Fortnightly Mailing

Was Gordon Brown right to scrap Home Computer Initiative?

Probably, but perhaps not so suddenly.

The Home Computing Initiative (HCI), which is said to have made it much easier for people in employment to get hold of a PC, got scrapped without notice in last week's Budget. During its two years of operation around 0.5 million people from over 1000 individual employers - spread acorss the public and private sectors - had taken advantage of the scheme, with high levels of take up in organisations like the Post Office, and with HCI playing a role in some workplace e-learning strategies. The links below provide a round-up of reactions to the decision, which have caught the businesses that have been making money from the scheme on the hop. The underlying issues seems to have been that:

• HCI schemes could not be accessed by workers on the national minimum wage, because it is unlawful to operate a salary sacrifice scheme that takes an employee's hourly rate below the national minimum wage;
• the scheme is alleged to have been abused, with people using it to purchase games consoles or second PCs;
• vendors were able to operate with better margins on their sales than in the open market;
• larger organisations claimed to gain large business benefits from the improvements in ICT fluency which the scheme brought about, at the tax-payer's expense.

Links

• Confederation of British Industry press release;
• Save HCI campaign web site, run by a company whose business has been associated with the supply of HCI PCs;
• BBC coverage;
• HCI Alliance, comprising Intel, Microsoft, and BT;
  
• Articles in the Register, generally taking the line that business has taken advantage of the scheme. "Anyone can get a cheap PC made in China, marketed from Texas, on similar terms to the government scheme anyway, except that with interest free credit, it's theirs to own. How much of the benefit of this subsidy was going to the participating multinationals who don't need any help improving their grip on the British market?" MPs botch HCI rescue (28/3/2006).  HCI admits failing poor (28/3/2006).  HCI traders fight for the right to PC tax breaks (27/3/2006).

World Economic Forum - Interview on the Global Information Technology Report 2005-2006

The World Economic Forum (the one that brings political and business leaders together in Davos each year and claims simultaneously to be impartial and non-partisan, but committed to entrepreneurship) has just published its Global Information Technology Report. This shows that the US, Canada, and Taiwan have jumped several places up a "Network Readiness" ranking based on an assessment of:

• the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community;
• the readiness of the community's key stakeholders - individuals, business and governments;
• the usage of ICT among these stakeholders.

The UK has risen from 12th to 10th place.

The full report costs £65, and is available from Palgrave Macmillan, but you can read its summary [66 kB PDF], as well as a transcript of an informative interview with Augusto Lopez Claros, who is one of the report's authors. [20060917 - link broken - intend to fix it.]

Just for the hell of it, and in less than 30 seconds, I used irows, which I described in Fortnightly Mailing 20060324, to create an HTML version of the ranking, and this appears in the continuation post below.

Perceptive comments from Bill Thompson about "Web 2.0"

I thought this 25/3/2006 piece by Bill Thompson, who writes on technology issues for the BBC, provides a thoughtful perspective on how the World Wide Web is changing at the moment, and on why he is gradually losing his scepticism about the importance of the so called "read/write Web", or "Web 2.0", as exemplified by services like Writely, or Flickr, and, increasingly, by Google services such as Page Creator.

An important issue for Thompson is the extent to which users have to but their trust in (i.e. give their personal or other important data to!) the companies that provide  these services. For example I've been quite taken with an interesting and attractive "Web 2.0" service called Box.net, which provides an advertising-free remote back-up service, enabling you to access your stuff from any networked device that runs a browser. So far so good - especially since so many people are so poor at back-up, and could get much better at it using a service of this kind. But this 2/4/2006 extract - emphasis added - from Box.net's Terms of Service makes me a bit wary, even assuming that I was content that my data was safe day-to-day with the company.

Box.net reserves the right to terminate without notice your password, account or use of Box.net service and delete any data within Box.net service if you fail to comply with this Agreement or for cause of any other nature. You may terminate your user account upon notice to Box.net at any time. Upon termination by Box.net or at your direction, you may request a file of your data, which Box.net will make available for a fee. You must make such request at the notification of termination to receive such file within thirty (30) days of termination. Box.net shall have no obligation to maintain any data stored in your account or to forward any data to you or any third party.

Myguide - a "radically simple" way of using the internet

The DfES describes myguide (known also as the Cybrarian Project) as a new online facility to provide a 'radically simple' way of using the Internet... which will ... consist of an uncluttered interface that people can personalise to suit their needs and tastes, an equally simple and intuitive email facility, and support in searching for information and using services of interest to them.

A pilot myguide service is now available. At the time of writing (2/4/2006) and for several days subsequently the account creation process and email system were not functioning, but when I looked in some detail at the service a couple of weeks ago I felt that it was neither uncluttered, nor simple, nor intuitive, nothwithstanding the extensive stakeholder involvement there has been in its development.

