Fortnightly Mailing

1938 pictures from Lesotho

Picture by Hans Schmoller

This picture of women waiting by a road near Morija, taken by my dad in Lesotho in about 1938, is one of 22 black and white prints from a family stash that I just had scanned. The continuation post contains all 22 in a short Flickr slideshow.

Updated 23/11/2012.

Songbird - a promising looking Open Source media player

 

Songbird is a desktop Web player and digital jukebox, built from Mozilla (on which the Open Source browser Firefox and mail-client Thunderbird are also based). Developed to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems, it is available now as a "version 0.2" developer preview. So it is too early to use for people like me. But worth keeping an eye on. (Thanks to Dick Moore for pointing this out.)

CAMEL - collaborative approaches to the management of e-learning

Sorghum crop recently grazed by cattle, Paysandu, Uruguay

'Meetings were 'calzon quitao' – 'with underpants removed'. Sometimes there emerged some truths or criticisms which were very painful, and this is what I think helped many to come to terms with reality.'
Nicholas Kent

In 1985 I visited my uncle Kent in Mercedes, Uruguay. He showed me the "log book" from what was, in effect, a "community of practice" that he and a group of 7 other local small farmers had established. The basic approach was that participants paid each other facilitated exchange visits at which they reviewed and critiqued each other's farming practices. For some reason, what he showed me stuck in my mind.

Nearly 20 years later this simple model was built into a small scale project (with a focus on e-learning rather than agriculture) involving 2 English Universities (Greenwich and Staffordshire) and 2 English Further Education Colleges (Loughborough and Leeds College of Technology). The project, called CAMEL, was funded by the HEFCE Leadership, Governance and Management programme, and jointly run by ALT (for which I work half time as Executive Secretary) and JISCinfonet (a JISC service), with the support of JISC and the Higher Education Academy. A  30 page  project report is now available. This tries and largely succeeds in getting to the heart of how to establish and sustain an inter-institutional collaboration, whether or not that collaboration is about e-learning. You can download it as a 1MB 32 page PDF. There's also this presentation about the project, from 2008.

Paul Duguid and Nicholas Carr on the lack of quality in "peer production"

Serendipity is the gift of finding useful things unexpectedly by luck, and it is amazing how often you find important stuff by browsing as well as by searching. 

My route to Paul Duguid's October 2006 essay Limits of self-organisation: peer-production and the "laws of quality" was via Alfred Essa's The NOSE and Nicholas Carr's Rough Type, where there is a thorough and readable review of the essay.

Like a lot of others I was strongly influenced by Duguid and Seely Brown's 1999 book The Social Life of Information. Duguid's argument in the essay, which echoes Stephen Weber in The Success of Open Source is that there are particular conditions pertaining in Open Source software production, that "see to the quality", which do not necessarily exist in "open source knowledge generation".  (Weber's specific points are, roughly: that software has to work in a specific technical contex; that whether it works well, or whether a new version is an improvement on an earlier one, can be objectively judged; and that within Open Source software development there is usually a complex heirarchy of control. For more on this see this brief December 2005 review in (old style) Fortnightly Mailing and this extract from the book's final chapter, in which Weber lists the sorts of tasks for which he thinks an open source process is more likely to work effectively, and the circumstances in which those involved in an open source process are likely to be motivated to contribute.)

I hope that the abstract of Duguid's essay:

"People often implicitly ascribe the quality of peer–production projects such as Project Gutenberg or Wikipedia to what I call “laws” of quality. These are drawn from Open Source software development and it is not clear how applicable they are outside the realm of software. I look at examples from peer production projects to ask whether faith in these laws does not so much guarantee quality as hide the need for improvement."

and the conclusion to Carr's review:

"But one comes away from this excellent paper wondering whether, once these "other ways" of quality assurance are imposed on a process, it would still qualify as "peer production." As Duguid eloquently demonstrates, quality doesn't just happen; it's not an emergent phenomenon. It's imposed on a work by people who know what they're doing. Quality - true quality - may thus be incompatible with the democratic ideal that lies at the heart of what we call peer production."

encourage you to read both of them.

Eye tracking: "climbing inside your users' heads and seeing your web site through their eyes"

For the first time for ages I clicked on a Google advertisement. The "climb inside your users' heads" is what did it. Though I'd have preferred it if I could have chosen to switch the sound on, rather than have it jump out at me as soon as I opened the page, this 2 minute video clip, and informative sound track  - from the British company etre - shows clearly what eye-tracking studies can reveal about how users take in (or not) the contents of a web page.  (It would certainly be interesting to see what eye tracking studies show about how users look at web-based learning materials.)

Christian Dalsgaard: social software - e-learning beyond learning management systems

Thoughtful article by Christian Dalsgaard of the Institute of Information and Media Studies at the University of Aarhus in Denmark in the Europen Journal of Open, Distance, and E-learning. Abstract:

"The article argues that it is necessary to move e-learning beyond learning management systems and engage students in an active use of the web as a resource for their self-governed, problem-based and collaborative activities. The purpose of the article is to discuss the potential of social software to move e-learning beyond learning management systems. An approach to use of social software in support of a social constructivist approach to e-learning is presented, and it is argued that learning management systems do not support a social constructivist approach which emphasizes self-governed learning activities of students. The article suggests a limitation of the use of learning management systems to cover only administrative issues. Further, it is argued that students' self-governed learning processes are supported by providing students with personal tools and engaging them in different kinds of social networks."

