Fortnightly Mailing

Microsoft after Bill Gates - a briefing in the Economist

This three-page briefing in the Economist coincides with the imminent departure of Microsoft's founder Bill Gates. It provides a clear indication of the state of play in Microsoft: over 80,000 employees, net annual income of over $16bn, a market capitalisation of around $300bn (half as much as in 1999), with plenty of questions being asked about the quality of the Vista operating system. Whatever your role, the briefing is worth scan-reading for the summary it provides of Microsoft's direction of travel: towards products that support collaboration and interconnectedness over the Internet. Bear in mind that on Gates's departure, the boss of Microsoft will be Ray Ozzie, who was an early pioneer of online collaboration. Ozzie more or less invented Lotus Notes, and then went on to found online collaboration software company Groove Networks. Microsoft bought Groove in 2005, bringing Ozzie with it.

Anand Rajaraman on how Google measures search quality

Anand Rajaraman is another of those clued up computer scientists/entrepreneurs who takes the time to share their insights in a candid and accessible way. Today's How Google Measures Search Quality is a good example. Excerpt:

"Let me try to explain the latter point. There are two broad classes of queries search engines deal with:

• Navigational queries, where the user is looking for a specific uber-authoritative website. e.g., "stanford university". In such cases, the user can very quickly tell the best result from the others -- and it's usually the first result on major search engines.
• Informational queries, where the user has a broader topic. e.g.,
  "diabetes pregnancy". In this case, there is no single right answer.
  Suppose there's a really fantastic result on page 4, that provides
  better information any of the results on the first three pages. Most
  users will not even know this result exists! Therefore, their usage
  behavior does not actually provide the best feedback on the rankings."

Learning and technology in China. Long piece from Donald Clark.

This long Learning and Technology in China post by Donald Clark, who has recently returned from time spent during May doing e-learning work for the Chinese Government through the World Bank, is worth reading. I bet Donald would welcome feedback from Chinese readers, and I'd happily pass these on to him.

Machines with consciousness? A spectrum from Kurzweil (yes) to Penrose (no).

Will machines develop consciousness? Published by the IEEE in a special report on the "singularity" (a.k.a. the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence), this  handy and quite entertaining chart by Paul Wallich colour codes 15 thinkers on the subject (all men) according to whether they are true believers, deniers, or somewhere in between.

Richard Elliot's eLearn Watch

New Zealand's Richard Elliot produces eLearn Watch a sort of monthly NZ version of Fortnightly Mailing, with plenty of useful links and insights.

OECD Broadband Portal - the UK has more than 25 broadband connections per 100 inhabitants

Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Korea and Sweden each have more than 30 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, according to new data, via David Weinberger, on the OECD Broadband Portal.

"The OECD broadband portal provides access to a range of broadband-related statistics gathered by the OECD. Policy makers must examine a range of indicators which reflect the status of individual broadband markets in the OECD. The OECD has identified five main categories which are important for assessing broadband markets."

This ranking table is taken from one of the many Excel worksheets available from the site:

                                                                                                                                                                       

Rank		DSL	Cable	LAN	Other	Total
1	Denmark	20.9	9.9	3.3	0.8	35.1
2	Netherlands	20.7	13.4	0.4	0.2	34.8
3	Iceland	31.1	0.0	0.4	0.7	32.2
4	Norway	23.3	5.5	2.0	0.4	31.2
5	Switzerland	21.2	9.4	0.1	0.3	31.0
6	Finland	25.6	4.0	0.0	1.1	30.7
7	Korea	9.5	10.5	10.4	0.0	30.5
8	Sweden	18.9	5.9	5.5	0.1	30.3
9	Luxembourg	24.1	2.4	0.1	0.1	26.7
10	Canada	12.4	13.8	0.0	0.4	26.6
11	United Kingdom	20.1	5.6	0.0	0.1	25.8

The OECD has also published a new report, Broadband Growth and Policies in OECD Countries, which is available as a 14 page summary [150 kB PDF], or as a 151 page full report [2MB PDF], and which contains a number of recommendations for government intervention to ensure that citizens can get online, irrespective of geography or class.

 

Something "generative" to try at home with a Wii Controller

Johnny Chung Lee is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Following up on Donald Clark's "$50 whiteboard - honestly", here is Lee's Wii projects page, from which you can find out how to use a Wii Controller (£30 from Amazon, say - you do not need a Wii games console) in various ways, including as the sensor in an interactive white-board. Excerpt:

"As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC "webcam" available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expansion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support."

In the continuation post is a lucid video-explanation by Johnny Lee of the white-board project. As an aside, what Lee is doing is a really good example of the "generativity" of the Internet and some of the devices that connect to it  (that is, devices being tinkered with, openly innovated with, and used generally in ways not envisaged by their suppliers, with the Internet used to spread know-how) which  Jonathan Zittrain describes, and defends, in "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It".

Understanding the Web a.k.a. Web Science - interesting article in a meaty issue of the ALT Newsletter

The Spring 2008 ALT* Newsletter has plenty of meat in it, including:

• a piece by Southampton University's Wendy Hall and Keiran O'Hara (from which a version of the above diagram is taken) discussing Web Science, and reporting in the Web Science Research Initiative;
• Dick Moore of Ufi's In-source, out-source, open-source, right-source - running a service not a system, about the heavyweight infrastructure underpinning learndirect’s learner management system (LMS), learndirect’s service characteristics, and the importance of what Dick calls ‘right sourcing’ in Ufi's technology choices;
• a piece by John Falchi, Chief Program Strategist with IMS, about student textbook use and pricing, and the role of the IMS "Common Cartridge" specification in enabling text book content to be (more cheaply) distributed digitally to students.

* I work for ALT half-time.

Web 2.0 Rights intellectual property toolkit

Here is a new and useful looking "IP Toolkit", part of a newish JISC-funded project that seeks to deal with the following sorts of questions:

• Do IP rights exist in a virtual world and, if so,  who owns them?
• Who owns the rights in works that are a result of collective collaboration?
• What happens if you can’t find the rights holders?
• Can rights be given up, and if so how?
• How can risks associated with content reuse be sensibly managed?

The toolkit provides extensive practical guidance under the following main headings:

1. Basic information about the IP and Web2.0 landscape
2. Practical IP tools for projects engaging with Web2.0
3. Template licences and model releases, covering “Rights in” and “Rights Out”)

Tangible Benefits of E-Learning - newly published report

Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning: Does investment yield interest? is a just-published report jointly produced by JISCinfonet, ALT (for which I work half-time), and the Higher Education Academy. It summarises a 2007 review of e-learning practice in Higher Education, and contains examples of where and how technology-enhanced learning is benefiting learners, teachers and institutions. Download a copy of the report [222 kB PDF]. Access a 2 page briefing published by JISC [170 kB PDF]. Order hard copy of the report from JISCinfonet.