Fortnightly Mailing

Tim Berners-Lee - 12 minute video interview in the Economist

This link should open a pop-up with a 12 minute video of an Economist Magazine interview with Tim Berners-Lee about building the web. The interview provides Berners Lee's perspectives on the work of the World Wide Web Consortium, which he heads, about the semantic web, which he believes is on its way, and about the crucial importance of net neutrality (the principle that data on the Internet should be treated equally irrespective of whose it is, and whether or not the carrier has a commercial interest in the content formed by the data).

There are nearly 300 other audio, video, and multimedia resources here on the Economist web site.

US National Survey of Student Engagement

[With thanks to Ray Schroeder]

The well organised and informative 2009 National Survey of Student Engagement [50 pages, 20 MB PDF] report is produced by Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research in cooperation with the Indiana University Center for Survey Research. The report aims to provide data to colleges and universities to "assess and improve undergraduate education, inform state accountability and accreditation efforts, and facilitate national and sector benchmarking efforts". This year's report has a two page section (go to pages 19 and 20) about Teaching and Learning Technologies, including a tantalising but all-too-briefly explained table (below, with its rubric) "Relationship Between Technology and Engagement, Deep Learning, and Gains".

"How Do These New Technologies Relate to Student Learning and Engagement?

Course management and interactive technologies were positively related to student engagement, self-reported learning outcomes, and deep approaches to learning (Table 7). Course management technology was most strongly related to student-faculty interaction and self-reported gains in personal and social development. It is possible that the use of this type of organizational technology encourages contact among classmates as well as between students and their instructors. Interactive technologies corresponded most strongly with students’ self-reported gains and the supportive campus environment benchmark. Students who use interactive technologies are also more likely to say their campus environment is supportive and contributes to their knowledge, skills, and personal development."

EDUCAUSE - 7 things you should know about Google Wave

Via Stephen Downes, here is a link to a new EDUCAUSE outline: 7 things you should know about Google Wave - [380 kB PDF - two pages]. Given that Wave is only in its early stage of roll-out, EDUCAUSE is taking a gamble asserting much about it. And when you read in the guide that "answers to questions about who in higher education is likely to find value in it and how exactly they will use it remain speculative" you realise that publication is possibly premature. (I have some spare Wave invitations which I am happy to share.)

Digital Inclusion: an unusual opportunity to help develop a critique of current digital inclusion research, policy, and practice

Digital Inclusion is a contested term and I think the ESRC/EPSRC funded Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Programme¹ is onto a good thing with this Digital Inclusion Commentary Site.

Why?

1. The site is implemented in Comment Press (a variant of Wordpress) that allows users to comment on a complex document at the level of individual paragraphs. [Explanation]
2. The site is open to the world.
3. The aim of the document that is in the process of being written is to influence future research relating to digital inclusion.

By the look of the first two chapters, the work is going to be thorough and free of the glibness that sometimes infects discussion about digital inclusion. Excerpt from the introduction:

"This is an area of the Digital Inclusion that we have created to facilitate the creation of an online document that reviews and critiques current digital inclusion research, policy and practice: with a particular focus on drawing out potential implications for future digital inclusion research. This document, when completed will have a stand-alone life of its own, but it will also form the foundation of a separate publication towards the end of the TEL programme that highlights ways in which each of the TEL projects has (or has the potential to have) made a contribution to advancing our understanding or practice in relation to digital inclusion."

¹ Disclosure. I am a member of the TEL Programme's Advisory Group; at one point I made a point to Jane Seale (the principal author of the two chapters to date) about the suitability of Comment Press as a platform for this kind of thing. So I have an interest in this project being a success.

Being mighty: how mortals can make learning technology projects that cause real impact - a talk by Jonathan Drori

Jonathan Drori puts his finger on why so many pilot projects never get beyond the pilot stage in this invited speaker session on 9 September at ALT-C 2009 (running time 32 minutes). (Here also is a link to a page with all the videos from ALT-C 2009.)

Jaw-dropping: a talk about "lightweight learning" by Sugata Mitra at Google's London office

Source: Infonomia

Updated: added extra bullet-point from Sugata Mitra - 11/10/2009; dates clarified - 25/10/2009.

