Fortnightly Mailing

Martin Dougiamas speaking in Sheffield on 27/7/2006

The South Yorkshire E-learning Special Interest Group has arranged for Martin Dougiamas (the man behind Moodle), and Jason Cole (Product Development Manager from the Moodle-using Open University) to present their plans for the future development of Moodle in front of an audience and expert panel (Adam Cooper, Tribal Education, Ian Dolphin, University of Hull, Stuart Sim, Sun Microsystems) at a free afternoon seminar at Sheffield's Royal Victoria Hotel. Probably worth travelling for.  27/7/2006 - full report from the meeting.

Link to report from meeting added 31/7/2006.

Free on-line training for pension fund trustees

Not sure who these sinister looking people are, but the UK Pension Regulator's decision to publish a freely available online course for pension fund trustees is an ambitious and interesting one which you could imagine being extended to, for example, charity trustees or company directors.

The first of its kind, the Trustee toolkit is a free, practical and interactive online training programme designed to improve trustees’ knowledge and understanding, and help them meet statutory requirements.

The course, implemented in Flash, and, from the look of it, pretty big and complicated, has been developed by Epic plc, and when you enrol on it you can opt to be sent a completion certificate signed by the Pensions Regulator.

Press release from the Pensions Regulator. Login page for the Trustee toolkit.

Google's China problem (and China's Google problem)

Thorough and informative 23/4/2006 article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson about Google and its role and development in China. The introductory paragraph reads:

For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese university about how young Chinese should compete with the rest of the world, scalpers sold tickets for $60 apiece. At another, an audience of 8,000 showed up; students sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word. It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China's high-tech youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon and is fluent in both English and Mandarin. Before joining Google last year, he worked for Apple in California and then for Microsoft in China; he set up Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research-and-development lab in Beijing.

Here is a printer-friendly rendering of the article, which, depending on your printer and browser set-up, will fill about 12 pages if as I did you decide to print it before you read it. In a related vein, you may also be interested in The party, the people and the power of cyber-talk, from the 27/4/2006 edition of the Economist.

Disabled people and ICT: Draft Charter

Disabled people and ICT is a UK project funded by the Alliance for Digital Inclusion, an industry body of members (including Microsoft, BT, AOL, and CISCO) "committed to the Digital Inclusion agenda". Part of the project is to create a charter, to be presented to Government and industry, that outlines a strategy for inclusion, with recommendations for action. The charter, on which comments are sought, will be launched on 15 May 2006 at a Parliamentary reception.

Disabled people and ICT will be providing an online list of experts that understand the challenges faced by disabled people and wants to hear from professionals working on issues relevant to disabled people and ICT.

Scottish pupils to sit public exams online

According to the BBC, school pupils in Scotland will sit exams online for the first time. Using systems provided by the Bradford company BTL, 120 pupils and students in schools and colleges across Scotland will sit a public multiple choice exam in biotechnology, described by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) as a "significant milestone" in modernising exams.  (Thanks to reader Che Osborne, for this, who works for BTL.)

Free stuff in a commercial world. Guest Contribution from Mark Berthelemy.

Since the beginnings of the internet there has been a possible conflict of interest between those who believe everything on the net should be free, and those with a commercial bent, who want to sell internet-based products and services.

So, how does the availability of “easy to use” free tools and systems, such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Writely, Frappr, Nuvvo, Yahoo Groups, Google Calendar, Elgg etc etc, work alongside those commercial interests?

First of all, let’s set a context: I’m writing from the position of being part of a company that sells a range of learning “products”, from off-the-shelf face-to-face training through to bespoke formal, open and self-directed learning solutions (see Terry Anderson for a definition of these that works) that mix online and offline learning. So where does the free stuff fit into our world?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch

No matter how “free” something is, there is always a business model attached to it. Every service has a cost that must be met somehow, whether by direct payment for the service, grants and donations, or indirect subsidy from another paid-for service. The viability of that business model dictates the stability of the free service. If we sell a commercial solution that includes free elements, we must be confident that the free stuff will work consistently well, which means being confident in the business model that supports the free stuff.

For example, we may build a Google search as a prescribed activity into a learning solution for a client. It’s a pretty safe bet that that will work – as a society we’ve gained confidence in Google’s business model and its product. If however, we were to use Frappr as a way of showing the locations of people involved in the learning group this would probably be done an experimental option within the solution. Although Frappr has a superb product, it doesn’t yet have a demonstrably viable business model, which means confidence in the long-term viability of the product is not that high.

There are many start-up companies, like Frappr, that don’t appear to have a good business model, yet gain commercial confidence by being bought up by companies such as Yahoo (which bought Flickr) and Google (which bought Writely). As soon as that happens, then it is more likely that these services will be built into solutions.

