Fortnightly Mailing

The software-sorted society

One of those ideas that makes you jump, by drawing clear attention to something that you already knew, without having appreciated its significance.  Specifically, when you interact with a service online or by phone there may be software in action that mediates how you experience the service: by sorting you.  Live in a high income postcode? Get routed to a sales person more quickly than if your IP address makes you look as if you come from a less promising area.  On record as an awkward customer or "time-waster"? Then wait in the queue.  These issues are being examined by Stephen Graham in a British Academy Readership Project: Rethinking the digital divide: the software-sorted society.

And from the same University of Durham research group is Multispeed cities and the logistics of living in an information age, a project that is examining the differences in how different communities use and interact with technology. 

Dead link removed, 5/6/2011. Link made to Steve Graham's new place of work, 26/11/2012.

World Wind - an Open Source sibling for Google Earth?

Images from the World Wind web site

NASA's World Wind is an Open Source educational tool that "allows users to explore many aspects of the Earth and Moon".  Summary of World Wind's main features. World Wind is a 60 MB programme, and currently only available for Windows XP/2000, although a Linux release is reportedly due in 2007.  As World Wind's own thorough, even-handed, and "Google Earth friendly" comparison between Google Earth and World Wind makes clear, World Wind and Google Earth are in effect complementary siblings, with different purposes.

JISC digitisation programme - from cartoons to polar exploration

Scott Polar Research Institute picture of Ernest Shackleton from the Virtual Shackleton site

Here is full list of the current JISC digitisation projects, with several of them newly announced under a £12m extension to the digitisation programme.

• 18th century parliamentary papers;
• 19th century pamphlets online: Phase 1;
• A digital library of core e-resources on Ireland;
• Archival sound recordings 2;
• British Cartoon Archive digitisation project;
• British Governance in the 20th century: Cabinet papers, 1914-1975;
• British Library 19th century newspapers;
• British Library archival sound recordings project;
• British newspapers 1620-1900;
• Digitising five centuries of UK life;
• Electronic ephemera: Digitised selections from the John Johnson collection;
• First World War poetry digital archive;
• Independent Radio News Archive digitisation;
• Medical journal backfiles;
• Modern Welsh journals online;
• NewsFilm online;
• Online historical population reports;
• Portsmouth University: Historic boundaries of Britain;
• Pre-Raphaelite resource site;
• Scott Polar Research Institute: Discovering the Poles – Historic polar images;
• The East London theatre archive;
• UK theses digitisation project;
• Voices: Moving images in the public sphere.

Web Presentation Tools And Technologies: A Mini-Guide

Web Presentation Tools And Technologies: A Mini-Guide (by Robin Good) is up to the long running Kolabora web site's usual high standard.

BBC Radio 4's "The Learning Curve" discusses personalisation

Not sure how long this link will be active, but if it remains so, Libby Purves' 22/1/2007 discussion with Professor Jim Campbell, Professor of Education at the University of Warwick; Dr Dennis Hayes, head of the Centre for Professional Learning, Canterbury Christ Christ University and Richard Westergreen-Thorne, head teacher of Barnwell School Stevenage, is worth listening to. For the first time I heard the terms "shallow personalisation" and "deep personalisation", used by Campbell to contrast superficial attempts to make a service seem "for" its users, with having a service that users can build around their own individual needs. Campbell, who is influential in the provision of education for "gifted and talented" school pupils, was open that deep personalisation is really of value to gifted and talented learners and those who already know, confidently, what their needs and preferences are. Chatting about this with David Jennings he quipped that when people start to qualify buzzwords with terms like shallow and deep, it is a sign that the buzzword is begining to get serious challenge.

E-assessment of Short-Answer Questions

Tom Mitchell of the company Intelligent Assessment, sent me a link to E-assessment of Short-Answer Questions [0.5 MB PDF], a succinct and example-rich 10 page "White Paper" published in 2006.

New Wave Computing - Peter Day on BBC "In Business"

Slightly breathless 30-minute business-oriented broadcast, available as an MP3 file, about Open Source software, in the BBC In business series. The programme which was broadcast on 11 January and 14 January 2007, explains clearly what is happening in part of the Open Source world, comparing the UK adversely with the US in its uptake and development of Open Source software, and blaming, in part, the lack of strong Government backing for Open Source software. The individuals interviewed are:

• Paul Sterne of Open-Xchange, an messaging and collaboration product;
• Peter Yared of ActiveGrid, an application development environment;
• John Newton and John Powell of Alfresco, a UK-based content management system;
• Scott Dietzen of Zimbr, a messaging and collaboration environment;
• Paul Radamacher of Google (Radamacher is described as the person who made the first "mash-up" - 2 years ago - linking Google Maps with property information on Craig's List, and who was then recruited by Google);
• Di-Ann Eisnor, of Platial, a.k.a. "The People's Atlas", a map-making system;
• Paul Saffo, writer and technology forecaster.

How to test the speed of your broadband connection

The chart (requires Shockwave) in the continuation post below  to  shows the upload and download speeds acheived on my cable connection to the internet. You can test your own connection in the same way from thinkbroadband's web site.

Presentations from Boston University Conference: Software Patents - A Time for Change?

Thanks to Jim Farmer for sending this archive containing the programme, background, and summary, and 211 presentation slides [3.2 MB PDF] from a 17 November 2006 conference on software patents.  The event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Public Patent Foundation, and Research on Innovation. 

INFOBITS in continuous production for 13 years. Now with RSS feed.

INFOBITS, written by Carolyn Kotlas has been published for 13 years by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Each month Carolyn monitors and selects from a number of information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators. I've subscribed to it for at least the last 10 years. I always make a point of at least scan reading it, and usually find at least one item of interest.December 1993 issue. December 2006 issue. RSS feed. Web subscription form.