Last Monday I had the pleasure of hearing Sugata Mitra give a jaw-dropping talk about his "Hole in the wall experiments", at a 157 Group / Becta event at Google's London office that I had had a bit part in organising. (Becta is the UK Government's agency to promote and support the effective use of ICT in education, and singled out on Thursday 7 October by David Cameron, in his pre-election speech to the Conservative Party Conference. The 157 Group is a group of England's big and most successful further education colleges.)

Alan Cann - using FriendFeed as a personal learning environment for science students in HE

Three months ago I started to use FriendFeed for lightweight blogging, telling myself I would use if for 3 months and decide whether or not to stick with it. The three months is up and on balance I am impressed with it - in particular at the scope for people to comment on posts, and the ability to pull RSS feeds into and out of FreindFeed. I now include some of the FriendFeed posts I write in the emailed version Fortnightly Mailing. (My main plea is for other users to be selective about what they pull into their own FriendFeed, and, in particular, not to include stuff from Twitter if they are Twitter users.)

Today, through FriendFeed, I came across this interesting piece by Alan Cann Leveraging FriendFeed for authentic science education. Excerpt:

"Using the Facebook paradigm, they will create a Friendfeed account, subscribe to RSS feeds, bookmark and share items and build a network. We will use FriendFeed as a feedback channel to guide them. Assuming FriendFeed is still around, this should work much better than our past approach to building a PLE. (They'll also use other tools, but their PLE will be based around FriendFeed, which will be the main communication channel, vertically and horizontally)."

Alan's "assuming FriendFeed is still around" comment stems partly from the fact that just after I started to use it, FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook. Who knows what Facebook's plans are for the product.......

OLPC laptops - a year of mass use in Uruguay / Android: coming from behind

Two informative pieces in the 3/10/2009 Economist. The first - "Education in Uruguay - Laptops for all" - provides quite an upbeat, though "warts and all" summary of Uruguay's deployment of nearly 400,000 OLPC laptops (nearly all of the country's primary school pupils now have them), pointing out that government's ambition that laptops will improve the overall standard of education "will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects", and that the introduction of laptops should "prompt a shift away from rote learning towards critical analysis".

The second - "The boom in smart-phones" - describes the rise of the Open Source operating system Android, emphasising how Android has enabled "cut-price Chinress firms such as Huawei and ZTE to enter the smart-phone market which they had previously stayed out of for lack of the necessary software". The article suggests that within four years half of handsets sold will be "smart", and that almost all will be so by 2015. (I think these figures relate to worldwide supply, in which case the switch will be quicker in the UK.) The changes this will cause in the role of technology in learning (and, perhaps more importantly, in its organisation and control) will be profound.

Back-links to related pieces:

• 26/9/2009 - The "mobilely accessible" Internet - global overview;
• 20/2/2009 - Using mobile technologies to promote children's learning;
• 2/10/2008 - Android: phones are PCs, only smaller and with more stuff on them;
• 4/8/2007 - Smartphones "are the PCs of the developing world";
• 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
• 1/6/2007 - Test the mobile-readiness of a web site;
• 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa: a "simple sort of eBay for agricultural products;
• 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
• 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
• 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.

Need random numbers? Plenty of enhancements to Mads Haahr's RANDOM.ORG.

Mads Haahr's RANDOM.ORG is classy site devoted to the provision of "true" random numbers. It has developed quite a bit since I described it in 2007, though its use of atmospheric noise to generate random numbers rather than a mathematical algorithm is unchanged.

The widget below (a beta) is just one of the tools available from the site. Others include a random location generator that integrates with Google Maps, a random password generator, and a random jazz scale generator.

More on self-organised learning

David Jennings has written a second instalment on self-organised learning in part responding my reservations. Dougald Hine comments (I mostly agree with him) that workplaces usually (often?) provide better vocational learning environments than institutional ones. When and if time permits I want to link this discussion with some points made by David Price


David Price - Co-founder of Debategraph: Thinking deeply together (click on thumbnail to run 28 minute video). Other ALT-C 2009 videos.

at the ALT conference (drawing on Clay Shirky) about the "cognitive surplus" in the heads of learners, and the scope there ought to draw value from it - thereby reducing the net cost of provision - by basing learning activities on finding real world solutions to problems.