"Curriculum on Wheels" - the Bush family gets to grips with e-learning

The purple device this person is using is an Ignite!Learning "Curriculum on Wheels" or COW. The COW contains a stand-alone PC, preloaded with curriculum content, with an integrated data projector. Ignite!Learning is headed by Neil Bush, brother of George. A larger number of COWs - which cost ~$4000, and are said to cost a futher $1000/year to maintain [link dead, August 2012], have been bought for  Texas and other schools.

According to the 22 October 2006 Los Angeles Times:

"A company headed by President Bush's brother and partly owned by his parents is benefiting from Republican connections and federal dollars targeted for economically disadvantaged students under the No Child Left Behind Act."

Ignite!Learning has plans to expand outside the US. So watch out.

Links:

• Bush's family profits from 'No Child' act - Los Angeles Times, by Walter Roche, 22 October 2006;
• No Bush Left Behind - The President's brother Neil is making hay from school reform - Business Week, by Keith Epstein, 16 October 2006.

The Web is not just a better printing press. Nature's Timo Hannay on what the Web means for science.

Timo Hannay leads Nature Magazine's extensive, and for an established scientific journal, very unusual, web-publishing activities. He gave a lunchtime presentation on 17/10/2006 to a small group of mainly youngish researchers at Harvard's Berkman Centre. Without question Hannay "knows what he is talking about".   So if you are interested in publishing, Open Access, e-research, how research is done (not just scientific research), blogging, the future of the Internet, Second Life (where Nature has an island, and is trialling integration between Second Life and external research databases) etc., you should spend an hour or so on one or more of the following three "views" of Hannay's presentation, and the questions that followed it:

• PowerPoint slides - [24 MB ppt];
• video transcript - [200 MB mp4] - best viewed with the slides open in another browser window, as they are not distinct in the video;
• contemporaneous notes by David Weinberger, who chaired the session.

There is no shelf. There is no file system.

Just links, with no filesystem

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, from which the diagram above is taken, is a long piece by Clay Shirky, via David Weinberger, about approaches to classification and how "classical categoristion" is not appropriate for the web, if it ever was. Here is the introduction, and if you read the essay, take note of how the Dewey Decimal System categorises religions of the world, and the Library of Congress System handles history.

"Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.

I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets."

Jonathan Zittrain: what would you install on one laptop per child? Guest Contribution from Steve Ryan.

Steve Ryan is Director of LSE's Centre for Learning Technology.

Resisting the urge to respond "Blackboard" to his question I sat back and enjoyed a brief history of personal computing and some very serious debating of future directions presented by Jonathan Zittrain, who is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, and Co-Founder & Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Zittrain gave  a highly entertaining and informative lecture and discussion at the London School of Economics on 13 October 2006. The lecture ranged far more widely than the question posed in the title would suggest and indeed neither Zittrain nor the audience actually considered specific software.

Jonathan commenced by offering a brief history of the PC, skipping all the technical stuff but concentrating on the tremendous power it gave to the individual to write and develop programs that would actually work. From this perspective, whether the PC is running Linux or Windows is of secondary importance. In both cases you can write and execute programs and particularly when combined with the Internet, all sorts of possibilities however apparently unlikely or even downright crazy emerge. Some of these would flourish and change significantly the way we work and interact. Wikipedia and Skype are just two examples.

But this apparently ideal state was threatened, challenged by those who recognise that the "channels of communication are also the channels of control" and that the individual PC through viruses and all sorts of malware can be taken over and manipulated.

While he did not doubt the seriousness of the problem, Zittrain suggested that in some respects the responses to this issue are as bad if not worse than the problem itself. In attempting to make our computing safer we have lost control. Others now automatically update and patch our systems and limit what we can and cannot do. Perhaps we are moving towards the end of the ".exe" era where anyone could develop and execute a program to the era where only approved and rights managed software will run on our machines.

In a parallel development we are seeing the emergence of specialised closed boxes, ipods, games consoles and even the "Internet box". They may be excellent at performing their specialised functions but they are closed, designed so that the individual user cannot write programs or modify them. The future then is of the increasingly sophisticated but specialised systems that lockout or limit individual creativity and control and that only do the things the system designers intend them to do.

The one laptop per child or "$100 laptop" programme is seen by Zittrain as having the potential to challenge this trend of specialism and lockout. Zittrain can best be described as critical friend of the initiative. He is certainly not starry eyed nor in the slightest bit naive about its potential and its dangers but he does see huge possibilities if many millions gain access to a laptop that combines the "traditional" flexibility and freedom to program of the PC with the sophistication and power of the latest developments in mesh networking. The former may allow continuing exciting software developments of the kind that our closed boxes will limit, The latter will offer the potential for new and extended forms of communication and collaboration that are perhaps outside the reach of current control agencies, offering new possibilities for individual and community development. So from this perspective, the one laptop per child initiative will not only impact positively on the developing world but may also reinvigorate computing and innovation in the developed.

Very refreshingly, Jonathan left half an hour for questioning and comment. The audience, comprising I would guess, heavily of students involved in Development Studies rather than Information Systems or Media pointed to some of the potential dangers, cultural assumptions, issues of control and ownership, environmental impact and sustainability embodied in such a project. Jonathan whilst accepting many of the points raised, generally took the view that the initiative was worth attempting even if it was only "half a loaf" rather than everything we might wish.

All in all, a thought provoking session, leaving me more optimistic about the potential of the initiative and recognising that it would really be up to “you”, what you install on the $100 laptop and not solely the decision of some Agency, Government or even Blackboard.

Steve Ryan - s.ryan@lse.ac.uk

Previous OLPC posting from August 2006, which includes a video of a prototype $100 laptop.