Fortnightly Mailing

Dick Moore's guide to making short instructional videos

Dick Moore (sometime collaborator, friend, and Trustee of ALT) writes a practical and insight-rich "how to" about making short instructional videos on his Tools and Taxonomy blog. It is just this kind of useful material that gets lost (i.e. is not written) when people with knowhow to share take the easy way out and write performative snippets rather than thought-through pieces. (I am as guilty as the next person in this respect.) 

Whether next year's new year resolution will be easy to live up to is another question.

A free online version of Stanford University's introduction to artificial intelligence

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Between 26 September and 16 December, with 10 hours study needed per week, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig will teach a wholly online version of the "standard" Stanford University "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence".

The course - CS221 syllabus - will be taught "concurrently around the web", with short videos, on-line marked quizzes, a mid- and end-term exams, and eight automatically graded homework assignments. Students taking the online version will therefore be graded according to the same grading criteria as students taking CS221 at Stanford.

I am tempted, partly because I am particularly interested in whether mathematics-based courses, where the medium is not the message, can be successfully delivered on line. But the question is: will what I can remember of A and S level mathematics from 1970, and from the first year of the physics part of a natural sciences degree in 1972 (I then switched to economics....) suffice for the stated prerequisite that "a solid understanding of probability and linear algebra will be required"?

I shall find out soon enough.

The future of learning and technology

Here is a candid, authoritative and reflective 25 minute talk by BP's Nick Shackleton-Jones, with plenty of memorable lines that will stick in your mind. The focus is on "corporate learning", but Nick's views are relevant much more widely.

Educational Technology Conferences for June to December 2011

Source

The tireless Clayton R Wright (pictured) has published an updated version of his comprehensive listing of close on 800 educational technology and related education conferences worldwide.  A Word 2003 format is used to enable people who do not have access to Word 2007 or higher version and those with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference proceedings.  The list is on the ALT Open Access repository at http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2106/.

Stopping link rot - keep your posts useful with the "WebCite this page" gadget

I've been writing Fortnightly Mailing since 2002. I've long ago stopped keeping to the discipline of publishing a fortnightly list of posts; and @sebschmoller and FriendFeed have got a bit in the way of writing proper posts such as this one. Occasionally vanity gets the better of me and I look at the access statistics for Fortnightly Mailing. Yesterday I noticed several hits from Google to a 2006 posting highlighting an article by Paul Black and Christine Harris.

When I looked at the posting - here is an archived view of it - all of its links were broken, making it worse than useless. All readers will have experienced this problem when searching and finding an apparently relevant piece about something they are interested in, but with key links broken. 

I've since fixed things in the orignal by going through the fiddly and time-consuming process of finding extant versions of the three documents in question and linking to these.  Instead of storing up trouble for the future, I've linked to archived versions created in moments with the service provided by WebCite, using the free "WebCite this page" gadget that I had already installed on my browser toolbar. The gadget allows a user, in seconds, to:

• go to a URL;
• click on the gadget;
• copy and paste the WebCite archive's URL of the orginal resource to wherever they want to use it.

Obviously it is a matter of judgement when to take this approach. My ground rule is going to be: if I am linking to a resource that I think others may want to use long term, or which I fear is likely to be short-lived at its current location, then I will include a WebCite link to the resource instead of or in addition to a link to the resource itself.

Comments on the feasibility and value of this approach are welcome.

Salman Khan - turning learning inside out with video / building "a global one-world classroom"

Here, Salman Khan gives a jaw-dropping TED talk, chaired by Bill Gates in March 2011.

Below the talk I've included as text a striking extract from the talk, from 12.5 minutes in:  striking because of Khan's emphasis on data and on teachers' need to use it, because of the ambitious conclusion (I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom .... that's essentially what we're trying to build), and most importantly because of Khan's comment about the dubious concept of giftedness.

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible.

Tim O'Reilly's "Perspectives on Open"

This is a link to a slideshare version of a talk given yesterday by Tim O'Reilly to the Open Courseware Consortium conference. Below the presentation is the transcript of O'Reilly's talk. A transcript of this kind - speaker's notes not what was actually said - cannot convey the full meaning of a talk, but, that said, it was a thinner brew than I had been hoping for, especially from points 30 onwards where O'Reilly turns his attention to Open Education. (In contrast, the transcript's earlier potted history of free software is meatier.) The talk itself, if it is made available, should be worth listening to and watching. I hope to post a link to it here.

Lessig: Just how badly have we messed up the architecture of access to scientific knowledge?

Very badly, as this 50 minute talk given by Lawrence Lessig on 18 April at CERN shows, followed by concrete suggestions about what to do about it. Lessig hits the nail on the head about how restricted access to scientific knowledge actually is, unless you happen to be a member of the "intellectual elite"; and if you are a member of the intellectual elite (a tenured professor in a rich-world university, or a student at one) the restriction on access is obscured from you.

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.

The lecture must stand - Stephen Downes / Don't lecture me - Donald Clark

Updated 15/4/2011

I wish I had taken part in the session about the future of the lecture that Stephen Downes ran yesterday with Donald Clark during Follow the Sun, a 2 day "non-stop global e-learning conference" run jointly by the University of Southern Queensland (Australia) and the University of Leicester (UK).

Embedded below is Stephen's slideshare presentation (each slide's header has a helpful "gist-giving" pointer, though this is not a substitute from hearing/seeing the talk itself) and here is a link to the presentation used by Donald. 

 

The Lecture Must Stand

View more presentations from Stephen Downes

 

Bill Dutton's nine strategies for "bottom up" collaboration networks

Networking Distributed Public Expertise: Strategies for Citizen Sourcing Advice to Government is an interesting 38 page February 2011 paper by Bill Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute, aimed at policy makers.  The paper struck me as a thinking person's guide to crowd-sourcing, criticising the notion without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Dutton "challenges conventional notions of the wisdom of crowds, arguing that distributed intelligence must be well structured by technical platforms and management strategies", and analysing lessons learned from previous efforts in this field. The paper concludes with the following nine strategies for for fostering bottom up initiatives to harness distributed public expertise, with a paragraph of advice on each.

1. Do not reinvent the technology.
2. Focus on activities, not the tools.
3. Start small, but capable of scaling up.
4. Modularize.
5. Be open and flexible in finding and going to communities of experts.
6. Do not concentrate on one approach to all problems.
7. Cultivate the bottom-up development of multiple projects.
8. Experience networking and collaborating – be a networked individual.
9. Capture, reward, and publicize success.

The concluding summary is as follows.

Expertise is distributed geographically, institutionally and socially. It has become a cliché, but no less correct, that not every expert in any given field works for your government or any other single organization. In a multitude of cases across the public sector, expertise is often located closer to a local problem or across the globe - beyond the reach of government officials when, and where, advice is most needed. This paper explains how government can creatively harness the Internet to tap the wisdom of distributed public expertise, and points to a set of challenges, guidelines and strategies for realizing this potential for networking with citizens not only as constituents, but as advisors/experts.

There are many reasons that public officials will cite for not experimenting with innovations in distributed collaboration, but these concerns can be addressed and countered by a strong set of valid reasons for moving forward on initiatives. Success will be the best counter-argument. A wide-ranging set of small, but visible projects for tapping the wisdom of distributed civic intelligence could be an incremental step for radically transforming how governments connect with citizens as experts. To get these started, champions need to emerge that understand that their agency or department is supportive of their use of networking, and has a basic set of policies, procedures and guidelines that can be built upon and not reinvented by each initiative. Developing these policies and guidelines, and following nine general strategies, such as documenting existing success stories, provides a place to start in citizen sourcing advice to government.