Fortnightly Mailing

When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?

This 8/6/2006 article by SA Mathieson in the Technology Guardian struck a chord with me as I've always felt that if I wanted to trust my personal data (an ePortfolio, say....) to a third party, I'd prefer to let the Co-op Bank handle it, than an institution, or the Government. The article has the following introduction:

We trust banks far more than the government to protect our personal data, so plans to share files across departments should ring alarm bells.

You might think your personal data is safe, secured under computerised lock and key, and fenced by the Data Protection Act with its sanctions against release of private data. Especially, surely, that which the government holds.

The reality is that everything has its price. Last month, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the state-funded watchdog for personal data, published a report, What Price Privacy?. The title's question was answered with a price list of public-sector data: £17.50 for the address of someone who is on the electoral register but has opted out of the freely available edited version; £150 to £200 for a vehicle record held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency; £500 for access to a criminal record. The private sector also leaks: £75 buys the address associated with a mobile phone number, and £750 will get the account details.

SA Mathieson's article in the Guardian.  Access page for the Information Commissioner's What Price Privacy? Report.

Palestine - surely it is Israel that must yield?

Amended on 13/5/2007; links updated 29/5/2011.

Between 11 and 14 June (and this is one reason why Fortnightly Mailing has had a hiatus) - just prior to the current crisis in Gaza - I was fortunate to go to East Jerusalem and Hebron, Ramallah, and Bethlehem in the West Bank.

The visit was my first to the Middle East. I went with John Cook, who is President of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), by which I am employed half-time. The visit was funded by the British Council and its focus was on how universities in the Palestinian Territories are using e-learning.

A short article will appear about the e-learning side of the visit in the ALT Newsletter. The continuation post is more of a personal reflection.

W3C Accessibility Guidelines - British Standards Institution response to consultation

The British Standards Institution (BSI) - the National Standards Body of the United Kingdom - has submitted 4 pages of solid comments in response to the World Wide Web Consortium's consultation on (the unsatisfactory!) version 2 of its Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines.  I have posted a copy of the response [23 kB PDF] on my web site, with BSI's permission.

Ray Ozzie will take over from Bill Gates in 2008

Concise piece from the 24/6/2006 Economist, set in the context of the threat posed to Microsoft by Google,  about Microsoft's plan for Ray Ozzie to take over from Bill Gates as "chief software architect" during 2008.  Ozzie, pictured, has had  long and illustrious career prior to joining Microsoft, in which he has concentrated on developing software to support collaboration and communication. Lotus Notes and Groove are two examples.

UKERNA SMS Survey - needs respondents

Thanks to Andy Black for pointing out that UKERNA is conducting an online survey about the provision and use of SMS, or text messaging, in UK education, the results of which will "help shape the requirement for a potential new SMS service for the (education) community". Complete the survey and you'll get a copy of the results.

E-learning trends - Kineo does some digging

Google Trends enable you to see how the frequency of common searches using particular terms changes over time.  I'd been meaning to use it to see if interest in e-learning (as measured by the number of web searches for the term)  may be on the wain. People at Kineo (a learning consultancy company in Brighton) got there first. The image above shows how the volume of searches with the term "podcasting" has varied over the last 2 years.   Thanks to Mark van Harmelen for spotting this.

Personal Learning Environments make a step forward. Guest Contribution from Mark van Harmelen.

Mark van Harmelen is an e-learning and a social software consultant, and also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science.

The UK is increasingly focusing on the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) after a slow start that began with client systems such as Colloquia (2000) and the  Manchester PLE/VLE Framework (2004). This week saw a two-day meeting  (on 6 and 7 June) organised by CETIS and held in  Manchester. The meeting comprised an initial ‘experts’ only day, and a second public day.

What became apparent at the workshop is that the name PLE now encompasses two major flavours of architecture:

• Client systems such as CETIS’s own PLE, PLEX.
• Web-based server and browser systems, building on Web2.0 tools including aggregators, blogs and wikis.

Importantly, and picking up on threads that have been emerging in the Blogosphere over the last two and a half years, PLEs are increasingly seen as a vehicle for self-directed and group-based learning, where individual learners construct their own agendas and learning programmes to satisfy their own learning goals. As such, the PLE revolution harbours two important threads, a change in learning style in institutions, and a spilling over of learning technology from institutions to non-institutional life.

In that many of the more hard-line proponents of PLEs feel that even blogs and RSS aggregators can constitute a personal learning environment, we are already seeing wholesale adoption of PLEs in contexts outside of traditional institutional learning setting. This much is sweet news to those proponents of the original idea of PLEs, that PLEs are  needed to provide lifelong learning environments across different institutions and CPD suppliers.

In fact, PLEs, as generally agreed on in the CETIS meeting, are seen as making possible a fundamental shift that can be characterised in a number of dimensions; moving towards greater autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness in education.

