Fortnightly Mailing

Using PSPs for learning in a Birmingham primary school for the deaf

Here are two superb ~8 minute videos in which Alison Carter, deputy head teacher of Longwill School, talks comprehensively, clearly, and passionately about the benefits flowing from pupils' use of Sony PlayStation portable devices. These talks deserve to be widely viewed.

Part 1

With thanks to Jenny Ellwood from East Birmingham City Learning Centre for telling me about this work.

Videos of keynote and invited speaker sessions at the 2009 ALT conference

Over the last few weeks Matt Scholes has been working with colleagues in ALT (where I work part-time) to edit the video recordings from the 2009 ALT conference, and to get these made available on the Web.

Hopefully we've got the format for these videos about right within the budgetary and technical constraints we faced; and the "wide-screen" format has enabled us to combine the video of the speaker with a reasonably legible view of their presentation in one screen, without needing to switch between them.

Progressive austerity and self-organised learning

I've worked on and off with David Jennings for nearly 15 years, starting with unsuccessful efforts in the mid 1990s to get Sheffield-as-a-City to take the Internet more seriously, and including Living IT [slow to load from The Wayback Machine] a project with MANCAT, The Sheffield College, and FD Learning, to make a suite of wholly online courses about how to use the Internet.

More recently we've pitched for and won various contracts concerning e-learning, standards, web site usability, social networking to support professional development, and so on.

Why the throat clearing? To provide a context for my pointing to a longish piece that David Jennings has written - Progressive austerity and self-organised learning - which I think is worth taking the time to read, and to make comments on it. (Though I've not switched off comments on this post, I encourage you to respond there not here.)

For the record and leaving aside my scepticism about "collapsonomics" (which reminds me too much of The Limits to Growth and Protect and Survive) I agree with some but not all of David's argument.

I particularly like the way David tabulates some "Literacies for self-organised learning" using lists by Guy Claxton and Howard Reingold (I'd be for including Claxton's "characteristics of a confident explorer/researcher" in many recruitment specifications), but I think David underplays the importance of accreditation of learning and of qualifications generally (this is more than the issue of compliance training that he raises towards the end of the piece).

Secondly learners in many contexts at many levels (medicine, catering and hospitality, car maintenance, marketing, say) need to learn in real "vocational" environments. These are generally anything but "lightweight" to provide.

Finally, though we are programmed to learn, for many it helps a great deal to receive the right formative feedback, and to be asked what Dylan Wiliam calls "hinge questions" [150 kB PDF - see page nine]; and in this respect the "self-organised" learning that David argues for  is not sufficient. 

What I think we do agree on is that the "information environment" has become far more "lightweight", with the bypassing of institutions, libraries, teachers, publishers, experts etc, and the establishment of an apparently open environment in which motivated people can learn a great deal on their own. (I put quotes round the term "lightweight", because the technical infrastructure that sits behind and supports the information environment is anything but lightweight.)

But you can make up your own mind by reading David's piece.

Using Twitter and Yahoo Pipes for electronic voting, by Martin Hawksey

Here is a plausible description by Martin Hawksey from the JISC RSC for Scotland North and East which explains how to use Twitter as a classroom voting tool.

Google Docs now has translation between any pair of 51 languages as standard

Updated 31/8/2009

If you use Google Docs, the "Tool" drop-down allows you to produce a machine translation of the document into any of 51 42 languages, including, as of today, Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish. For more on the newly available language pairs, see this 31/8/2009 piece in the Google Research Blog by Franz Och, Principal Research Scientist. Excerpt:

"We're very happy that our technology allows us to produce machine translation systems for languages that often don't get the attention they deserve. For many of the newly supported languages ours is the only mature and freely available translation system. While translation quality in these languages will be noticeably rougher than for languages we've supported for a longer time like French or Spanish, it is most often good enough to give a basic understanding of the text, and you can be sure that the quality will get better over time."

The state of the LMS market - shades of Napoleon's march to Moscow

Here is a wonderful diagram from a report by Michael Feldstein from a "Delta Initiative" webinar about the state of the LMS market. 

The diagram reminded me of Joseph Minard's "Carte Figurative" of Napoleon's march to and retreat from Moscow:

Source: Edward Tufte.

Hal Varian: Why that hoodie your son wears isn't trademarked

Lots of thought-provoking accessible articles from the New York Times by Hal Varion, who is on leave from the University of California, Berkeley, and serving as Google's Chief Economist. An example is Why That Hoodie Your Son Wears Isn’t Trademarked, from which this is an excerpt.

"According to Mr. Raustiala and Mr. Sprigman, the fashion industry can survive without intellectual property protection because of two interacting factors that they refer to as 'induced obsolescence' and 'anchoring'."

"The first factor means that clothes become unfashionable before they wear out, so trendy people have to keep buying new clothes every year. When you are wearing the same thing as your cool friends, that’s great. But when you start seeing that style on decidedly uncool people, it’s time for something new — which the fashion industry is happy to provide."

"But how do the fashionable decide what the next big thing is? Or perhaps more to the point: how does the fashion industry convey to their consumers what they should be wearing? How does the industry 'anchor' the consumers in this season's fashions? This is where copying comes in. If all the designers are showing baby doll dresses in the spring of 2006, then there’s a good chance that is what everybody will be wearing by the summer of 2006."

"Mr. Raustiala and Mr. Sprigman argue that the lack of intellectual property protection actually promotes the functioning of the industry. If the extension of copyright to fashion prevented clothes manufacturers from copying each other, the industry would be ceding a major role to the lawyers and become much less creative. We’d see the same thing year after year. "

ReViCa - a wiki-based web site about virtual campus initiatives worldwide

The ReViCa wiki has been "set up to provide an inventory and to show the results of a systematic review of Virtual Campus initiatives of the past decade within higher education throughout the world". According the the site more than 300 programmes are categorised by the "interesting or innovative eLearning approach they have taken".

Internet use by country - how it has changed since 2002

Source: New Scientist

Apart from the annoying use of zeros in numbers like 253,000,000, this graphic from the New Scientist (via Laura Czerniewicz) is an outstandingly good example of quantitative information visually displayed. You can explore some of the data with mouse-over and using the controls in the the Google Motion Chart below.

Après Wave, le déluge. Google Wave assessed in Dick Moore's new "Tools and Taxonomy".

Dick Moore (whom I know of old, through Ufi, and through ALT) has started Tools and Taxonomy. His first piece is an informative one about Google Wave which summarises why Google Wave is likely to be a "next big thing". Note also Dick's use of CommentPress, a "theme" for the  Wordpress blog software that allows for commenting on individual chunks of text. I've had my eye on CommentPress (which anticipates one of the features that Google Wave will support) for some time, and ALT has it in mind to use it when putting drafts of responses to public consultation out for comment by our members or the wider learning technology community. So it is interesting to see it in use in this way.