Fortnightly Mailing

Virtual video cutter - creates small chunks of content from longer streaming audio or video files

One of the drawbacks of video and audio in learning materials is that typically "the bit you want" is buried deep inside a file. In a conversation during a conference I attended last week, Robert Schuwer of the Open University of the Netherlands mentioned SURF's Virtual Video Cutter. This is an impressive web-based tool for making snippets from streaming media files.

The tool has comprehensive instructions in Dutch, English, and Spanish. I usually struggle with this kind of thing, but managed quickly to make usable snippets from MP3 (audio) and MP4 (video) files, and to save these locally in a format that enabled me subsequently to open them and play them locally; though the actual asset seems to be stored (for how long?) on a SURF server. One of the nice features of the Virtual Video Cutter is that it enables you precisely to specify the start and finish time of the snippet, and easily to alter this.

If readers know of other web-based tools that do the same kind of thing, post a comment below.

[SURF is, broadly, the Dutch equivalent of the UK's JISC.]

The principal requirements of plain English style, by William Strunk in 1918

If you need a terse guide to writing style, try this one from 1918 by William Strunk.

"It aims to give in a brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. The numbers of the sections may be used as references in correcting manuscript."

[Thanks to Dick Moore for this.]

Wide range of interesting stuff in the October 2007 ALT Newsletter

The Octboer 2007 issue of the ALT-N, the newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) - for which I work part time - has several interesting articles, including:

• a piece by Sanjesh Sharma about Djanogly City Academy's structured and successful use of ICT;
• a case study by Federica Oradini and Gunter Saunders about the introduction of e-portfolios at Westminster University;
• a report by Bob Banks from Becta's 17/9/2007 "Harnessing Technology" Research Forum;
• a detailed article by Jim Farmer about the the growing provision by US text book publishers of accompanying on-line support materials, and its impact on student success;
• a report from Howard Hills comparing the use, uptake and impact of e-learning in colleges with businesses generally.

Puncturing the hype: large-scale analysis of MySpace users and their behaviours, by Mike Thelwall

Mike Thelwall is Professor of Information Science in the School of Computing & Information Technology at the University of Wolverhampton. He has recently published a fascinating piece of "work in preparation" about MySpace users - Social Networks, Gender and Friending: An Analysis of MySpace Member Profiles [250 kB DOC], which he is happy for people to quote and cite.

The analysis uses two nice big data sets, and a third, much smaller one. The large data sets were obtained in the following interesting way:

"The raw data for this article are three samples of MySpace public user profiles. Each MySpace user has a personal identification number, and these numbers are apparently given out in sequence. We identified approximately the last ID issued by MySpace on July 3, 2007 and for the first collection selected every 10,227th ID starting at 1,939 (a random starting point) to give a large total sample size (20,064). The profile page associated with each of these user IDs was then downloaded via the URL http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid= followed by the user ID. These profiles were downloaded at a rate of 8,000 per day over three days to avoid overloading the MySpace server. This is the 'all members collection', and encompasses MySpace users from a wide variety of joining dates. "

"The second collection is the 'July 3, 2006 members collection' and consists solely of users who joined on July 3, 2006, as identified by trial and error through MySpace ID ranges, selecting 10,000 IDs (90,306,349 to 90,316,348). These were downloaded over four hours on July 17, 2007 starting at 2.30am central U.S. time in an attempt to access the data when most users were asleep in order to (a) minimise impact upon the MySpace servers and (b) capture comparable data."

The article draws many useful insights, and represents the data visually with great clarity. Here is a small selection:

• ".... (half of the users had not checked their account for at least two and a half months), because they had given up MySpace, had a pattern of infrequent checking, or had switched to another MySpace account ."
• "Excluding users with 0 or 1 friends on the grounds that they are probably mainly inactive users, the median length of time since the last logon was approximately one week (8 days)."
• "In simple terms, it seems that about a third of members give up immediately, a third become regular users and the rest log on occasionally."
• Users lie about their ages: "The surprisingly high number of centenarians could be due to children signing up their oldest living relatives but certainly reflects joke ages for at least some: several claimed to want children 'someday'; and there are examples in the data like 'Kevin' (apparently 102) who appears to be about 13 from his picture and has a typical teen action-packed MySpace profile."
• "A large majority (77%) of users were from the U.S., although – surprisingly - the UK was in second place (5%), followed by Canada (2%), Australia, (2%), the Philippines (1%) and Mexico (1%)."
• "The median number of friends is 1, and the median number for users who have at least 2 friends is 27."

Thelwall concludes:

"If there is a typical MySpace user then she is probably 21, single, with a public profile, interested in online friendship and logging on weekly to engage with a list of mixed but majority female 'friends' that are predominantly acquaintances (including bands). This is a very different profile to those of the teen users frequently discussed in the contemporary press, and so it seems likely that public perceptions of MySpace are at variance with reality."

Note. After writing this piece I came across dana boyd's extensive and up-to-date Research on Social Network page, which contains a link to Thelwall's paper, and a lot of other material besides.

Institute for Fiscal Studies monthly public finance bulletin

Some subscribers to Fortnightly Mailing are in roles where access to a regular low-volume, neutral commentary on the state of the public finances is valuable.

