Fortnightly Mailing

Stunning "MIT Lecture Browser" indexes recordings using speech to text conversion

[Updated 14/1/2008]

Thanks to Carolyn Kotlas and INFOBITS for highlighting the stunning MIT Lecture Browser. Use it to search a large body of MIT OpenCourseWare video assets, scroll through a machine-generated - and reasonably accurate - transcript of the audio to the asset (a lecture, say), and then navigate accurately to the point in the lecture that interests you. For reasons I cannot yet fathom, I could not get the video to play in my browser, but even without this I was gripped by the Lecture Browser's underlying utility, even without being able to play the video properly, [14/1/2008] though following the advice in the comment below I have now solved the problem.

For more on the browser, follow these links:

• Lecture Browser "About" page;

• November 26 2007 MIT Technology Review article by Kate Greene.

Peter Norvig's "Learning in an open world", and Dylan Wiliam's "Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control"

I've previously made quite a lot of Dylan Wiliam's and Peter Norvig's keynote speeches at the 2007 ALT Conference last September. Dylan and Peter have each now approved the full text transcripts of their sessions, and these are now available as PDF files, along with MP3s, slides, and captured video of the sessions, from the ALT-C 2007 web site. The transcriptions, skillfully done by Ann Ciechanowski, have each been annotated to show the slide transitions, and I think they are each worth taking the time to read in full.

For ease of reference:

• Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control, by Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education: Text transcript [75 kB PDF]; Slides [400 kB PDF]; MP3 recording [12 MB].
• Learning in an open world, by Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google: Text transcript [75 kB PDF]; Slides [13.5 MB PDF]; MP3 recording [23 MB].

Disclosure: I have half-time employment with ALT.

Wikis: 5 ways to improve corporate use

During summer 2007 the Brighton-based elearning company Epic invited Segun Olomofe and Judith Good from Sussex University to research factors affecting the usage and success of Epic's in-house wiki. This post on the Epic Blog briefly summarises the findings.

How to secure a Windows XP wireless laptop

Useful series of 12 slides from c|net showing how to make a Windows XP wireless laptop more secure.

Via Joe Dysart in the November 2007 Greentree Gazette, where there are links to other useful security-related resources.

Can we design a supportive assessment system? Keynote speech by Paul Black of "Inside the Black Box".

In 2001 Paul Black, with Dylan Wiliam, wrote the brilliant and influential Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment [50 kB PDF], about the importance of formative feedback in learning.

Here, from 4 May 2007, is Paul Black's 1 hour keynote speech from the conference of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors [take care - this opens directly in your browser]. The PowerPoint slides that went with the talk are also on the IEA web site [186 kB PPT]. The talk contains plenty of insights into the value of formative feedback, as well as a telling quote from Margaret Thatcher's memoires on teacher-led assessment:

"The fact that it was then welcomed by the Labour party, the National Union of Teachers and the Times Educational Supplement was enough to confirm for me that its approach was suspect. It proposed an elaborate and complex system of assessment - teacher dominated and uncosted. It adopted the 'diagnostic' view of tests, placed the emphasis on teachers doing their own assessment and was written in an impenetrable educationalist jargon."

(Dylan Wiliam's 5 September 2007 keynote "Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control", is accessible from the the ALT web site.)

The revolution will not be downloaded

Despite its punning chapter and section titles, The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded looks like it will be worth reading when it is published next year:

"This book attacks the often implicit and damaging assumption that 'everyone' is online and that 'everyone' is using online resources."

Just in time learning, not just in case learning - video podcast from Reuter's Charles Jennings

This 31/10/2007 video talk by Reuter's Charles Jennings, who is Head of Global Learning at Reuters, is worth its 15 or so minutes, despite its very lumpy flow (it seems to have been designed to work smoothly only on a very fast Internet connection). I'd not heard the striking "we need just in time learning, not just in case learning" point made before (watch out: its use will quickly spread), and Jennings's description of the needs of "knowledge workers" of the type employed by Reuters, and how the company seeks to meet their training and development needs, is lucid. There are more podcasts about workplace e-learning on the generally impressive "Towards Maturity" section of the e-skills UK* web site, as well as an RSS feed, if you want to keep an eye/ear on the updates.

* e-skills UK is the employer led sector skills council for IT and Telecoms.

[With thanks to Howard Hills for pointing this site out to me.]

A new blog from the UK's Intute educational resources service

Thanks to Emma Place for sending this link to the new Intute Blog. Intute is a free online service providing access to a curated database of web resources for education and research.  Intute's blog is written to be "relevant to staff in UK universities and colleges who are interested in the use of Internet resources in education and research".

Clayton R Wright's comprehensive listing of educational technology conferences

Via ZaidLearn and Stephen Downes, and attached here, is Clayton R Wright's terrific listing of educational technology conferences world wide. Wright has been compiling this list, and issuing it every 6 months, for nearly ten years as a "spare time" activity. Now that is true amateurism.

Subtitled version of Common Craft explanation of RSS

Here is a helpfully subtitled version of Common Craft's April 2007 4 minute video explanation of RSS, aimed at the lay user. 

[With thanks to Kate Butler.]