Fortnightly Mailing

OpenID - one reason why single sign-on is risky

Amended 13/5/2007

Intuitively - and this is not a good basis for deciding on such matters - I am a fan of i-names, which I wrote about in December 2004. I use an i-name as the "Contact me" link on this web log - it works well - and you can register your own here.) A small but increasing number of sites that require you to log in now enable you to do this with your i-name (or with any other "OpenID-enabled identity" - if that is the right phrase). All very convenient, you might think, since for any such site you only need to know one user name and password. But there is a catch. Someone can steal (i.e. "phish" for) OpenID user names and passwords by setting up a bogus web site to which naïve (or tricked) users log in with their OpenID enabled identities. The commoner OpenID-enabled sites become, the more value will attach to the theft of users' details. This issue is interestingly discussed on the OpenID web site itself. (With thanks to Victor Grey of 2idi for telling me about this resource.)

13/5/2007. Via Stephen Downes here is a link to a 7/5/2007 news release from Sun announcing its interest in, and support for, OpenID, which it currently sees as "limited to facilitating low-risk transactions such as blog comments", including its plans to explore "what changes and practices are needed to make OpenID applicable to a broader spectrum of business and IT challenges".

Defunct links corrected 5/1/2009

The case against the IMF in education

Thanks to Kevin Donovan for sending me details of this April 2007 report by Action Aid .  According to the research by Action Aid in Malawi, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone, "a major factor behind the chronic and severe shortage of teachers is that International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies have required many poor countries to freeze or curtail teacher recruitment".  The report makes the following core recommendations:

• "The IMF should stop attaching specific policy conditions to their lending and surveillance programmes.
• Any advice they give must provide a range of policy options to enable governments and other stakeholders – including parliaments and civil society – to make informed choices about macroeconomic policies, wage bills and the level of social spending.
• Governments should place education and development goals at the centre of their macro-economic planning. They should develop long-term and costed education plans detailing the actual need for teachers and resources for training in order to provide quality learning for all.       
• Donors need to keep their promises by committing to close the annual US$15bn financing gap needed to achieve education for all with increased and predictable aid over the long term. There is an urgent need to front-load increases in aid to education.
• Civil society organisations need to develop their own economic literacy so they can better scrutinise government budgets, increase the sensitivity of budgets to the needs of girls, poor people and other excluded groups, and engage in discussions about alternative macroeconomic policies."

You can download the full 56 page report as a 1 MB PDF file from the Action Aid web site. 

UK National Archive of Educational Computing

Item in the National Archive

A long time ago I used to veer between lust for and scepticism about the Sinclair ZX80. In the end I only started using computers in 1985 when I bought an Amstrad PCW.  ZX80s and a load of other artefacts and documents are held in the National Archive of Educational Computing, under the auspices of Core-UK, which is part of the diaspora of entities left after the restructuring and "down-sizing" of Ultralab.  Richard Millwood, who is now running Core-UK, and who will write a future Guest Contribution in Fortnightly Mailing, is looking for support for the archive. 1 page blurb about the National Archive - [50 kB PDF].

Motorola's use of wikis and blogs

Informative post by Mark Oehlert (whose e-Clippings web site is worth browsing) about Motorola's internal use of wikis and blogs, based on an interview by Dan Bricklin with Motorola's Toby Redshaw.

Michael Feldstein's "Better networked learning"

Michael Feldstein, who last year initiated the Wikipedia entry on the History of Virtual Learning Environments, is now Principal Product Manager for the Oracle Corporation's Academic Enterprise Initiative. His just-published article in the ALT Newsletter, Better networked learning, is worth reading if you are interested in the design of systems to support learning. Here is an excerpt:

".... despite explosive growth in both practical knowledge about teaching online on the one hand and cognition and learning research on the other, we see relatively little cross-fertilization. Teachers are getting little benefit from the theoretical advances in cognitive psychology and related fields, while theoretical research is likewise seldom informed by the growing knowledge base of the networked learning community. Interestingly, there is a very similar communication gap between practitioners of networked learning and developers of virtual learning environments (VLEs). "

Elgg - an Open Source social networking platform designed for use in education

Elgg describes itself as follows:

"An open source social networking platform based around choice, flexibility and openness: a system that firmly places individuals at the centre of their activities. Your users have the freedom to incorporate all their favourite tools within one environment and showcase their content with as many or as few people as they choose, all within a social networking site that you control."

