Fortnightly Mailing

Paul Andrew's classy e-learning resources web site

Learning technologist Paul Andrews has made a classy, simple, public web site with links to free on-line services that in Paul's estimation are relevant or useful. You can stay updated with the site's RSS feed.

Peoples-uni: Building Public Health capacity using Internet-based e-learning

Peoples-uni has a new web site and is beginning to enrol students for six four-month on-line course modules starting in October:

• Foundation Sciences of Public Health: Introduction to Epidemiology Research Methods, Biostatistics, Evidence Based Practice
• Public Health Problems: Maternal Mortality, Preventing Child Mortality, Disaster Management and Emergency Planning

All of the modules, which are accredited by the UK Royal Society for Public Health, use Open Educational Resources. The cost per person per module in the current intake is USD50.

For more on Peoples-uni, see this November 2007 Guest Contribution by Dick Heller.

FreeMyFeed - a simple way to subscribe to an authenticated feed

I'm involved in project with a username and password protected web site. The project web site (provided by BaseCamp) has an RSS feed which enables users easily to keep up with changes to the site. The snag is that the feed is authenticated, which means that my preferred feed reader (Google Reader) cannot display the feed. FreeMyFeed solves this problem, by providing an alternative URL for the BaseCamp RSS feed, which Google Reader can display. FreeMyFeed has a promising looking approach to privacy:

"Usernames, passwords, feed URLs and feeds are never stored on the server. Usernames, passwords and feed URLs are only parsed from the alternate URL to retrieve your RSS feed on the fly from the original source and then are discarded."

With thanks to Neil Smith of Knowledge Integration for telling me about this solution.

Itiel Dror and Stevan Harnad: the Web is the "Cognitive Commons"

Itiel Dror, who will be speaking at the 2008 Association for Learning Technology Conference (disclosure: I work for ALT half-time) on Wednesday 10 September in Leeds, sent me a chapter from a forthcoming book edited by him and Stevan Harnad - "Distributed Cognition" - which will be published - not sure when - by John Benjamins. The final sentence of the abstract (below for reference) struck a particular cord. You can also access the whole chapter in various formats including PDF and HTML from the University of Southampton's ePrints Server.

"'Cognizing' (e.g. thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state. Systems without mental states, such as cognitive technology, can sometimes contribute to human cognition, but that does not make them cognizers. Cognizers can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology, thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other cognizers. Language also extends cognizers' individual and joint performance powers, distributing the load through interactive and collaborative cognition. Reading, writing, print, telecommunications and computing further extend cognizers' capacities. And now the web, with its network of cognizers, digital databases and software agents, all accessible anytime, anywhere, has become our 'Cognitive Commons', in which distributed cognizers and cognitive technology can interoperate globally with a speed, scope and degree of interactivity inconceivable through local individual cognition alone. And as with language, the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental states, and on our very nature."

Devedžic's Semantic Web and Education, reviewed by Bürger

Source: elearning-reviews

elearning-reviews is an impressive, well-organised printing-friendly web site, from the Swiss Centre for Innovations in Learning. It "provides those interested in research on elearning with concise and thoughtful reviews of relevant publications".

This review by Tobias Bürgerof Vladan Devedžic's 2006 "Semantic Web and Education", does just that. Concluding paragraph:

"This book also shows that the marginal importance (compared with e. g. prior learning experiences) of “general” learning styles (as it was shown in research) is still not recognised in the world of artificial intelligence and computer science; they still deal with the idea of several cognitive styles and the possibilities for adaptation of e-learning materials. By the way: We were surprised that the different ways of reasoning seemed not to be important to Vladan Devedižic. Some could say that we should not be so harsh with our comments on this book, because it is one of the first longer publications on this topic (published 2006). Yes, we agree – but we would not have been as harsh, if there were not some very interesting older publications, where we find a deeper understanding of what learning and education is and could mean in the Semantic Web. Nevertheless, we will use this book and can recommend it as a standard work about education and the Semantic Web with the clear strength in an overview about relating technical concepts."

How to stop email overload

Nice clear explanation by Anand Rajaraman about how his 30+ person business (Kosmix - a company that is developing a pretty impressive topic-focused search engine - example 1; example 2) uses blogs, wikis, and instant messaging for internal communication. Plenty to emulate there for many organisations.
 

Why are researchers citing fewer papers than ever?

Via this article about James Evans's work in the Economist, referring to Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship, published yesterday in Science, I came across this (poorly produced!) National Science Foundation short video of Evans discussing why researchers cite fewer research papers despite having access to more. Blurb:

"Thanks to the Internet, scientists now have access to an astonishing number of research papers, scholarly journals and other papers. But according to new research conducted by James Evans, a professor sociology at the University of Chicago, researchers are actually citing fewer papers than ever, and they tend to cite newer papers that are also cited by many of their peers. In this interview, James discusses what got him interested in the topic, how he conducted his research and what he believes are some of the implications of this trend."

The key cause of the change - which Evans alludes to towards the end of the interview - is surely "search", and in particular the ranking technologies that search engines employ: once a paper on the Web has a lot of citations from articles also on the Web, then that paper's search ranking rises; if its search ranking is high it is more likely to be cited.  You wonder what account is being taken of this by proponents of metrics-based assessments of research excellence.

Michael Wesch talks about the future of education

You'll possibly have seen some of cultural anthropologist Mike Wesch's widely viewed pieces: as Information R/evolution, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us, and A Vision of Students Today. Here, via Matt Jukes, is a long and gripping talk by Wesch at a University of Manitoba conference on 17/6/2008, in which Wesch manages successfully to trash the ghastly "digital natives/digital immigrants" dichotomy that currently plagues discourse about technology in learning.

Summary, from the conference web site:

During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.

Digital Ethnography course portal at Kansas State University. Thorough review of the Wesch's University of Manitoba talk by Matt Lingard from LSE.

Dylan Wiliam on formative e-assessment

[Updated 14/7/2008]

I've focused on formative assessment in previous posts. I'm a member of the steering group for a short JISC-funded project about formative e-assessment run by the Institute of Education. The aim of the project is to "scope a vision for formative e-assessment". Here is a link to the PowerPoint slides of an introductory talk given by Dylan Wiliam [1.2 MB PPT] at the project's first "practical enquiry" day. (An MP3 file for the talk would be useful, and will be available soon.)  Wiliam's introduction sets the tone:

"Much of the debate about the improvement of systems of educational assessment focus on binaries. Is reliability more important than validity? Are constructed-response items better than multiple-choice items? Is teacher assessment better than externally-set tests and examinations? Is continuous assessment through coursework better than terminal examinations? In this talk, I will argue that as long as the debate is conducted in terms of such either/or issues, then progress will be slow, if not entirely absent. Rather, progress is to be made by mapping out the shades of grey between these extremes, understanding how each end of the spectrum is useful in helping us understand the spectrum, and the tensions we have to reconcile, but lethal as a goal in itself."

and these statements about formative feedback make you think:

• "Frequent feedback is not necessarily formative
  
• Feedback that causes improvement is not necessarily formative
  
• Assessment is formative only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner in making improvements
  
• To be formative, assessment must include a recipe for future action"

The project is looking for a spectrum of case studies of "formative e-assessment in action". Further details about the project.

Debunking the "Net Generation" myth

Iain Doherty, Mark Bullen and two less identifiable individuals are contributing to Net Gen Nonsense a blog "dedicated to debunking the myth of the net generation, particularly as it relates to learning, teaching and the use of technology".