Fortnightly Mailing

The OU's Niall Sclater on Blackboard's "Next Generation" learning platform

Niall Sclater leads the Open University's VLE Programme.

I had not come across his interesting blog before, and it is now on my reading list.

Niall is responsible for the OU's widely reported and watched implementation of Moodle, for which reason his enthusiastic description of Blackboard's "Next Generation" learning platform - based, he says, on a presentation about the product given by Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen in Manchester on 13 May, rather than on direct experience of it - is worth reading, along with the comments that have been made on the post.

Using a mobile phone for disease diagnosis

The 17 May Economist has  a piece about how simple accessories can turn mobile phones into useful medical devices. The prompt for the article is work led by Dan Fletcher at the University of California. Here is an extract from the Telemicroscopy for Disease Diagnosis web site, with a picture of the prototype mobile phone microscope and an image of a blood sample taken with the device. (Seeing these pictures led me successfully to use some small binoculars as a telephoto lens for the camera on a phone.)

"The goal of this project is to bring modern diagnostic testing to remote regions cheaply and efficiently with telemicroscopy. The ability to capture images of, for example, malarial blood samples, infected skin, or ulcerous lesions, and then to send those images for remote diagnosis could drastically reduce both the cost and time of performing critical disease diagnosis – as well as provide early warning of outbreaks – in poverty stricken regions of the globe. In many developing countries with the greatest health needs, the infrastructure for cellular phones is expanding rapidly, opening the door for greater use of cell-phone-based healthcare devices. The project is actively developing a second-generation device for field testing in 2008."

 

Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment

Long, fascinating (for me, anyway) post by Jim Farmer on Michael Feldstein's e-Literate, summarising the current state of "play" between Blackboard and Desire2Learn. You get the impression that several parties are on the hook in different ways. Desire2Learn, most obviously; a substantial number of Desire2Learn's clients in the US, who, to be free of risk will need to start using the revised (non infringing) version 8.3 of Desire2Learn's software, which may or may not be as functional as the (infringing) earlier version (this assumes that the revised version will not itself be judged to infringe); and Blackboard, which, without a settlement with Desire2Learn, will struggle to avoid being seen as the author of the misfortune of those Desire2Learn clients (and their students), as well as having used a software patent (viewed by many as dubious) to put the squeeze on its main non Open Source competitor.

Something "generative" to try at home with a Wii Controller

Johnny Chung Lee is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Following up on Donald Clark's "$50 whiteboard - honestly", here is Lee's Wii projects page, from which you can find out how to use a Wii Controller (£30 from Amazon, say - you do not need a Wii games console) in various ways, including as the sensor in an interactive white-board. Excerpt:

"As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC "webcam" available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expansion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support."

In the continuation post is a lucid video-explanation by Johnny Lee of the white-board project. As an aside, what Lee is doing is a really good example of the "generativity" of the Internet and some of the devices that connect to it  (that is, devices being tinkered with, openly innovated with, and used generally in ways not envisaged by their suppliers, with the Internet used to spread know-how) which  Jonathan Zittrain describes, and defends, in "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It".

Understanding the Web a.k.a. Web Science - interesting article in a meaty issue of the ALT Newsletter

The Spring 2008 ALT* Newsletter has plenty of meat in it, including:

• a piece by Southampton University's Wendy Hall and Keiran O'Hara (from which a version of the above diagram is taken) discussing Web Science, and reporting in the Web Science Research Initiative;
• Dick Moore of Ufi's In-source, out-source, open-source, right-source - running a service not a system, about the heavyweight infrastructure underpinning learndirect’s learner management system (LMS), learndirect’s service characteristics, and the importance of what Dick calls ‘right sourcing’ in Ufi's technology choices;
• a piece by John Falchi, Chief Program Strategist with IMS, about student textbook use and pricing, and the role of the IMS "Common Cartridge" specification in enabling text book content to be (more cheaply) distributed digitally to students.

* I work for ALT half-time.

Web 2.0 Rights intellectual property toolkit

Here is a new and useful looking "IP Toolkit", part of a newish JISC-funded project that seeks to deal with the following sorts of questions:

• Do IP rights exist in a virtual world and, if so,  who owns them?
• Who owns the rights in works that are a result of collective collaboration?
• What happens if you can’t find the rights holders?
• Can rights be given up, and if so how?
• How can risks associated with content reuse be sensibly managed?

The toolkit provides extensive practical guidance under the following main headings:

1. Basic information about the IP and Web2.0 landscape
2. Practical IP tools for projects engaging with Web2.0
3. Template licences and model releases, covering “Rights in” and “Rights Out”)

What to advise a student about using the Web

Towards the end of April I got a call from a Harriet Swain, a freelance journalist who writes an advice column aimed at students for the Guardian Newspaper. What advice should students be getting about how to use the Web?

What I sent her was rather a rush job, and is in the continuation post below. For comparison purposes, here is Harriet's The art of being virtual.

JISC's £5m call: "Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design"

UK HE Institutions, and FE Institutions with more than 400 full time equivalents of higher education students, are eligible to apply for medium term funding for large-scale course redesign projects. Expect Carol Twigg's National Center for Academic Transformation to get a major boost in traffic, and for good reason. Excerpt:

"JISC invites proposals for projects to review course design and validation processes, and the ways these are supported and informed by technology, in order to transform learning opportunities to address an identified issue or challenge of strategic importance to the institution involved.