Use of Elgg by UK educational institutions is probably increasing, and it is the platform supporting the JISC-funded EMERGE project in which ALT (for which I work part time) is a partner. Picking up on recent coverage of Elgg in Wired, Donald Clark writes:

"Some excellent folks at Brighton University (my home town) were given a glowing write up in Wired this week on the use of Myspace, blogging and other webby stuff in schools and higher education."

...

"It's free, downloadable and has Blogging, Social networking, File repositories for individuals and communities, Podcast support, Full access controls, Supports tagging, User profiles, Full RSS support, RSS aggregator, Create communities, Collaborative community blogs, Create 'friends' networks, Import content, Publish to blog, Multilingual with Branding/customisation."

Read the rest of Donald's piece.

Alexandre Borovik - What is missing from the social constructivist theories of mathematics?

Broken links fixed 1/1/2014

Today I came across Alexandre Borovik's Mathematics Under the Microscope blog, set up to support Borovik's book of the same title. The blog has plenty of interesting, funny, and challenging observations and insights, about mathematics, about learning and teaching, and about the politics of education. I particularly enjoyed these two.

• What is missing from the social constructivist theories of mathematics? which likens developing as a mathematician to being a dog trainer - "Mathematician is a dog trainer; his subconscious is his 'inner dog', a wordless creature with fantastic abilities, for example, for image processing, or for parsing of symbolic input. Mathematician has to train his 'inner dog'."
• Psychophysiology of blackboard teaching, from which the lovely image above from Samira Makhmalbaf's film "Blackboards" is shamelessly stolen.

Citizendium - the Citizens' Compendium. Much smaller than Wikipedia, but with "gentle expert oversight", and no anonymity.

Citizendium has been set up by Larry Sanger, one of the original founders of Wikipedia. Currently it has less than one thousandth as many articles as Wikipedia. All its content is developed by people who have signed up under a Statement of Fundamental Policies:   

"Authors: all contributors have "author" rights on the Citizendium.  They can start new articles, edit existing articles, engage other contributors in discussion about articles, etc.
Editors: editors, in addition, have the right to make (or work together with other editors in making) plans, policies, and decisions for particular articles, and eventually will have the right to designate particular versions of articles as "approved."  As a rule of thumb, editors in traditionally "academic" fields will require the qualifications typically needed for a tenure-track academic position in the field, while editors in more "professional" fields require the usual terminal professional degree in the field plus significant experience and publishing."

So, even if all you want to do is to correct a typo or other minor error, you have to apply for an account to do so. I want it to succeed, but the hurdles you have to jump to get involved make me sceptical that it will efficiently capture knowledge for re-use in the way that Wikipedia seems to. It would be interesting to test it by seeding both it and Wikipedia with identical articles, and monitoring the way these develop over time and the amount of use they get. Maybe someone has already done this?

Geograph - 350,000 images mapped to the British Isles

Geograph is a stunning project to attach photos to every square kilometre of the British Isles. By March 2007 over 350,000 images had been submitted and 53% of 1 km squared grid squares had at least one photograph attached to them. You can view the pictures directly via the Geograph map-browser, or, if you have Google Earth Version 4 installed, using a purpose-designed Google Earth SuperLayer. To add photos you need to create an account.

RoboBraille - translating text into Braille

Thanks to Dave Pickersgill for showing me RoboBraille which "automates the translation of text documents into Braille and speech". By sending documents to RoboBraille by email you can, with a time lag of a few hours:

• translate them into contracted Braille, speech, or visual Braille;
• convert them between different character sets;
• convert Braille documents to specific Braille character sets;
• partition them into smaller parts.

Here, for example, is the RoboBraille-generated speech file - [180 kB MP3] of this posting.