Fortnightly Mailing

"E-readiness worldwide" - 2007 Economist Intelligence Unit report, including Excel version of the data

Useful report from the Economist Intelligent Unit [1.5 MB PDF] with a market- and business-oriented focus. The report covers 69 countries worldwide under the following 6 headings:

• Connectivity and technology infrastructure;
• Business environment;
• Social and cultural environment;
• Legal environment;
• Government policy and vision;
• Consumer and business adoption.

Economist Intelligence Unit commentary.  Excel version of the main data table [24 kB XLS].

'Marketing' with Metadata - How Metadata Can Increase Exposure and Visibility of Content

'Marketing' with Metadata - How Metadata Can Increase Exposure and Visibility of Content. OAI-PMH, Z39.50, SRU/SRW, RSS is a well-written and clear 2006 "how to" guide by M. Moffat from the JISC-funded PerX Project about how properly structured metadata can increase the findability of web resources.

Using a virtual learning environment to motivate learners

I should have flagged this really strong article by Syd Rimmer of Barking College when it was originally published in the ALT Newsletter in April 2006. The following short excerpt, from an article that deserves to be read in full, gives you a flavour:

"There are many ways in which a course can be structured and supportive resources presented using a VLE. One example would have been to use the scheme(s) of work as the template for lesson-by-lesson breakdown. The model I chose to adopt and develop was to present the documents that the learners would find important to them such as the course plan, course specification and assessment plan and offer these as the first topic outline for the course (See Figure 1: Important documents).

This proved to be a 'eureka' moment. I had been trying to get the students to complete their portfolios since the beginning of the course but they were always quite reluctant to do so and seemed to find any number of issues that appeared more important. When they suddenly had access to the course assessment plan, (see Figure 2) and could now chart their own progress through their own assessment summary sheets, the impact on their interest and enthusiasm was palpable. This certainly was a defining moment as the group developed a growing awareness of the opportunity to take greater control of their learning."

Revamp to W3C Markup Validator

I put the World Wide Web Consortium's Markup Validator down as 5th in my Top Ten Tools in Jane Hart's recent survey. I was alone in this amongst over 100 other respondents. Maybe this points in part to a general doubt in the e-learning world about the value and relevance of making web content conform to W3C standards.  (Fortnightly Mailing tries, but sometimes fails to conform.) According to W3C, the Markup Validator has just been updated "with improved accuracy and performance" and "an automatic cleanup option using HTML Tidy". The latter feature is a particularly useful and time-saving one.

Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth and Politics

By chance I hit on Pinter's astonishingly intense 2005 Nobel Lecture, whilst browsing the elegantly and usably organised archive of lectures, acceptance speeches, and so on, given by Nobel prize winners. After a gripping description of Pinter's process of writing plays, and a long discourse on US foreign policy, the closing sentences are:

"I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man."

The seemingly impossible is possible - data visualisation

Via the Open Rights Group mailing I came across this wonderful 18 minute talk by Hans Rosling, the Swedish co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation about the need for datasets to be made publicly available. Gapminder is "a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development". This is "done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations". [Parts of the talk Rosling gave are similar to a much more effectively recorded, longer, and more wide-ranging talk - including..... sword-swallowing - at the March 2007 TED conference in Monterey, and this is the second video in the continuation post below. The first as an equally compelling talk given by Rosling in 2006.]  One of Gapminder's tools is Trendalyzer, which in March this year was acquired by Google, with Trendalyzer’s developers leaving Gapminder to join Google. I do not know how long you have been able to access a Google-hosted implementation of Trendalyzer, but if you've any interest in data visualisation tools, or in health, or in international development, spend some time examining it. If you get stuck, then the Gapminder World Tutorial, will help you get the hang of the tool. Rosling also has a web log.

Point-to-point Wi-Fi brings internet to all

 There's been plenty in the media about the beneficial impact of mobile phones on the developing world, and I've occasionally covered this in Fortnightly Mailing. (There is a list of back-links below.)

Paul Marks, in this "subscriber only" article in the New Scientist of 23/6/2007 (reproduced in full here) argues that unless, as in China, there is mandatory mobile coverage of sparsely populated poorer areas, or as in Bangladesh there is a dense population, mobile telephony is only economically viable for the service providers if there are on average enough users for each mobile antenna to justify its costs. Marks reports on an alternative technology called Wi-Fi over Long Distance Networks (WildNets) which can "beam the net to communities hundreds of kilometres away". Wildnets, coupled with the mesh technology being pioneered by One Laptop Per Child, and others, look like a potent way of getting connectivity into all corners of the globe.

For more on WildNets, the technology and approach for which has been developed by Eric Brewer (inventor of the pre-Google Inktomi search algorithm, and now back at the University of California), see this March 2007 article in Forbes, by Michael Zow.

Links:

• 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
• 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa;
• 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
• 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
• 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.

Top Ten Tools - spilling the beans to Jane Hart

Jane Hart has persuaded a lot of people who are active in e-learning - 45 at the last count - to tell her their top ten tools. Mine are shown here. The top 100 tools from all of us are listed here. Firefox, Skype, and a raft of Google services stand out, with Microsoft Office well-cited also. Oh that the same exercise had been conducted every couple of years....

Update - 2/8/2007. Jane has now published a different view of the aggregated data, in the form a personal tool-set and producer's tool-set.

Send large files without using e-mail

My heart sinks if someone sends me a large file by email. Especially if I am on-line with a slow mobile connection. YouSendIt is a free and functional service that enable you to upload a file up to 2 GB in size to a remote web site and to supply your recipient with a URL for the file.

2007 Oxford Internet Survey

Click on image to make it intelligible

Every two years the UK's Oxford Internet Institute does a large scale survey of internet usage in Britain. The full report, which is particularly easy to use on screen, is freely available as an ~80 page PDF [6.3 MB]. Alongside an executive summary and a description of the survey's methodology, the report is in two parts:

• Profiles of users and non-users of the Internet;
• Patterns of Internet use.

Two sections that caught my eye in the "patterns" section were "Creativity and production", and "Learning", and below I reproduce one chart from each section. The first  gives an indication that the overall proportion of users who are actively creating content for the Internet remains quite small and is not growing rapidly. The second highlights the extensive use being made of the Internet for learning, especially informal learning.

Click on image to make it intelligible

Click on image to make it intelligible

The report is most definitely useful, and should be required reading for people in policy and strategy roles. That said, I was left slightly dissatisfied by it. In particular it would have been interesting to know the extent to which users are using "flagship" services like Wikipedia. Secondly, some of the specific "facts" established by the survey did seem to lack basic credibility. For example, if ~90% of Internet users use email it does not feel "right" to me, given the proportion of spam originating outside Britain, that only just under 20% if Internet users have been "contacted by someone over the Internet from a foreign country"; or, given the proportion of spam that involves financial fraud, that under 20% have been "contacted by someone online asking you to provide bank details". If readers have views on this issue, please comment below.