Fortnightly Mailing

A three month trial of FriendFeed

For every post in Fortnightly Mailing there are probably four or five items that I do not get round to writing up, or decide not to bother with. For the next three months I am intending to use FriendFeed to make informal notes about these items. You can keep an eye on these by subscribing to this public RSS feed, which also includes links to the posts that make it into Fortnightly Mailing. (So far I am very impressed with FriendFeed, which is intelligible and flexible.)

Knowledge wants to be free too - essay by Peter Eckersley

I believe that the UK Government ought to be putting efforts into adapting to the changes wrought by the Internet, adjusting the copyright laws to work with the grain of peer-to-peer file sharing rather than trying to hold back the tide.

Using Second Life to help mentally impaired people give informed medical consent

Image from Imperial College

Interesting piece in the Economist about research by Suzanne Conboy-Hill of the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, in collaboration with Imperial College, and using the latter's virtual postgraduate medical school, built in SciLands, a large scale Second Life user community devoted exclusively to science and technology.

The purpose of the research is to establish determine whether or not simulations of this kind can provide an improved way of obtaining informed (and real, rather than led-by-a-nurse) consent.

See also Millions being wasted in a deserted Second Life, October 2007

"Effortful": Educating the Net Generation - A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy

Phil Candy, who is, sadly (for people in the UK....), back in Australia , sent me a copy of Educating the Net Generation - A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy, 2009 [6 MB PDF], published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia Licence by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.  The following extract explains the approach taken, and there is an informative project web site.

Oxford Internet Institute's "The Internet in Britain 2009" sheds important light on the attitudes of non-users

Today the OII published The Internet in Britain 2009 [2 MB PDF], its fourth biennial survey into Internet access, use and attitudes in Britain. The survey covers digital and social inclusion and exclusion; regulation and governance of the Internet; privacy, trust and risk concerns; and uses of the Internet, including networking, content creation, entertainment and learning.

What would be the single most effective thing government could do to drive its digital inclusion agenda?

Flowing from this week's Digital Britain report, is the establishment of a Digital Inclusion Task Force.

Digital inclusion is defined as:

"The best use of digital technology, either directly or indirectly to improve the lives and life chances of all citizens, particularly the most disadvantaged, and the places in which they live."

The task force is headed by Martha Lane-Fox as "Champion for Digital Inclusion".

Digital Britain "closing down the open internet"

Updated 20 June 2009

The Open Rights Group does not dispute that artists need paying and that copyright needs to function well. However it criticises this week's Digital Britain report for the way it proposes to "tackle piracy", arguing that the proposed legislation to reduce unlawful peer-to-peer file sharing - summarised here - will blur Ofcom's role from "protecting competition and the public interest" to one of "altering market access and conditions in favour of incumbent players".

Meanwhile:

•  (via David Weinberger) File-Sharing and Copyright by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard University, and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas, published on 15 May 2009, argues that weak copyright protection benefits society overall - see Michael Geist's summary;
• Donald Clark attacks Digital Britain for the way that old-world telco and media interests have dominated the line taken "BBC is mentioned 169 times, Google gets 6, FaceBook 5, Twitter 3, YouTube 2,  iTunes 1, Games 0, Xbox 0, Playstation 0, Second Life 0, Wikipedia 0. It’s as if the internet doesn't really exist and that the digital future is an issue for broadcasters.";
• here is the remit [67 kB PDF] given to the Digital Inclusion Task Force, whose task is, apparently, breathtakingly, "to be our conscience, on behalf of those citizens who are disadvantaged due to digital exclusion".

1992 - when I got switched on to online distance learning, and why

Click picture to enlarge

In 1992, before the Web, before the likes of you and I had email, in the days when a 2400 baud modem costing £300 in today's money felt like a terrific deal, when people not in big companies or universities could only connect to each other by dialing at great expense into a BT-run "point of presence", I was lucky to run a TUC project that investigated the use of computer conferencing in distance learning.

The project involved making and running an on-line distance course (about the EU, oh joy!) for union representatives in Denmark, Sweden and the UK, and then assessing the impact. The design of the course was much influenced by my reading of work by Robin Mason, who died on Monday, and who 12 years later I got to know through her involvement as a trustee of ALT and as Chair of our Research Committee.

Today, prompted by discussion about Robin's contribution, I dug out a box file in my attic with some stuff from the project. I was particularly struck by the piece above by a learner, that I used in an overhead projector transparency for a talk I gave at the time.

