Fortnightly Mailing

AccessApps - 50 Open Source and freeware assistive technology applications on a USB stick

AccessApps

"is an initiative developed by the Scottish JISC Regional Support Centres in cooperation with JISC TechDis. It consists of over 50 open source and freeware assistive technology applications which can be entirely used from a USB stick on a Windows computer (here is a full list of applications on offer).

AccessApps will run without needing to install anything on a computer and provide a range of e-learning solutions to support writing, reading and planning as well as visual and mobility difficulties.

The type of software solution required by someone is dictated by their own individual learning support needs. Our download section allows you to choose the portable applications which best suit your individual needs and download them in a single application suite"

Scitable - a free biology and genetics education web site from Nature

Scitable describes itself as a collaborative learning space for science undergraduates:

"Scitable an educational website offered by Nature Education for Biology and Genetics educators and undergraduate students. Scitable provides faculty with instructional articles, primary research literature, and online study tools to share with their students and help them develop a deeper comprehension and appreciation for the science of genetics."

I worked through "Breaking Down the Central Dogma" about DNA Replication.  There I learnt that the discoverers of the Double Helix won a "Novel Prize", and got irritated at some of the navigational features of the site, whilst admiring the mix of material (excellent diagrams, PDFs of original papers, etc) that is available in the different "learning paths".

Scitable has been going for only 3 or 4 days, as far as I can tell, which means that the usage it is already getting is quite substantial. You can follow Scitable from its Twitter feed.

For a previous piece about Nature's web publishing activities, see The Web is not just a better printing press.

A Safer Web - David Weinberger interviews US child safety task force members

David Weinberger interviews John Palfrey and Dena Sacco, respectively chair and on of the co-directors of the US Internet Safety Technical Task Force about the findings of the Task Force. Abstract:

"An exhaustively researched report on the safety of the web is the result of a year of work for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. The report reveals some surprises about just how safe the web and social networks really are for minors, and some recommendations for dealing with sexual predators, cyberbullying, and access to explicit content."

Ofsted survey - Virtual learning environments: an evaluation of their development in a sample of educational settings

This 13/1/2009 Ofsted report, [28 pages, 130 kB PDF], describes itself as a survey which "evaluates how VLEs are developing with a selection of providers" in the school (primary through to secondary) and FE sectors, including work-based learning providers, and adult and community learning providers.

The selection of 41 providers (all in England, where Ofsted functions, and all visited between January and May 2008) is wide and representative, and the survey is unusual in that it is issued by an organisation that takes a hard nosed possibly pedestrian line that focuses on learners and learning, with no in built enthusiasm for technology. The survey includes two case studies - one based on Havering College, and the other on the TeesLearn VLE platform.

The "key findings", which make depressing if predictable reading, and the "recommendations" are below in full in the continuation post below.

Anyone responsible for VLE use, or for policy in this area should read the report in full. (My own reaction to it is that it is slightly off the pace with what the best providers are doing, and that it could have been more explicit about the benefits of "doing VLE things" at scale - as in the Scottish GLOW initiative. And are Ofsted and its predecessors in part contributors to the basically rather dire state of affairs reported, through its failure to integrate concrete assessment of the effectiveness of VLE use into the inspection regime?)

Inside the mind of an autistic savant - interview with Daniel Tammet

Updated 13 August 2009

Brief and interesting interview with autistic savant Daniel Tammet in the 7/1/2009 New Scientist in which Tammet explains how he thinks he learns, and in which he takes issue with Oliver Sacks's explanation of savantism in The Twins - part of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat And Other Clinical Tales. Tammet's Embracing the Wide Sky: A tour across the horizons of the human mind is out soonnow and reviewed by Donald Clark here. Tammet's blog.

Richard Florida on cities as "the third great business model"

Today's BBC In Business had a gripping and wide-ranging interview with Richard Florida [link to podcast], Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, in the University of Toronto, who argues enthusiastically about the benefits of immigration, about successful cities like London and San Francisco as illustrating the "third great business model" (he is not a fan of the technology driven "death of distance"), and about popular music as a historically important driver of technologies and development (radio, TV, phonograph, CD, iPOD etc). Richard Florida's website is worth browsing, and below is a video of a one hour talk he gave at Google's New York Office on 5 April 2008.

Science Magazine's January 2009 Special Issue on Educational Technology

Revised 2 January 2009

There is plenty of interest, some of it with a UK focus, in this 2 January 2009 Special Issue of The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Magazine, though you will need to be a subscriber (or work for an organisation with a subscription) to view most of it other than at USD10 per article. There is a freely available video piece focusing in part on video games in science learning, and a podcast to promote the special issue, and I can see the issue having quite an impact in the US, given Science Magazine's reach and influence amongst policy-makers, the relatively poor performance of the US school system, and the political changes that are afoot there. See for example this coverage of the Science article about video games picked up by the Scientific American. From a UK perspective, Scotland's "Glow" national education intranet gets supportive and no doubt welcome coverage in a two page article by Dan Clery, and there is a longer review article about online education worldwide - abstract - by Frank Mayadas, John Bourne, and Paul Bacsich.

As an aside I think that Science Magazine is missing a trick from both a business and influence point of view by not making this issue freely (or far more cheaply) available on-line.

John Lanchester on video games

Here is an interesting and well-written article by John Lanchester about Video Games in the 1/1/2009 issue of the London Review of Books, covering ground I am not familiar with, and highlighting the fact that 2008 was the year in which the UK market for video games is forecast to have overtaken that for music and video combined (it overtook that for books in 2007). Excerpt:

"There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t. Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist. (The exceptions come in the form of occasional tabloid horror stories, always about a disturbed youth who was ‘inspired’ to do something terrible by a video game.) Their invisibility is interesting in itself, and also allows interesting things to happen in games under the cultural radar."

Huddersfield University makes its library usage data freely available

On 12/12/2008 Huddersfield University published a large swathe of its library usage data under an open license, along with a full explanation of why and how. Excerpt:

"Since 2005, the University of Huddersfield has provided book recommendations within its library catalogue, driven by mining of the historical circulation usage data.

At the time of writing, the library has details of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a period of 13 years. The mining of this data has proved both beneficial to our students (via recommendation services and easy access to personal borrowing histories) and to the library (via usage analysis to inform stock management).

Involvement with the JISC TILE Project led to a decision to release a sizeable portion of the usage data in the hope that it might prove beneficial to others. The released data represents about 70% of the total circulation data available -- only items with low circulation and/or no ISBNs have been omitted."

David Wiley's "Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education"

In 1998 my enthusiasm for openness was given a boost (or started?) by David Wiley and the Open Content license that he developed. At that time the use of such licenses, which have been superseded and absorbed by Creative Commons, was very rare. (The LeTTOL course was originally published under an Open Content License, though this seems no longer to be the case.) Ten years later, David Wiley's influence has grown a great deal, and his 85 slide presentation Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education deserves to be widely viewed, though you can only follow Wiley's argument to a certain extent from his slides; and without that you cannot develop a critique or endorsement of it.

[With thanks to Dan Barker for highlighting this.]