Fortnightly Mailing

New format for Fortnightly Mailing

This is the first edition of Fortnightly Mailing in a new format, which I've created using some web log software called Typepad. I've taken the plunge for several reasons.

1. Producing Fortnightly Mailing as a hand-crafted HTML page and RSS file has been very time consuming.
2. Typepad enables me to write pieces as and when I've thought about what I want to say, rather than at infrequent intervals.
3. For the growing number of people who keep an eye on Fortnightly Mailing using RSS, Typepad's RSS feed is far superior to the best I could manage by hand.
4. One of the most common responses I got to last year's readership survey was that I provided no easy way for you to respond to or take issue with what I had written. Typepad provides space for you to make comments.
5. Individual items have their own unique URL in the event that you decide you want to bookmark something, or send it to someone.
6. I want to provide "guests" with the opportunity to write occasional guest contributions. This is much easier to do in Typepad than with the previous system.

You can provide me with feedback on the new version by sending me an email, or by commenting directly on this post. Be warned that despite my best endeavours Fortnightly Mailing will continue sometimes to appear rather sporadically, though hopefully this will be less of an issue than it has been over the last 6 months.

OU to make course content "open", and to collaborate with the University of Manchester

Two major developments, which look like a sign of a major differentiation within UK HE, have been reported in the last month by the UK's Open University.

Firstly it has announced that it will partner with the University of Manchester (the UK's largest, formed last year by the merger of UMIST and Manchester University) to develop and offer combined degree programmes, "focussed initially on overseas student markets".

Secondly, that supported by a £2.56m grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, it will start to make its course materials freely available for reuse by teachers and students anywhere, paralleling MIT's OpenCourseWare (which continues to be part-funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation).

The following links provide some of the details, and in the continuation post there is a link to the OU's application to the Hewlett Foundation, including an extract containing one of the document's many references to Moodle, the Open Source VLE that the OU recently decided to use as its main platform.

• job vacancies in the Open Content Initiative (OCI);
• details of OU's OCI plans;
• OU 28/2/2006 press release about its partnership with the University of Manchester;
• 10/3/2006 Guardian article about OCI by Alexendra Smith.

New UK specification on web site accessibility

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has just published a new "Publicly Available Specification" that has been developed by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in collaboration with BSI. According to BSI the specification is:

• applicable to all public and private organizations that wish to observe good practice under the existing voluntary guidelines and the relevant legislation on this subject;
• intended for use by those responsible for commissioning public-facing websites and web-based servicesoutlines good practice in commissioning websites that are accessible to and usable by disabled people;

and gives recommendations for:

• the management of the process of, and guidance on, upholding existing W3C guidelines and specifications;
• involving disabled people in the development process and using the current software-based compliance testing tools that can assist with this.

You can buy the specification on line from BSI for £30.  Although this is much cheaper than most standards from BSI, and although people who work for organisations with a direct or indirect subscription to BSI publications should be able to access the specification free of charge, I am certain that uptake of the specification will be far smaller than if it had been made freely available on the web.

Jane Knight joins Learning Light

Jane Knight is now Head of Research for Learning Light, a not-for-profit Government funded start-up in Sheffield, for which I contributed to two reports last year. Learning Light aims to become a European Centre of Excellence for e-Learning. The e-Learning Centre, a huge, full, and successful resources web site which Jane Knight has built up since the mid-1990s, will become part of the Learning Light web site. Currently the Learning Light site seems not quite ready to roll, with its registration system disabled. But you get the feeling that inside the site there is quite a lot of interesting stuff, for example a 5 page document written specially for Learning Light by Jay Cross - Learning Light and E-learning Version 3.0 [50 kB PDF].

Economist special report on "Open source" business

Here is an accessible and informative, and not particularly software-oriented, 3 page Special report on Open-source business in the 18/3/2006 Economist Magazine, drawing heavily on The Success of Open Source by Stephen Weber, which I reviewed in Fortnightly Mailing Number 60. The web-based version of the report contains several links to additional resources, including to CAMBIA, an international, independent non-profit research institute pioneering Open Source Biology and Informatics to support Patent Transparency.

Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture

Fascinating unedited record from a talk about MySpace, by danah boyd (sic), who is a PhD student in the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She gave the talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Conference in February 2006. Here is an extract from its introduction:

I have been following MySpace since its launch in 2003. Initially, it was the home to 20-somethings interested in indie music in Los Angeles. Today, you will be hard pressed to find an American teenager who does not know about the site, regardless of whether or not they participate. Over 50 million accounts have been created and the majority of participants are what would be labeled youth - ages 14-24. MySpace has more pageviews per day than any site on the web except Yahoo! (yes, more than Google or MSN).

There is plenty of other interesting research into young people's informal learning with digital media taking place at Berkeley.

6/4/2005. See also this 21/3/2006 essay by danah boyd, which compares MySpace with an earlier social software service called Friendster.

Updated 20060406

Everyone writes and no one pays - Guest Contribution from Donald Clark

Thanks to Donald Clark for this guest contribution.

In January I blogged a "Seven Wonders of the Digital World" list:

1. Wikipedia
2. Napster
3. Toy Story
4. Linux
5. Doom
6. Google
7. World Wide Web

Lots of people posted with suggestions; Google Earth, iPOD, eBay etc. But Wikipedia remained a firm favourite. The more I use it, the more wonder it induces. But is Wikipedia full of crap data? Research published in Nature (December 2005), a blind trial in which experts were sent randomly selected articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica, found that both contained inaccuracies, but the difference was marginal.

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