Fortnightly Mailing

John Medina's "Brain Rules"

John Medina - source: John Medina's web site

"Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It's (sic) text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads — all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones."

Amended 22/2/2009 and 2/3/2009

I enjoyed John Medina's excellently implemented, thoroughly referenced, browsable and entertaining  Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School partly because it complemented some of my prejudices. 

I did my teacher-training in 1976-1977, and the proportion of the 1-year full time course devoted to the science of learning was small. (Sure, 30 years ago less was known about the subject than is the case now.)

Medina's web site could not have been produced in 1976 (either technically, or from the point of view of its science), but one would hope that teachers and others will be making a point of using it now, whilst retaining plenty of the natural scepticism we evolved for life as hunter gatherers. (One of Medina's points is that our brains and bodies evolved to make us fitted for life as hunter gatherers, and his 12 "rules" are built on that assumption.)  One thing Medina's slick web site would benefit from, though it would be costly to manage, is some space for (peer reviewed) challenges to the science that underpins his "rules". For a 2 March 2009 overview of Medina's site see this post by Donald Clark.

Related posts:

•  9 September 2006 Come dance with me, whispers the neuroscientist to the teacher;
• 12 March 2007 Useful terse articles by Itiel Dror about the science of learning;
• 14 March 2007 The bandwidth of consciousness;
• 4 January 2008 Baboon Metaphysics. The Evolution of the Social Mind.
  

Universal design - building web applications for everyone

I've been reading Universal Design for Web Applications by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May. Chisholm and May's main point is that the proportion of users that are accessing the Web using a mobile device is growing fast, with many of these users having no access whatever to a conventional large-screen device. So making web sites work on mobile devices is no longer an option unless you want to exclude a large number of potential users. Universal Design provides concentrated and apparently feasible - if fiddly - advice on how to make web applications that conform to the Level A "Success Criteria" of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, taking account of W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0.  One weakness that struck me was the book's rather superficial treatment of content management systems (CMS) - like TypePad that I use for Fortnightly Mailing, and how a user-in-the-street should tackle ensuring conformance when their CMS does not do this by default - as in the case of TypePad.

Previous relevant Fortnightly Mailing posts:

• Test the mobile-readiness of a web site - 1 June 2007;
• Sharp critique of WCAG 2.0, with comments by Stephen Brown and Jonathan Grove (whom I have asked fix the dead link) - 25 May 2006;
• Improving the accessibility of your web site - 9 May 2006.

Here Comes Everybody: how change happens when people come together - Clay Shirky's 3/2/2009 public lecture at LSE

Clay Shirky gave a publice talk at LSE entitled Here Comes Everybody: how change happens when people come together on Tuesday, and Steve Ryan sent me a link to the 45 minute talk and 45 minutes of discussion, which LSE has made available as an MP3 [42 MB]. Abstract:

"Clay Shirky, one of the new culture's wisest observers, steer us through the online social explosion and ask what happens when people are given the tools to work together, without needing traditional organisational structures. As online communication becomes ubiquitous, Shirky unpicks fundamental issues that are increasingly the source of much debate in particular in the media, in business, and in government, all of whom are grappling to make sense of the new social revolution. He argues that the conundrum is not whether the spread of these social tools is good or bad, but rather what the impact will be, for better or for worse."

The digitally literate learner and the appropriation of new technologies and media for education

Here are the slides from John Cook's well-attended inaugural lecture at London Metropolitan University this evening. John's talk - you get quite a clear grasp of it from the slides - was a nice mix of the personal, the practical, and the theoretical; and in listening to it you got the sense that John has been thoughtfully "plugging away" on learning technology research that is making a real difference to learners from non-traditional backgrounds. (John is based at London Metropolitan University, which is said to have more black and ethnic minority students than the whole of the UK's "Russell Group" of elite research led universities.)

John's argument (this is written live, and is bound to be doing him disservice)  is roughly as follows:

• connected mobile devices are everywhere;
• young people in the developed world are digitally literate;
• they spend several hours per day on the Net (often using a spectrum of devices rather than just one);
• their digital literacy enables them to communicate and manipulate (images, data, etc) in ways that really are  new and different;
• informal learning is endemic, and for many is more important in its overall impact than formal learning;
• context/location aware mobile devices provide a powerful way to enhance learning;
• the learning environment is the loosely coupled set of tools, services, and information resources that learners choose to access, rather than the institution's VLE.