HCI and webcasting in Toronto. Guest Contribution from Sara Frank Bristow.

In June 2005 I became the Network Manager for NECTAR, the Canadian Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research. NECTAR links 14 HCI researchers at UBC, Calgary, Saskatchewan, Toronto, Queen's and Dalhousie universities, and is administered from the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) in Toronto. A 5-year project which runs through 2008, NECTAR is part of the government’s Strategic Network Grants Program, and like all networks in the program, it is funded by both the Canadian government (NSERC) and the private sector. In our case, major sponsors are Microsoft and SMART Technologies, though NECTAR has support from a number of other companies too.

Among NECTAR's many goals is to improve communication among our own labs, preferably via technology. Yet we find that without annual network-wide meetings at which our faculty, postdocs, and students can interact face to face, collaboration is less likely to flourish. Last Autumn we tried to improve network synergy via a postgraduate Computer Supported Collaborative Work course, webcast live to all NECTAR sites via an open/community source tool called ePresence (a version is available at SourceForge, and you may also be interested in this podcast about ePresence on the Educause web site). The course attracted students and/or speakers from all six NECTAR universities; built-in text chat, synchronization of audio/video with PowerPoint slides, and experimentation with a new (and pedagogically controversial) Voiceover IP module all contributed to each week’s presentation.

ePresence is one of many projects sponsored by NECTAR, and one of numerous collaborations underway at KMDI. Project Open Source|Open Access (OS|OA) is another: a tri-campus initiative, it seeks to develop a networked community of individuals interested in distributed peer production at the University of Toronto and beyond.

I must admit that I get a bit lonely amidst all of these virtual communities. From Toronto I co-ordinate the activities of researchers up to 3,000 miles away, most of whom I have never met. We keep in touch via Instant Messaging (MSN, Trillium), VoIP (Skype, Google Talk), the telephone and email – lots of email.  But there are no immediate colleagues to celebrate with when, for example, I finish a big project. Perhaps this is one more reason to support HCI research: with an adaptive enough interface, I might not notice the difference.

Contact Sara

The future of the Web - a 2 hour web-cast from/with Tim Berners Lee

Tim Berners Lee gave an 80 minute lecture, followed by about 30 minutes of discussion, in Oxford on 14/3/2006. Definitely worth listening to it, and possibly watching, particularly if you want to get a better understanding of the Semantic Web and the direction  that Berners Lee sees it as taking.

Abstract. The development of Web technology has been an exciting ride, a series of socially motivated technical innovations some languishing, others catching on in a viral way. As each development has suggested many new ones, and much of the original vision is still unfulfilled, there is a lot to do. This talk will discuss new challenges and hopes for weblike systems on the net.

Slides for the talk. 

Links to media files from the talk, hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute:

• Streaming RealPlayer video of the talk which will launch in your external player
• MP4 File [685 MB]
• MP4-LOW File [204 MB]
• MP3 File [70 MB]

Rollyo - DIY cross-domain searching

Some readers will know that if you put "site:XYZwebsite" into Google or Yahoo prior to your search terms, your will get results that are restricted to XYZwebsite. This is useful when the site you want to search has a poor search tool of its own.

With Rollyo you can quickly construct and share a search window for one or more web sites, which when used will provide a Yahoo-based search of those web sites. You can make your search windows public on the Rollyo web site, and you can also generate the code to include a "hand rolled" search window on your own web site.  Here, for example, is a search window which you can use to search:

• all the UK Research Councils' web sites, or
• the web sites of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Joseph Rountree Foundation, and the Department of Constitutional Affairs.

Select Search Engine...ODPM/DCA/JRFUK Research Councils

Powered by Rollyo

Good stuff from Clive Shepherd in "Clive on Learning"

Clive Shepherd is a consultant specialising in the application of technology to education, who co-founded Epic plc with Donald Clark. I reviewed Clive's book - the Learning Object Design Assistant in Fortnightly Mailing Number 30. Shepherd's blog - Clive on Learning - contains regular insights into e-learning, and is worth keeping an eye on.

TechNews from Becta - deserves wider circulation

Thanks to Andy Black for sending me details of the British Educational Communication Technology Agency's seriously underpromoted roughly bi-monthly TechNews, a technology news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. It cries out for an RSS feed.  March 2006 issue [250 kB PDF].   Sign up page.  Archive.

Open Source mind mapping software - SourceForge's project of the month

On the few occasions I've tried it, I've not got on with mind mapping software like MindManager; but several people I know and trust swear by it.  I would be interested to hear from readers who have used FreeMind, which is said to be an equivalent product to MindManager, and which was the Sourceforge Project of the Month in February 2006.