them for use in online privacy research."

The items and instructions to participants for the Internet administered questionnaires are included as Tables 1 and 2 at the end of the article. There are  6 questions each for General Caution and for Technical Protection "privacy behaviours", and 16 questions for Privacy Concern, i.e. "privacy attitude".

Other related posts of potential interest:

• Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture.
• When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?
• Anonymity online as the default.
• Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical?
• Privacy, trust, disclosure and the Internet.

One laptop per child - further information and progress

David Weinberger has two 28/11/2006 posts [1], [2], including pictures, which which work as "latest news" about the One Laptop pre Child laptop, ased on a presentation by SJ Klein at Harvard's the Berkman Centre.

Previous posts which may also be of interest:

• What would you install on one laptop per child? 17 October 2006 Guest Contribution by Steve Ryan from talk at LSE by Jonathan Zittrain;
• The "One Laptop Per Child" wiki. 1 August 2006 posting which includes a video of a working prototype of the laptop.

GoPets - coming to a learner's desktop near you soon

This is posted as an "oddment", because that is what it is..... Liberty Media has just taken an undisclosed stake in the Korean service GoPets, which has nearly 0.5M members.

"GoPets is a global community composed of real people and virtual pets. Each GoPet is a unique 3D companion that makes its home on its owner’s desktop. GoPets are not restricted to a single computer, however - when they feel like wandering, they leave home and visit the desktops of other GoPets users. In their travels, GoPets visit their owners’ friends and families, as well as introducing their owners to other GoPets members who share similar interests. These traveling GoPets are messengers and ambassadors - they form the dynamic network of connections that comprises the GoPets social network."

GoPets will shortly expand to Europe and you can imagine that educational firewalls will being readied to limit student (and staff?) access. Thanks to Rafat Ali for this, whose daily Paid Content mailing is worth occasionally scan-reading, partly to get a feel for the scale of the massive changes that are taking place in the web and media worlds.

Learnometer: "dashboard" measures of investment performance in learning

Stephen Heppell has a Microsoft-sponsored project to create a Learnometer, i.e. some "dashboard" measures of investment performance in learning:

"All round the world countries are investing significant and increasing amounts in education, particularly in ICT and in buildings. At the same time clear emergent learning trends, effective and consensual, are re-defining learning in the 21st century. The two fundamental questions are:

• is our investment in learning taking us in the right direction, towards 21st century learning? and
• if it is, how do we know how effective that investment has been - what should improve?"

Referring back to the post below about Andrew Pinder's call for education to be organised industrially, it would be interesting to get Pinder and Heppell into public conversation on these issues.

Organise industrially. The Chair of Becta's vision of e-learning. Webcast of an 80 minute seminar.

This is an 80-minute recording of a seminar held on 16 October 2006 at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) addressed by Andrew Pinder, Chairman of the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), the Government agency responsible for ICT in the whole of English public sector education with the exception of higher education.

Pinder spent a career in the financial services sector, and was for a time the Government's e-envoy. The seminar, which is chaired by OII's Bill Dutton, opens with Pinder's scathing (and glib?) assessment of why, despite billions of ringfenced Government spending, 85% of schools are getting next to no improvements in their effectiveness from the spending. Pinder's line - illustrated with a sideswipe reference to electronic whiteboards as a technological means of maintaining the status quo - is that unless education is organised industrially (that is, if it continues to be run as a cottage industry, with professional interests dominating) the money will continue to be wasted.  Becta is increasingly influential, so for English readers with an interest in public sector education, make a point of watching this, and stick with it to the final 20 minutes of open discussion. If I worked for Becta, I'd be nervous.

Update, 26/11/2006. David Smith, a public school ICT manager, provided an interesting reflection on Pinder's session (25/10/2006); Donald Clark posted a longish piece about the session (24/11/2006), in a similar vein to his earlier comment on this piece below; Julian Todd, an Open Source software programmer in Computer Aided Manufacture, writes in a hostile vein (20/11/2006), picking up on Pinder's comment about the individuals in schools whom he asserts tend to be responsible for procurement in schools  ("Typically they would be people who have a real passion about Open Source — as if open source is any different to any other software — it’s just the pricing structure is different, that’s all. But they have a passion. It’s a religion, it’s a real belief, and again they have a belief about bits of technology that are going to change things. What they don’t do, however, is organize things properly."). (Todd has also been busy with a Freedom of Information request concerning Becta's framework contract for the supply of hardware to schools.) Meanwhile, Becta is recruiting 3 new members to its Board of Directors [100 kB PDF].

Founders of iRows, the multi-user web-based spreadsheet, recruited by Google

Google has been in the news for its acquisition of YouTube. But it is also consolidating its grip on the web-based application market. In March I described iRows, a web-based multi-user spreadsheet, speculating that Google (which had just bought Writely, a web-based multi-user wordprocessor) might be interested in iRows, an Israeli start-up. Earlier this month, iRows stopped taking registrations, and will stop operating at the end of 2006. The two founders of iRows, Yoah Bar-david and Itai Raz, have been recruited by Google, which already has its own web-based spreadsheet system, sitting alongside its (ex-Writely) wordprocessor. Meanwhile, Google has bought JotSpot, a sophisticated wiki application, which has been used by the TUC for its on-line course development and management manual. When JotSpot starts taking registrations again - whether as JotSpot, or as a Google-branded application (one assumes the latter), it will be a free service. 