However, all is not rosy, and there was a general degree of concern about possible institutional responses to the coming PLE revolution: That PLEs in their most useful incarnations can only be used to full advantage with a fundamental change in pedagogic practice  and that  institutions may be wary of a consequent loss of  control of their teaching and learning processes. Perhaps, then, from an institutional point of view, it was no coincidence that the first day of the workshop was scheduled on the much touted date of 666.

Useful links:

CETIS PLEX Blog,  their  download page, and a selection of screenshots of PLEX in action.

Elgg, a PLE-like environment initially conceived as a response to increased institutionalisation of e-portfolios.

The half-hour PLE, a simple PLE built in half an hour.

A  resource on PLEs, still under some development -- "A great general resource containing numerous references and descriptions of resources on personal learning environments" Steven Downes (thanks Steven).

A useful  note from Graham Attwell who refers to  Derek Morrison  discussing the potential dissonance between PLE use and the industrialisation of education.

warwickblogs, the University of Warwick's bold experiment in student blogging.

To contact the author email: mark -a-t- cs.man.ac.uk

More about "user-generated" games

In the 25/5/2006 Fortnightly Mailing I pointed to an interview on the BBC web site with Will Wright, the creator of "The Sims".

Thanks to Dick Moore for sending me the these two videos. The first is of an hour-long talk by Will Wright at the Games Developer Conference in San Fransisco in March 2006, to an (adulatory) audience of games developers. His basic argument is that when games are played by masses of people, even if only a small proportion players make content, and even if only a small proportion of this "user-generated" content is any good, more high quality content will be generated by users than could ever conceivably be made by the games-development companies themselves.

The second is a 30 minute description by Wright of Spore - basically a video, with Wright's voice-over, of the Spore "world", the kinds of creatures that populate it, the tools available to players to create content, and an overview of the technology underpinning it. (For me it brought back memories of a rather unpleasant shrimp (Triops australiensis) one of my children once grew from eggs bought in kit form from the Natural History Museum. There were several shrimps to start off with, but they were vicious cannibals.)

You can find out a bit more (but not much more) about user-generated content from Caryl Shaw's Building Community Around Pollinated Conted in Spore by [9 MB PPT], from the same conference.

Three free reports available from Learning Light - a "centre of excellence in the use of learning technologies in the workplace"

I commented last April about the formation of Learning Light, when the job of Chief Executive was originally advertised.  At that time PA Consulting had the contract for getting Learning Light established, procuring a web site for it, and commissioning some "research reports" for Learning Light to subsequently provide to users of its services. (I wrote two of these with David Kay, David Jennings, Camilla Umar, and Liz Wallis.) 

Earlier this year Learning Light appointed Jane Knight - founder of the e-learning centre - as  Head of Research, and Vaughan Waller - of the e-learning network - as Head of Membership Services. Astute decisions, since each of them brings with them a network of contacts and a lot of exerience and credibility. In addition, Donald Clark, original founder of Epic plc, who sometimes comments on posts in Fortnightly Mailing, and who did a Guest Contribution in March, has joined the Learning Light board of directors.

Learning Light's web site is now properly live, rather better designed and with less hyperbole than before. If you register on the site you will be sent by email links to 3 of the "research reports" referred to above. These are:

• Enterprise Learning 2006 Trends, Focus Areas, and Predictions for 2006 - written for Learning Light by Bersin Associates;
• At Cross Purposes - Why e-learning and knowledge management don’t get along - by Patrick Dunn and Mark Iliff;
• Generating Demand for E-learning: the 21st Century Citizen - by David Jennings, David Kay and Seb Schmoller.

Here is a direct link to Generating Demand for E-learning [400 kB PDF]. Thanks to Learning Light for permission to point directly to the report. Feedback on it would be most welcome.

How to geotag a page or an image

If you store photos on a service like Flickr you may want to "geotag" a picture so that a user can see on a map where the picture was taken. See for example this link on the full Flickr version of the picture.

No doubt there are much more elegant ways of doing this - post a comment if you know of one - but the cumbersome method I worked out involves the following:

1. Convert the the UK Ordnance Survey Grid Reference of the spot to longitude and latitude with this 1998 web-based tool from David Harper and Lynne Marie Stockman. Thus NY690250 is Longitude 54.618332, Latitude -2.480000.
2. Insert the longitude and latitude into this tool from Beeloop.
3. Copy the resultant tags and text back into Flickr.

For more on geotagging in general see this page on the Mapbureau web site, and [20061020] this interesting 19/10/2006 piece by Stuart Yeates about some emerging problems with geotagging.

You may also want to use geotags with Google Earth. You can link a series of longitude and latitude coordinates together to create a "fly-over". For example, if you have Google Earth loaded on your PC or Mac, and click on this link to a 1 kB  .kmz file (a small XML file that can be generated using Google Earth, and that Google Earth can interpret) you should be taken, within Google Earth, to an aerial view of the English/Scottish border. Click on the start button under "Places" and you should experience a rather soothing "fly-over" South to Middleton in Teesdale.

[Link to Suart Yeates post added 20/10/2006.]