Fortnightly Mailing

iRows - a web-based multi-user spreadsheet

Google's purchase of Upstartle, the small company behind the useful and successful web-based word processing tool Writely has caught a lot of people's attention, with talk of long term trouble for Microsoft. Will the similarly useful web-based spreadsheet tool iRows be next? Perhaps not, because you'd think that a spreadsheet is something Upstartle is already working on.  To get a clearer sense of what web-based applications like Writely and iRows have going for them, it is worth reading this iRows summary. If readers have good examples of the use of tools like Writely and iRows in online learning, please use the space for comments. (For some "insider" views on the take over, see this piece by Peter Rip.)

Open access learning materials for new courses about Open Source Software - Sheffield College bites on the bullet

I was in two minds as to whether to publish these links from Dave Pickersgill as News and Comment or as Resources, and decided on the latter.  Firstly here is the publicity web site for six 1-day and 2-day accredited courses which the Sheffield College has begun to run including "Administering Linux",  "Using Thunderbird and Firefox", and "Using the GIMP"*.  Possibly a first within the UK further education sector.  Secondly, and more importantly, here is the open access Wiki on which you can find the materials for each of the courses, with content licensed under a A Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales License.

*Thunderbird, Firefox, and GIMP are, respectively, Open Source email, browser, and image manipulation programmes.

Stunning 3D representations of parts of London

I came across Andy Hudson-Smith's digitally distributed environments web log via City of Sound, written by Dan Hill, who works as a designer for the BBC. (I reviewed City of Sound briefly in Fortnightly Mailing Number 42.) Andy is a researcher at University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.  He has made some spectacular 3D  virtual reality representations of parts of London. There are 3 links below to examples of these, and to tempt you use them I have also pulled one of them directly into the continuation of this post. You need Apple Quicktime installed to view them, and the one inside the continuation post will look distorted until you narrow your browser. I could not find a proper index page to the representations, but if you scroll down digitally distributed environments you will find plenty of direct links.

• Soho Square, London
• Covent Garden Market, London
• Paddington Walk, London

Big changes afoot during 2006 in the Resource Discovery Network, which is to be renamed "Intute"

The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) "selects, catalogues and delivers Internet resources for further and higher education". Currently there are 8 seperate free services within RDN, of which the best known are probably SOSIG (covering Social Science, Business and Law), and EEVL (covering Engineering, Mathematics and Computing). During 2006, the 8 services will be reorganised under 4 main subject groups, with a single interface, under a new brand: Intute. (At the time of writing this is simply a holding page.) A key question will be how the new services expose their records to Google and other search engines, since for many users, the first thing they do when looking for resources is to use Google, rather than to visit a subject-specific portal. As a result, unless these services expose their records to search engines, many potential users will remain ignorant of them, despite the fact that what they contain are properly curated resources.

Designing physical spaces for effective learning

JISC has published an elegant booklet by Sarah Knight containing guidelines for and examples from institutions - including further education colleges like South East Essex College (picture to the left) and Glasgow Caledonian University (picture to the right) - on the design of learning spaces.  Maybe things have changed since I stopped working for a large creaking English further education college, but the big problem we faced then was that to get approval for capital spending we had to conform to rules that simply did not permit such ambitious designs. Instead new buildings had to "pack 'em in tight" in such a way that airy, spacious, and technologically rich designs like those shown in the guide would not have got approval, or so we were told.  You can download the booklet as a PDF file, and order it (free) in hard copy from the JISC web  site, and there are further resources available from JISCinfonet.

"Turning the Pages" of some beautiful resources from the British Library

I finally downloaded and installed Adobe's Shockwave in order to look at and listen to these beautiful online books (the term "online book" simply does not do them justice). Examples include the Diamond Sutra, printed in China in 868, and Mozart's musical diary, with 75 audio extracts, and the orginal of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Thanks to Jane Horton for sending me the link, and be warned, the individual titles are slow to load even over a fast connection.

Connotea

Social bookmarking systems are web based online reference management systems which users can make publicly available over the web. Connotea is an Open Source bookmarking system launched 12 months ago by the Nature Publishing Group, and modelled broadly on del.icio.us.

Connotea is a place to keep links to the articles you read and the websites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and websites through sharing your links with other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are instantly on the web, which means that they are available to you from any computer and that you can point your friends and colleagues to them. In Connotea, every user's links are visible both to visitors and to every other user, and different users' libraries are linked together through the use of common tags or common bookmarks.

As with deli.cio.us, if you are using Firefox as your browser you can put a convenient "add to Connotea" button in your browser tool bar.

Evaluation of the Sheffield College/Sheffield LEA 'Literacy through Technology' Project

The Sheffield College has published a comprehensive evaluation by Julia Davies from the University of Sheffield's Literacy Research Centre. This shows strong benefits in learner achievement, motivation, and aspirations for school pupils using the Sheffield College's ground-breaking 'Young People Speak Out' blended learning literacy course. The college originally developed this to address the literacy needs of young students leaving school with Entry Level and Level 1 literacy. The materials are clearly of value for school-aged learners also.

Tackling the roots of racism

Useful report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

What are the causes of racism? And how successful are policy measures in addressing these? The main focus in this unique review by Reena Bhavnani, Heidi Mirza and Veena Meetoo, from Middlesex University, has been on British research and policy evidence. The review also included examples of international interventions and the lessons from their success.

The standard for standards

Over the last few years I've worked on the drafts for public comment of 3 British Standards relating to e-learning. As you'd expect, BSI has a standard describing how British Standards are to be written; and this has just been issued in a revised form as BS0:2005, A standard for standards. Published at the same time is the BSI guide to standardisation [3 MB PDF], section 2 of which contains rules for the structure, drafting and presentation of British Standards. If ever you've got a complex document to produce, with, for example, tables, figures, numbered and bulleted lists, footnotes, bibliography, and a multi-level heading structure, the guide has some very clear advice on how such a document could be laid out.