Measurement Lab - helping you find things out about your broadband connection

Measurement Lab is a joint initiative by the Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and Google. Excerpt:

"Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet. When an Internet application doesn't work as expected, how can you tell whether the problem is caused by your broadband connection, the application or something else? It can be very difficult for professional network administrators, let alone average Internet users, to answer this sort of question today. Transparency has always been an essential component of the Internet's success, and Internet users deserve to be well-informed about the performance of their broadband connections. For that to happen, researchers need resources to develop new analytical tools."

The tools currently or soon to be available via M-Lab are:

• Network Diagnostic Tool to help you test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed;
• Glasnost to test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled;
• Network Path and Application Diagnosis to diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks;
• DiffProbe (coming soon) to determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic;
• NANO (coming soon) to determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.

Thanks to Dick Moore for highlighting this.

How we make websites (for the BBC)

Thanks to David Jennings for sending a 29/1/2009 link to a presentation by Michael Smethurst about how (some of) the BBC's web sites are designed and built.

How to write in the age of distraction

For all you writers out there, Cory "Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" Doctorow's Writing in the Age of Distraction has some sharp advice summarising how to avoid being "info-whelmed" when writing to deadlines. Via dana boyd.

Doctorow's five-minute video Writing a Novel is in the same vein.

(Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, from 2001, is here.)

Updated with the Doctorow video, 26/4/2012, with thanks to @jjn1.

Economic implications of alternative scholarly publication models

Very meaty report to JISC - Economic implications of alternative scholarly publication models [286 pages, 2.25 MB] - published today, by John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen, Peter Sheehan, Charles Oppenheim, Anne Morris, Claire Creaser, Helen Greenwood, Mark Summers and Adrian Gourlay, which examines the costs and benefits of three alternative models for scholarly publishing, namely: subscription publishing; open access publishing; and self-archiving.

Difficult to gut it (while sitting in the meeting in which it was tabled) in the absence of a good executive summary, but here is an extract from the JISC media release about the report:

"The research centred on three models which include:

• Subscription or toll access publishing which involves reader charges and use restrictions;
• Open access publishing where access is free and publication is funded from the authors' side; and
• Open access self-archiving where academic authors post their work in online repositories, making it freely available to all Internet users.

In their report, Houghton et al. looked beyond the actual costs and savings of different models and examined the additional cost-benefits that might arise from enhanced access to research findings.

The research and findings reveal that core scholarly publishing system activities cost the UK higher education sector around £5 billion in 2007. Using the different models, the report shows, what the estimated cost would have been:

• £230 million to publish using the subscription model,
• £150 million to publish under the open access model and
• £110 million to publish with the self-archiving with peer review services plus some £20 million in operating costs if using the different models.

When considering costs per journal article, Houghton et al. believe that the UK higher education sector could have saved around £80 million a year by shifting from toll access to open access publishing. They also claim that £115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to open access self-archiving.

In addition to that, the financial return to UK plc from greater accessibility to research might result in an additional £172 million per annum worth of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone."

Educause/NMC 2009 Horizon Report - predictions for emerging technologies

Thanks to Mike Sharples for this link to the New Media Consortium/Educause Horizon Report for 2009 [370 kB PDF - irritating two-column format], which makes predictions about the emerging technologies that are likely to have a significant impact on education. This year's concentrate on: mobile devices, cloud computing, location awareness (the report calls this "geo-everything"), the personal web, semantic-aware applications, and smart objects (that is, object that include a unique identifier that can track information about the object).

Alex Jones - PWC's report on Building Schools for the Future

Alex Jones manages one of the City Learning Centres in Sheffield. His thoughtful blog provides a steady flow of reflections on (and summaries of) official and other publications relating mainly to technology in schools. The most recent concerns PriceWaterhouseCoopers' December 2008 Report on BSF. It is worth subscribing to Alex's RSS feed.