One good way to get this is by subscribing to the Institute for Fiscal Studies monthly Public Finance Bulletin, which provides a monthly three-paragraph update.  Here, for example is the update for October.

Headline Comparisons

• Central government current receipts in September were 4.6% higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase over last year's levels of 6.1% for the year as a whole and of 6.8% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. The latest figures show an increase over last year's levels of 4.9 % for the year to date.
• Central government current spending in September was 5.4% higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase over last year's levels of 5.1% for the year as a whole and of 4.1% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. The latest figures show an increase over last year's levels of 6.3% for the year to date.
• Public sector net investment in September was £1.2bn, or 68%, higher than in the same month last year. Last week's Pre-Budget Report forecast for 2007-08 implies an increase of 13.1% for the year as a whole and an increase of 19.5% for the period from September 2007 to March 2008. Together, public sector net investment during the first six months of 2007-08 has been £10.3bn, which is 10.8% higher than in the same months of 2006-07.

Bill Dutton - a political scientist's perspective on the Internet

The pace of change on the Internet is so fast, and there is so much snake oil around, that it is hard to keep a sense of perspective. Bill Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, does us a service in the text of his 15/10/2007 inaugural lecture Through the Network (of Networks) - the Fifth Estate [300 kB PDF]. In it he argues, in a thorough, reflective, and evidenced way, that just as printing led to the creation of an independent institution that has become known as the ‘Fourth Estate’, the Internet is leading to the 'Fifth Estate' which Bill describes as "a new form of social accountability" which is "enabling people to network with other individuals and with a vast range of information, services and technical resources..... in ways that can support greater accountability not only in government and politics, but also in other sectors", and which "could be as important – if not more so – to the 21st century as the Fourth Estate has been since the 18th".  It is worth taking the time to read the whole document; and if you have comments on it, the place to put them is on Dutton's blog.

TagCrowd - make your own "tag cloud" from any text

 

academic academy account acl administration administrator adult advanced adviser advisor advisory application assessor assistant associate based blended business campaigns care careers category cel centre chief co co-ordinator coach college commercial commissioning communications consortium consultant content coordinator corporate course curriculum department deputy designer development director divisional doctoral e-learning e-strategy early education elearning england enterprise environment esol events executive facilitator faculty fe general greek head health iclt ict ilt improvement information innovation instructional instructor iv jorum key le lead leader leadership learner learning lecturer libraries library life lrc management manager managing marketing mathamatics maths mobile national network officer on-line online operations ordinator partnerships performance plp policy practitioner principal professional programme project projects proprietor quality research resource resources sales school science section senior service services skills social software sport staff strategic student suport teacher teaching team technologies technologist trainer training tutor vice virtual vocational vpash wales work years

The other day I needed to make a "tag cloud" to give people at a conference an at-a-glance view of the kinds of people in the audience. I used TagCrowd, feeding in a text file, and then extracting the cloud as an image file, in a roundabout way. TagCrowd produces the HTML for a tag cloud with ease, but if you know of an alternative that generates the cloud directly as in image file, please post a comment below.

Clive Shepherd's "top picks" from Patti Shank's "The Online Learning Ideas Book"

Clive Shepherd posts his "top 12 picks" from the 95 ideas listed in Patti Shank's newly published The Online Learning Ideas Book. Reading a list like Clive's makes you realise how hard (futile?) it probably is to try to develop a formal language or syntax with which to describe learning design or to model learning, though the Open University of the Netherlands and IMS are trying, with Educational Modelling Language and IMS Learning Design.

Autumn 2007 interviews about artificial intelligence

"In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk."

7 similarly structured recent interviews with leading thinkers about (enthusiasts for?) artificial intelligence  have been published on the SIAI web site. Each is available as a video, downloadable video or audio, and, most helpfully, as a transcript. Interviewees range from confident to quite cautious about the imminence of the "singularity" that will result from the creation of a smarter-than-human artificial intelligence, with Google's Peter Norvig at the cautious end of the spectrum. Scan reading the transcripts gives you a good sense of the spread of opinion.  If this kind of thing interests you, then this 15 page summary [1.3 MB PDF] of the issues surrounding the singularity, from which the extract below is taken, is worth reading.

"The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. Several technologies are often mentioned as heading in this direction: Artificial Intelligence, direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, and ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.  A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human."

"University Chapters" - a way to get involved in OLPC

Source: OLPC wiki

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) announced that during Autumn 2007 it will launch a University Programme, under which interested students and staff can create "OLPC University Chapters" at their institutions.

Of the 6 institutions so far mentioned (9 September 2007) on the University Programme area of the OLPC Wiki, 3 are in the US, 1 is in Europe (Macedonia), and 2 are in Latin America (Columbia and Peru).  This is the kind of thing you'd imagine that the British Computing Society, or the Information and Computer Sciences Subject Centre might promote in the UK.

Walter Bender writes in the 8/9/2007 OLPC News:

"University chapters: Olin College started a university chapter on Wednesday, and are drafting a model for other universities to follow. People from other universities are encouraged to help define the model."