(If I had to predict what's next, I would say that Google will acquire a web-based audio and/or video-conferencing service.)

Machine translation. A 2005 article; and the November 2006 (and June 2008) NIST results.

NIST data set		BLEU-4
Site ID	Language	Overall	Newswire	Newsgroup	Broadcast News
google	Arabic	0.4569	0.5060	0.3727	0.4076
google	Chinese	0.3615	0.3725	0.2926	0.3859

GALE data set		BLEU-4
Site ID	Language	Overall	Newswire	Newsgroup	Broadcast News	Broadcast Conversation
google	Arabic	0.2024	0.2820	0.1359	0.1932	0.1925
google	Chinese	0.1576	0.2086	0.1454	0.1532	0.1300

Summary score table from NIST "Unlimited Plus Data" track

I included something about machine translation in the (pre- web log) Fortnightly Mailing Number 54. This June 2005 article by Gregory Lamb in the Christian Science Monitor is jargon-free, and explains the difference between the two main approaches to machine translation: rules-based - as developed by Systrans, and still used by Google; or statistically-based, as being developed by Google. (4/12/2006 - see also Not Lost in Translation, from the MIT Techology Review, by Stephen Ornes.)

As to the effectiveness of statistically-based methods, Google's system continues to score considerably better overall than the competition (who may or may not be using statistically-based methods), in both Arabic to English and Chinese to English, with the margin rather bigger for Arabic to English than for Chinese to English, in the US Government's NIST Translation Evaluations of machine translations of different genres of text (Newswire, Newsgroup, Broadcast News, Broadcast Conversation). Bear in mind however that a score of 0.503 out of a maximum of 1 (the best score achieved by Google for the translation from Arabic to English of Newswire genre, with  scores for Chinese to English consistently worse) does not mean that the absolute quality of the translation was particularly high.

It is also worth noting, although the test regime was different, so this observation needs taking with a pinch of salt, that Google's results do not seem to have improved much on what was achieved in the equivalent 2005 NIST tests.  (Here, for reference are the 2008 NIST results, which I have not had time to analyse.)

Updated 4/12/2006 and 1/1/2009

Interesting discussion about the wisdom or idiocy of crowds

Clive Shepherd starts a discussion, triggered by David Freedman's The Idiocy of Crowds - which challenges the "conventional wisdom" that groups take better decisions than individuals - to which (22/11/2006) Donald Clark and Mark Berthelemy respond. To varying degrees they are sceptical about the value of "small group work" in learning. DC "The most effective learning takes place on your own or one-to-one". MB "... the activities that rely most on the group are the ones that I feel less ownership of, and have far less relevance to my situation. The group activities are also far more work - mainly to deal with group dynamics issues rather than the content of the activity itself."

What do I think about this?

Usually my understanding (i.e. what I learn) develops if i) I have to express myself about the issue - verbally or in writing; ii) what I say or write about the issue is challenged by others. So on the face of it, "small group work", whether face-to-face, or on-line, should be suitable - for some things at least, depending of course on task-design, group-composition, and the useability of the technology. And in some contexts, learners in a small group can give each other the personally relevant and motivationally effective formative feedback that helps develop their learning (for more on this see Inside the Black Box), more cost-effectively than can a teacher - assuming a good one is available, and probably more effectively than can a piece of interactive software.  But small group work on how to write an Excel function, the chemical pathways in photosynthesis, or the mathematics of font-design? Other than as a means of developing confidence in expressing concepts, probably not.

Evaluation of Open Source repository systems

Here is a well-structured and clear 41 page technical evaluation [250 kB PDF] of 3 major Open Source open access repository systems (DSpace, ePrints, and Fedora), written by Max Maxwell, Jun Yamog, and Richard Wyles. The evaluation was funded by the Tertiary Education Commission of New Zealand. It was published in September 2006, and, in the case of ePrints, covers version 2, rather than the presently available version 3, which has superior work-flow capabilities.

TRACE Project web site. A meaty resource about dealing with restructuring.

For the last two years I've had a paid involvement in a big multi-partner European trade union project called TRACE - Trade Unions Anticipating Change in Europe.  Under the auspices of the European Trade Union Confederation, TRACE brought together trade union organisations from across Europe, across a wide range of economic sectors, both public and private. TRACE finishes at the end of November 2006. One of the main outputs from TRACE is its web site, and which has recently been filled with a wide range of materials from the project, relating to restructuring, including:

• learning materials;
• workshop reports;
• handbooks;
• presentations;
• analysis tools;
• online courses;
• "topic sheets";
• web links.