Fortnightly Mailing

OLP's Moodle Guides, and Kineo's Moodle demonstration site

The Open Learning Partnership in London has published a set of 10 simple and clear guides to different aspects of the use of Moodle. Typically these are PDFs of 3 - 5 pages. All the ones I looked at are for Moodle Version 1.9.

Meanwhile Kineo Rapid eLearning has a publicly accessible and slickly implemented Moodle demonstration site.

Knowledge wants to be free too - essay by Peter Eckersley

I believe that the UK Government ought to be putting efforts into adapting to the changes wrought by the Internet, adjusting the copyright laws to work with the grain of peer-to-peer file sharing rather than trying to hold back the tide.

"Effortful": Educating the Net Generation - A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy

Phil Candy, who is, sadly (for people in the UK....), back in Australia , sent me a copy of Educating the Net Generation - A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy, 2009 [6 MB PDF], published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia Licence by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.  The following extract explains the approach taken, and there is an informative project web site.

Dasher - Open Source software helping skilled users to write at over 30 words a minute by pointing

Source:Dasher Project

Last March I mentioned David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. (Read it before you decide on any domestic or personal energy saving investments.) MacKay is a Professor in the Cambridge University Department of Physics and a leading figure in the artificial intelligence community. He is closely involved in the Inference Group's Dasher, an Open Source "zooming" text entry interface:

"You point where you want to go, and the display zooms in wherever you point. The world into which you are zooming is painted with letters, so that any point you zoom in on corresponds to a piece of text. The more you zoom in, the longer the piece of text you have written. You choose what you write by choosing where to zoom."

The eyetracking version of Dasher allows an experienced user to write text as fast as normal handwriting - 29 words per minute; using a mouse, experienced users can write at 39 words per minute. Here are a three page explanation and some videos; and MacKay will be talking about Dasher (and a newer sister product, Nomon) at an open public meeting in Cambridge on 17 June. If any reader gets to this talk I would happily include a report from the meeting as a Guest Contribution.

Mapometer - a well implemented way of tracing and saving a route onto a Google map

Thanks to Nicky Ferguson for sending me a link to Mapometer. You can use it to trace, save, and share a route on a Google Map, Mapometer estimates distance, energy used, and height gained. This example of its output is my regular (well, not that regular) run from my front door. Serving a different function is Where's the Path, which enables you to view an Ordanance Survey map side by side with a Google satellite image of the same terrain, there by working out where in the landscape a route lies. A mashed together version of these two services would be a killer application for fell-runners.

Google Translator Toolkit

Google has launched Google Translator Toolkit, a set of tools to enable users to exploit the power of Google Translate whilst enabling them to improve upon the machine-translated output, contributing in the process to the quality of Google Translate's output. Find out more.

Links to previous posts on this subject:

• 12 June 2005 - Combining human with machine translation;
• 24 January 2006 - Machine translation;
• 24 November 2006 - The November 2006 (and June 2008) NIST results;
• 26 April 2008 - Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?;
• 30 September 2008 - Google launches eleven more languages at translate.google.com;
• 21 May 2009 - Automatic translation of email.

A wiki full of snapshots of uses of learning technology in UK HE and FE

Here is a wiki with a wide and well structured range of "best practice examples" of learning literacies, defined as the range of practices that underpin effective learning in a digital age, for example academic skills, information literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, ICT skills, learning to learn. The wiki has been produced as part of the JISC-funded Learning Literacies for the Digital Age project at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Automatic translation of email

With minor revisions, 25/5/2009

I've occasionally written about machine translation, the quality of which has improved greatly in the last few years, along with an increase in the number of language pairs between which machine translation can be made. (There are some links below.)

Between 2004 and 2006 I was involved in a transnational trade union education project, and I can remember speculating with someone during an early morning run along a beach in Portugal that sooner or later Google would introduce a feature to Gmail which enabled users without any language in common to sit at opposite ends of a communication, each reading and writing in their own language.

On 19 May, Google announced that Gmail now provides this; and a user can activate it through the "Settings" and "Labs" tabs, then scrolling down and activating "Message translation". I think the arrival of this feature is very significant.

I've tested it superficially, and it works pretty well. To judge the feature's utility properly you would need to have several rounds of an email exchange relying entirely on machine translation. Anyone who is a Gmail user with the feature activated, who wants to email me in a language other than English is welcome to do so in order to test this out a bit more.

Links to previous posts on this subject:

• 12 June 2005 - Combining human with machine translation;
• 24 January 2006 - Machine translation;
• 24 November 2006 - The November 2006 (and June 2008) NIST results;
• 26 April 2008 - Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?;
• 30 September 2008 - Google launches eleven more languages at translate.google.com.

With thanks to Dick Moore for highlighting the announcement to me.

The Literacy Project

Via the indefatigable New Zealander Richard Elliott I found the Google hosted Literacy Project, "a resource for teachers, literacy organizations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning".  Is it any use? I'm not the best person to judge, but some aspects of the site, for example its Literacy Map, were superficial.  Try searching on Sheffield (where I live, and which I know well). What do you get? Sheffield University's Department of Education. Not Ufi; not Sheffield City Council; and not The Sheffield College, all of which are far more active on literacy issues than this university education department. If you've got views, post a comment below.

WolframAlpha: David Weinberger interviews Stephen Wolfram

Though I kept wanting him to challenge a bit more, here is an interesting, fairly searching and definitely thought-provoking 55 minute interview with Stephen Wolfram about WolframAlpha [MP3] by David Weinberger.

WolframAlpha is  described by Wolfram as a new "computational knowledge engine", and it is due to be launched by Wolfram's company during May.

I listened into a presentation about WolframAlpha on 14 April, and summarised this fairly enthusiastically here. Meanwhile, there is some sceptical commentary about WolframAlpha here on Slashdot.