Fortnightly Mailing

Emerging technologies for learning - report from Becta

Thanks to Andy Black for highlighting Emerging Technologies for Learning, a new ~50 page Research Report from the British Educational and Communications Technology Agency (Becta). This "covers emerging technologies and some of the future trends that are likely to have an impact on education".  With a Foreword by Andrew Pinder, ex-UK-Government e-Envoy, and now Chair of the Becta Board, it has 5 main sections, each written by a different author, each of whom is active in the commercial world in the area their section covers:

1. Mobile technologies: transforming the future of learning, by Geoff Stead
2. The ambient web, by Bill Sharpe
3. The future of human-computer interaction, by Paul Anderson
4. Social networks, by Leon Cych
5. The broadband home, by Michael Philpott

The different sections stand alone from each other, and, no bad thing, have different structures. The report will become dated quite quickly, though I did make a diary note three years hence to check if Geoff Stead's "in three years time" predictions about mobile technology stand up. One grouse about the report is its 2 column design format, which makes it tiresome in the extreme to read on screen. Becta should have changed its document style guide by now.

Monthly bulletin for content developers by email from Becta

The British Educational and Communications Technology Agency (Becta) publishes a free monthly emailed bulletin for content developers "alerting you to key developments and information relevant to learning resource developers and providers".  You can sign up for it right here, using your browser's back button to return to Fortnightly Mailing from Becta's subscription confirmation screen.

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The future of computing - a forward look from Nature

In the last two decades advances in computing technology, from processing speed to network capacity and the internet, have revolutionized the way scientists work. From sequencing genomes to monitoring the Earth's climate, many recent scientific advances would not have been possible without a parallel increase in computing power - and with revolutionary technologies such as the quantum computer edging towards reality, what will the relationship between computing and science bring us over the next 15 years?

3 News Features and 5 Commentaries from the 23/2/2006 issue of Nature (all freely available as a result of sponsorship from Microsoft Research) concerning the future of computing. Take your pick:

1. Philip Ball - Champing at the bits
2. Jacqueline Ruttimann - Milestones in scientific computing
3. Declan Butler - Everything, everywhere
4. Stephen H. Muggleton - Exceeding human limits
5. Vernor Vinge - The creativity machine
6. Alexander Szalay and Jim Gray - Science in an exponential world
7. Roger Brent and Jehoshua Bruck - Can computers help explain biology?
8. Ian Foster - A two-way street to science's future

Google Calendar - plenty of appealing features, but no substitute for Meet-o-matic

Google recently launched a new calendar service. Having tried it out in a low key way, it seems to have the features needed to enable organisations to publish calendars of events, or for individuals or workgroups to maintain online schedules. It has good RSS support, integration with desktop calendar applications, an export/import capability, and scope to give different users different levels of "write rights". What it seems to be missing is the equivalent of Meet-o-matic, the wonderful free scheduling tool created by Marc Eisenstadt and Stuart Watt.  Overview.  Calendar Help Centre.

Web stats - StatCounter seems to offer all you might need

I came across the Irish StatCounter, a free "Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats" service. I am now using it to keep an eye on traffic to this site. I am very impressed with the basic (i.e. free) service. It is flexible, very easy to set up, and much more powerful than others I have investigated. The StatCounter web site has excellent user-documentation and help. The help is written with great care, and the user-documentation has useful insights on interpretation. You can review the range of reports provided from the StatCounter demo.

13/5/2007 update. StatCounter currently has over 1.3 million members and tracks 9 billion page-loads per month across its network of 2 million websites. StatCounter was founded by Aodhan Cullen when he was 16. In May 2007 Aodhan won the Irish "Young ICT Person of the Year Award".

Events in the pipeline

A clutch of forthcoming events.

