Fortnightly Mailing

In the US, young adults are the heaviest users of libraries

Apart from teaching me that being in my mid-50s I am a "leading boomer", Information searches that solve problems - How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help [187 kB PDF], published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on 30/12/2007, counters the view that Internet access is driving out library use - in the US at least:

"Libraries meet special needs. Young adults in Generation Y (age 18-29) are the heaviest users of libraries when face (sic) these problems. They are also the most likely library visitors for any purpose. Most of those who visit libraries to seek problem solving information are very satisfied with what they find and they appreciate the resources available there, especially access to computers and the internet."

"Who uses libraries, not just for problem solving, but for all purposes? Major finding: 53% of American adults report going to a local public library in the past 12 months. The profile of library users shows an economically upscale, information hungry clientele who use the library to enhance their already-rich information world. Gen Y again leads the pack again. Public library patrons are generally younger adults, those with higher income and education levels, and those who are internet users. Parents with minor children living at home are very likely to be patrons. There are no significant differences in library usage by race and ethnicity."

Meanwhile, the Independent reports on library closures in England.

May 2006 dialogue on Fortnightly Mailing about libraries.

With thanks to Lorcan Dempsey and George Siemens for flagging this Pew report.

OLPC laptops arrive in Arahuay, Peru

Optimistic coverage by Frank Bajak in the 30/12/2007 Washington Post about the impact in Peru of an initial delivery of OLPC XO laptops in the village of Arahuay. (The Peruvian government has ordered 270,000.)

Wikia Search is reportedly live, and is due for public launch on 7 January 2008

Source: http://search.wikia.com/

I wrote about Wikia Search in January 2007. This 23/12/2007 message from Jimmy Wales on the Wikia Search mailing list states that a public version of Wikia Search will launch early next month:

"Private pre-alpha invites available
Ping me if you want one.... we're launched. :-)
I'm going to be letting people in slowly over the next few days and we are aiming for a January 7th public launch.  We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken...
Best way to ask is by email, but please don't be offended if I don't answer right away.  I am expecting a bit of a flood here."

A week earlier, community contributions were requested to define a "whitelist" of sites for the first crawl. More from Wales:

"As many of you likely know, we are now doing some preliminary crawls in anticipation of the upcoming launch.  Information is going to change quickly in the next 2-3 weeks, but I'm getting excited. One of the things we want to do is launch with a basic first crawl.
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Whitelist
Please add sites there, including comments, and also let's have a healthy on-wiki debate at:
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Whitelist."

Keep an eye on the story and its ripples: news; blogs.

Peter Norvig's "Learning in an open world", and Dylan Wiliam's "Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control"

I've previously made quite a lot of Dylan Wiliam's and Peter Norvig's keynote speeches at the 2007 ALT Conference last September. Dylan and Peter have each now approved the full text transcripts of their sessions, and these are now available as PDF files, along with MP3s, slides, and captured video of the sessions, from the ALT-C 2007 web site. The transcriptions, skillfully done by Ann Ciechanowski, have each been annotated to show the slide transitions, and I think they are each worth taking the time to read in full.

For ease of reference:

• Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control, by Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education: Text transcript [75 kB PDF]; Slides [400 kB PDF]; MP3 recording [12 MB].
• Learning in an open world, by Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google: Text transcript [75 kB PDF]; Slides [13.5 MB PDF]; MP3 recording [23 MB].

Disclosure: I have half-time employment with ALT.

Categorising information on the way out?

Donald Clark strikes a cord in Are we outsourcing memory?

"I've been blogging for years only to find that my posts form a sort of archive of thoughts that I often turn to for answers to questions I’m asked or reports I write or for items in talks I give at conferences."

It is easy to think of Donald's:

"What's remarkable about all of this outsourced memory is that it's free. The tools, storage and retrieval are all free. It's hard to see how astonishing this change has been, how absolutely revolutionary."

as stating the obvious; but plenty of people (and policies) fail to recognise how far "plain old web search", alongside the use of alerting mechanisms like RSS or Google Alerts, and a bit  (lot?) of tacit nous is increasingly how, in the developed world at least, knowledge is mediated for users, rather than visits to portals or repositories or gateways or other places where dedicated and committed professionals have spent time systematically organising, tagging, and cataloging material. (I know I've not got this quite right yet, but what is now happening feels to be that rather than the publisher, host, or owner of material needing to "categorise information on the way in", the user can "categorise it on the way out", with shape given to information by the user's choice of search terms, by the judgment he or she then exercises, and by the algorithms that rank-order what the user finds.)

Rethinking the digital divide - the themes for the 2008 ALT Conference, and the call for proposals

The paper submissions system for the 2008 Association for Learning Technology Conference opened on 14 December 2007, and will remain so until 29 February 2008. Meanwhile ALT  has announced the 7 (well 8) dimensions of the conference. Proposals for inclusion should address up to 3 of these:

• global or local;
• institutional or individual;
• pedagogy or technology;
• access or exclusion;
• open or proprietary;
• private or public;
• for the learner or by the learner;    
• or other aspects of the digital divide.

[Disclosure: I am employed half-time by ALT.]

Making sense of this year's PISA data

The Economist carries a generally helpful review of the OECD's PISA study, from which I take the image above, which shows how in Finland - top overall - the differences between schools are almost negligible. According to the Economist, the factors most affecting a country's ranking are: giving school principals the power to control budgets, set incentives and decide whom to hire and how much to pay them; publishing school results; and, most importantly, high-quality teachers. "A common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates."

For more on that issue, see Dylan Wiliam's Keynote Speech at the 2007 ALT Conference, with this extract from the soon-to-be now-published full transcript squaring very well with the massive in-school variance revealed by the PISA study for Britain:

"The variability at teacher level is about four times the variability at school level. If you get one of the best teachers, you will learn in six months what an average teacher will take a year to teach you. If you get one of the worst teachers, that same learning will take you two years. There's a four-fold difference in the speed of learning created by the most and the least effective teachers."

Help to define the requirements for a college web portal

Keith Burnett, who last year wrote a Guest Contribution about using Blogger to get teachers started with e-learning is seeking advice. He writes:

"I'm trying to map out what a college web portal should provide for various types of people: students; teachers: and middle managers. I'm trying to do this in a way that makes few assumptions about the systems used to provide the services/information. I've hit upon the 'extreme programming' ploy of 'user stories'. I'd be most grateful if people had a look at these and simply made comments - either to add services, or subtract them or to specialise the roles to more finely divided kinds of people."

Wikis: 5 ways to improve corporate use

During summer 2007 the Brighton-based elearning company Epic invited Segun Olomofe and Judith Good from Sussex University to research factors affecting the usage and success of Epic's in-house wiki. This post on the Epic Blog briefly summarises the findings.

Ten years of online learning at The Sheffield College: taking a new direction - Guest Contribution by Julia Duggleby and Julie Hooper

Earlier this year the Sheffield College celebrated 10 years of delivering online learning. Significantly for us, the end of this decade also marks a new beginning where the two previously distinct teams, Online Learning and Online English, have merged to combine resources and experience in new online learning initiatives such as a fully online BA Foundation Degree in e Communications (beginning February 2008) validated and topped up with an online BA Hons year by Sheffield Hallam University.  These teams have developed respectively some well known and award winning courses such as LeTTOL and English GCSE Online.

So as the College moves into its 11th year, it seems like a good time to reflect on what we have achieved, what challenges we face (and not always overcome), and what we hope to gain from the merger, through the e Communications Foundation Degree and in other ways.