Funding of up to £400,000 per project is available with projects expected to last for just under four years. JISC has committed £5 million to this work and expects to funds up to 12 projects. Because of the need for institutions to identity issues or challenges relevant to their own context only one project per institution will be funded. Institutions are encouraged to ensure that the most appropriate bid from their institution is submitted.

JISC is holding a community briefing event where potential bidders will be given information about the background to the call, its objectives and the bidding process. Attendees will also have an opportunity to ask questions about the call. This meeting will take place on 21 May in Birmingham and registration will be open on Friday 2 May 2008.

The deadline for receipt of proposals is no later than 12.00 noon on Thursday 19 June 2008.  Projects should start in 1 September 2008."

Marc Andreessen's "If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo"

Long and interesting 28 April 2008 piece by Marc Andreessen (who founded Netscape, and is a successful serial entrepreneur in the US), analysing, with the help of expert analysis commissioned (?) by Marc from two corporate attorneys, about how a fully hostile takeover by Microsoft of Yahoo might play out.

Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?

Last September, just prior to Google switching to its own statistical machine translation system for all the language pairs it offers, I set up a crude comparison between the rules-based and statistical methods used at that time by Google for different language pairs. The crudity stemmed in part from my use of the "round trip" comparison method (defects outlined below), from the use of only one sample text, and from the inherent drawback of comparing translation methods across different language pairs, each of which presents different translation challenges.

Microsoft certified Moodle – Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer

A "Microsoft certified" version of Moodle can be downloaded now from SpikeSource, a venture capital backed US company that aims to make Open Source software "business ready". Available since February 27, 2008,  neither Microsoft or SpikeSource announced the certified version. A representative for SpikeSource said this was a routine extension of the company’s certifications for Microsoft.

Tangible Benefits of E-Learning - newly published report

Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning: Does investment yield interest? is a just-published report jointly produced by JISCinfonet, ALT (for which I work half-time), and the Higher Education Academy. It summarises a 2007 review of e-learning practice in Higher Education, and contains examples of where and how technology-enhanced learning is benefiting learners, teachers and institutions. Download a copy of the report [222 kB PDF]. Access a 2 page briefing published by JISC [170 kB PDF]. Order hard copy of the report from JISCinfonet.

Graphene used to create "the world's smallest transistor"

Graphene transistor - image from the University of Manchester

Impression of graphene by Jannik Meyer

Within the next 10-15 years, say, Moore's Law will cease to hold for chips made from silicon, because individual transistors will get so small that silicon ceases to function as a semiconductor. Science Daily reports on work published on 17 April 2008 in the peer-reviewed journal Science - abstract - by Ponomarenko, Schedin, Katsnelson, Yang, Hill, Novoselov, and Geim , a team based mainly at the University of Manchester's Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology that proves that transistors one atom thick and 10 atoms wide can be made using graphene, a hexagonal mesh of carbon atoms that is one atom thick. 

For more on graphene, see the frequently updated Wikipedia article, and this 10 April 2007 Scientific American article by JR Minkel, who also comments  in the Scientific American on 18 April 2008 about the "smallest transistor" claim.

(With thanks to Dick Moore for the nudge.)

"Motion charts" - Data animation tool for Google Docs

You may have seen (and wondered at) some of Hans Rosling's talks, in which he uses Trendalyzer (the Gapminder Foundation's data visualisation tool) to draw conclusions from complex time-series. Last year Google bought Trendalyzer and some or all of the team that designed it joined Google. In the last few weeks Google seems to have implemented the tool - now renamed Motion Tool - along with a couple of others - as standard components of Google Docs. The addition of these features begins to differentiate Google's spreadsheet from Microsoft Excel in a particularly profound way, as you will see if you look at this sample spreadsheet and motion chart.

JISC Learner Experiences of e-Learning: Half way through the phase 2 research - Guest Contribution from Ellen Lessner

The second phase of the research into the learner experience of e-learning is one year old, with most projects due to finish in March 2009.  Phase 2 of this programme is made up of 7 research projects, with a "Support and Synthesis" project running in parallel.  On the public area of the project wiki you can get a good idea of the work that’s been done so far.  While the 7 projects are doing their individual research, the Support and Synthesis project has run 4 support workshops which have enabled the project teams to work together while focusing on the issues surrounding data collection, methodology and dissemination outputs.

You may have seen the publication from the first phase of the research - In Their Own Words available from the JISC website, and you may have seen coverage of LEX here in Fortnightly Mailing. There continues to be considerable interest in the many aspects of this phase of the project; not only the possible findings but the different types of data collection (video and audio), the methodologies used by the range of projects and the model of support used by the Support and Synthesis project.  We’re now at the stage where a variety of themes are just beginning to emerge.

Evaluating what learners are doing with technology is obviously important and there are a number of UK projects, mainly HE centred, focusing on this theme.  For example, the Higher Education Academy has funded a project, running from January to July 2008, called the Experiences of E-Learning Special Interest Group (ELISIG), for those involved in investigations and evaluations of learners' experiences of e-learning.  An initial ELISIG workshop held in March 2008 was attended by over 40 people.   

For more information on the Learner Experience Projects,   contact Ellen Lessner, Project Manager, Support and Synthesis Project or Sarah Knight, JISC Programme Manager.