For a pretty astonishing mixture of views about Robin, here is the Memorial Page on the OU's web site.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Picture: Richard Baker. Source: http://www.alaindebotton.com/work_photographs/gallery_index.htm

I've been gripped by Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, learning from it and laughing in equal measure at de Botton's take on events and on the jobs investigated and observed. At one level de Botton's basic argument is that work with all its quirky absurdity saves us from thinking too much about death, as well as keeping us out of greater trouble, giving us a sense of mastery, and putting food on the table. At another, he provides a set of sharp insights into globalisation and the modern labour process. I think a lot of 16 year-olds would gain a lot more from it than from conventional careers classes.

Dasher - Open Source software helping skilled users to write at over 30 words a minute by pointing

Source:Dasher Project

Last March I mentioned David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. (Read it before you decide on any domestic or personal energy saving investments.) MacKay is a Professor in the Cambridge University Department of Physics and a leading figure in the artificial intelligence community. He is closely involved in the Inference Group's Dasher, an Open Source "zooming" text entry interface:

"You point where you want to go, and the display zooms in wherever you point. The world into which you are zooming is painted with letters, so that any point you zoom in on corresponds to a piece of text. The more you zoom in, the longer the piece of text you have written. You choose what you write by choosing where to zoom."

The eyetracking version of Dasher allows an experienced user to write text as fast as normal handwriting - 29 words per minute; using a mouse, experienced users can write at 39 words per minute. Here are a three page explanation and some videos; and MacKay will be talking about Dasher (and a newer sister product, Nomon) at an open public meeting in Cambridge on 17 June. If any reader gets to this talk I would happily include a report from the meeting as a Guest Contribution.

Progressive austerity - a term to watch

You know things have come to a pretty pass when a term like "progressive austerity" come into use, especially when an egalitarian (?) think tank originates it. See this 21 May 2009 Financial Times piece by Richard Reeves, head of Demos. Excerpt:

Second, progressive austerity means giving the public sector more than just a hard squeeze. The principal lesson from Canada – where spending was cut by 10 per cent in the mid-1990s – is that whole budgets, agencies and departments should be axed. The default assumption in spending rounds is that money will continue to flow towards an activity. Expenditure must address a clear need, through demonstrably effective policies.

Much of the quangocracy that has sprouted under Labour will fail one or both of these tests. Regional development agencies, sector skills councils and the communities and local government department should all go. Any agency with the word “improvement” in its title could probably disappear without discernible negative effects. Middle-class welfare should end. Child benefit should be abolished. Subsidised higher education ought to be targeted at low-income students.

Mapometer - a well implemented way of tracing and saving a route onto a Google map

Thanks to Nicky Ferguson for sending me a link to Mapometer. You can use it to trace, save, and share a route on a Google Map, Mapometer estimates distance, energy used, and height gained. This example of its output is my regular (well, not that regular) run from my front door. Serving a different function is Where's the Path, which enables you to view an Ordanance Survey map side by side with a Google satellite image of the same terrain, there by working out where in the landscape a route lies. A mashed together version of these two services would be a killer application for fell-runners.

Device diversity. More blurring of the boundary between phone and PC.

Succinct article in the Economist which properly credits One Laptop Per Child with triggering the development of the netbook and points out that several PC-makers are now working on devices relying on a chip designed by ARM (i.e. neither Intel nor AMD) and running Android, a Linux-based "software stack" (operating system, middleware and key applications) for phones developed by/with the support of Google.

Google Translator Toolkit

Google has launched Google Translator Toolkit, a set of tools to enable users to exploit the power of Google Translate whilst enabling them to improve upon the machine-translated output, contributing in the process to the quality of Google Translate's output. Find out more.

Links to previous posts on this subject:

• 12 June 2005 - Combining human with machine translation;
• 24 January 2006 - Machine translation;
• 24 November 2006 - The November 2006 (and June 2008) NIST results;
• 26 April 2008 - Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?;
• 30 September 2008 - Google launches eleven more languages at translate.google.com;
• 21 May 2009 - Automatic translation of email.

A wiki full of snapshots of uses of learning technology in UK HE and FE

Here is a wiki with a wide and well structured range of "best practice examples" of learning literacies, defined as the range of practices that underpin effective learning in a digital age, for example academic skills, information literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, ICT skills, learning to learn. The wiki has been produced as part of the JISC-funded Learning Literacies for the Digital Age project at Glasgow Caledonian University.