1. 17 May, Brussels. Citizen Connect. The concluding event of the URBACT Information Society Network, which concerns how technology can connect citizens, combat social exclusion, stimulate economic local development, and put the citizen at the heart of the democratic process. (Thanks to reader Martine Tommis for this.)
2. 24 May - 9 June, online.  Identifying Successful Business Strategies for Online Programs.  An online workshop with Steve Schiffman, Chris Geith, and Karen Vignare, organised by the Sloan Consortium. "This workshop marks our most ambitious effort to date to map the business models of the online industry and present them in a context that will actually help to improve the success of your online programs. This workshop includes ongoing research that has been collected over the course of the past two years from top institutions and has included the input and work of several top researchers in this area. And as with all of our workshops, it is provided in a way that adapts to your busy schedule. If you are a top level administrator in an online program, you don’t want to miss this workshop." (Workshops like this one have in the past produced very useful outputs, for example Effective Workload Management Strategies for the Online Environment [84 kB PDF].)
3. 2 June, London. ‘blog.ac.uk’, the UK's "first educational blogging conference bringing together practitioner and research based expertise to explore cutting edge issues surrounding the educational use of weblogs and weblogging software". With keynote contributions from Stephen Downes and Barbara Ganley.
4. 6-7 July, York. 6th International Meeting of JISC and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). With keynote speeches from: Reg Carr, Director of University Library Services at Oxford University; Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC; Derek Law, Librarian and Head of Information Resources, University of Strathclyde; Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, CNI; Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, CNI; David Nicholas, University College London. (If I was not going to be on holiday at that time I would stump up the £350 residential fee for this event.)
5. 5-7 September, Edinburgh. ALT-C 2006 - the next generation. Keynote speeches from: Stephen Heppell; Diana Oblinger, Vice-president of EDUCAUSE; Tim O'Shea, Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Theme speakers: Terry Anderson, Athabasca University; Phil Candy, UK National Health Service; Gilly Salmon, University of Leicester; Chris Yapp, Microsoft. (I work half time for ALT as its Executive Secretary.)
   

Hiraki Sawa's "Certain Places" - exhibition in Colchester until 6/5/2006

I posted an item about Dwelling, an animation by Hiraki Sawa, on 6/4/2006. If you are within striking distance of Colchester in Essex, Certain Places, an exhibition devoted entirely to Sawa's work will run there until 6/5/2006.

Hut-to-hut skiing in Tafjordfjella, Norway, April 2006

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Last year's reader-survey told me to go easy on the ski-touring photos. Hence just this one from  Tafjordfjella, in western Norway, which amazingly is only about 10 miles from the sea at the Eastern tip of Tafjord. The continuation post contains a few more in a 1 minute Flickr slideshow.

Remote-controlled sharks

According to this 2/3/2006 BBC summary of a report in the New Scientist, Pentagon scientists are planning to turn sharks into "stealth spies" capable of tracking vessels undetected. The same technology may be used to keep farmed tuna fish in one place, without needing to pen them in, apparently.

FE White Paper - the personalisation virus is spreading

March 2016 - some dead links, I am afraid. Seb.

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Readers in England with an interest in FE will know that on 27/3/2006 the Government published a White Paper on the reform of the Further Education sector. There are links to the White Paper and various associated documents on the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) web site, and the Trades Union Congress has published a balanced assessment of/briefing about the White Paper.

I had a look at the White Paper from the point of view of e-learning. The term "blended learning" is absent: hopefully it is drifting out of use. But "personalisation" is in with a vengeance, with almost all of the White Paper's references to e-learning made in the context of personalisation. This is not surprising given the way that the term permeates UK Government educational thinking at present, with one of the four strands of the DfES Technology Group now led by a "Programme Director for Personalised Content". Maybe as a result of having co-written a report on personalisation in presentation services for JISC a couple of years ago I am sceptical about the current policy emphasis.

Firstly, where is the evidence that (whatever the term means) personalisation will improve the efficacy of public education? Secondly, there is a lot of vagueness about the meaning of the term, with definitions varying from the (perfectly acceptable, general) "the antithesis of impersonal", to the more technically focused "automatically structured to meet the needs of the learner".

Although the White Paper uses the term overall mainly in the former sense, it also uses it in the second sense, making the assumption that e-learning has a major role to play in providing a personalised experience. Developing a clear framework which explains what is meant by "personalised" in the context of educational policy would help, and it would go some way to reduce the risk of absurd/naive "snake oil" claims being made for this or that online content's (or this or that technical system's) capacity to make learning personalised.

[I showed a draft of this post to David Jennings, whom I've worked with on various projects, including writing the Draft for Public Comment for British Standard BS8426 - A code of practice for e-support in e-learning systems (8-page handout - 150 kB PDF), and whose web log I sometimes link to. He made the following point about personalisation, which I agree with. "The idea that technology can second-guess the needs of learners is superficially attractive but riddled with problems; I've never seen evidence of it being done effectively and with consistent accuracy; if it's done inaccurately it just undermines the transparency of the system and the users' control, which makes things worse."]