There is also an accountability issue, in that most large organisations prefer to use systems and services with which they have some sort of contractual relationship. With free solutions, there is usually an explicit clause in the terms and conditions which removes any accountability from the service provider. But then, the providers could incorporate this into their business model, to provide paid for support and warranties for organisations that wish to have that level of protection.

We should remember that free stuff in the guise of open-source software (Open source primer) is actually well embedded within the commercial world, although it tends to be for the back-office applications such as Linux and Apache for servers, and systems like DNS and SMTP which underpin the internet. However, a number of front-office applications, such as Moodle are also gaining wide acceptance. Again, this is mainly because confidence in the sustainability of the application has increased to a critical level. This has happened through the exponential increase in the number of developers involved, and also through the business model adopted by Moodle.com which ensures that development and support will continue.

Building the free stuff into a learning solution

We have used a number of free services to provide access to open information that can then be integrated using RSS. For example, using Del.icio.us to provide a set of links tailored to a specific group.

But, as soon as you need to hide information, restrict access or brand the solution for a particular client, then the difficulties arise:

• Will we require users to register with each of the free services individually?
• Will we have to host our own set of services and information behind a firewall or a single login?

Many learning solutions require complex mixes of interactions, activities and resources. If each interaction, activity and resource comes from a different service provider, with its own branding, navigation and registration process we are likely to lose learners rapidly. The question is then, how do we make use of these “best of breed” services, at the same time as providing learners with branded, coherent, integrated solutions?

About the Author. Mark Berthelemy is a Learning Solutions Architect for Capita Learning and Development. He works with clients to help them understand the potential of new technologies to support effective learning and then to implement those technologies across their organizations. If you wish to contact Mark, please email: mark.berthelemy@capita.co.uk.

Comparative evaluation of proprietary and open educational technology systems

This is the latest Monthly Report from the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education - by Ken Udas, Director, and Michael Feldstein, Assistant Director, SUNY Learning Network at the State University of New York, USA.

Abstract

 Selecting a learning management technology has increasingly become a mission critical and strategic decision for higher education institutions. As technology supported and online learning has become more prevalent and learning management technologies more important institutional features, the selection environment has become increasingly complex. This paper presents a comparative model developed specifically for evaluating learning management software for adoption decisions in which open source software (OSS) and proprietary options are under consideration in higher education. It is intended to support senior academic administrators and policy makers who are responsible for or influence the software evaluation and selection process by proposing a methodology that accounts for organisational context and software system characteristics, while also providing the advantage of cross-organisational comparison.

The full text is available for free download (as a 31 page PDF) to individuals with an email address with an OBHE subscriber.

Messiness is a virtue - David Weinberger - 80 minute MP3

Presentation, with a faltering start, but some good insights about half way in about the Semantic Web and the "trouble with ontologies", given recently by David Weinberger at Harvard University's Berkman Centre:

My topic wasn't why you really should tidy up your office. (You know you should.) It's about knowledge and why we have thought neatness is a sign of a proper understanding of a topic, why it's good that our mental categories are messy, what Aristotle got wrong, and whether the Semantic Web is too much of a fuss-budget for its own good.

Download MP3 file.

Improving the accessibility of your web site - new W3C guidance

The World Wide Web Consortium has just published Improving the Accessibility of Your Web Site.

Abstract

Most organizations already have a Web site, and most of those sites were developed without considering accessibility. Thus most Web sites today have accessibility barriers that make it difficult or impossible for some people with disabilities to use the site. Some sites have several significant barriers; others have only a few minor barriers. Sites developed to meet Web standards such as XHTML and CSS usually have fewer barriers. While implementing accessibility on an existing Web site may seem overwhelming at first, there are  approaches to make the process more efficient and effective. This document provides guidance for fixing accessibility barriers in existing Web sites; in other words, repairing accessibility problems, or retrofitting a site to improve accessibility. It provides approaches and tips for:

• getting started, understanding the issues, and communicating your  commitment to improve the accessibility of your site;
• developing a retrofitting plan by identifying accessibility barriers and prioritizing repairs; repairing accessibility barriers on your site efficiently and effectively;
• addressing next steps after initial retrofitting.

Digital libraries - ten years on, "Ariadne is still the best guide"

February 2006 (decennial) issue of Ariadne, with articles by Lorcan Dempsey, Peter Brophy, Cliff Lynch, Derek Law, John MacColl, and Reg Carr and others.  Google Challenges for Academic Libraries by John MacColl from Edinburgh University ends with this (deadpan?) statement of principle:

As librarians, running pleasant study environments, containing expert staff, providing havens on our campus which are well respected, and building and running high-quality Web-based services, we will decide which of Google's offerings we wish to promote, and which we are prepared to pay for. And we will stand up - no matter how wealthy we assume our students and academic users to be - for the principle of free and equal access to content, and for the principle of high-quality index provision, whether free or at a cost, because without those principles we are no longer running libraries.

... which I hope makes you want to read the article in full.