Fortnightly Mailing

Scaling up: a hindsight-laden reflection on the launch of the Ufi Charitable Trust

The Ufi Charitable Trust launched on Wednesday of this week. The Trust has an endowment of ~£50m. Its mission is to "to achieve a step change in learning and employability for all adults in the UK, through the adoption of 21st century technologies".

The original University for Industry (Ufi) has played a varying part in my working life for the last 15 years. So attending the launch of the independent charitable trust that is now Ufi got me thinking about the origins of the organisation and about whether well over £1.5 billion of public funding could have been better used.

Both episodes of Dylan Wiliam's "The Classroom Experiment" now available

Very good to see that both episodes of Dylan Wiliam's 2010 BBC documentary (docudrama?) about improving learning methods in secondary school are now available on YouTube, where I hope they will stay.

Bear in mind that these two one-hour programmes will have derived from many many hours of video, and that there will surely have been pressure to produce "good TV". [Added 21/5/2012] See also the helpful notes on the two programmes from David Jennings that are referenced in the comment below; and if you are interested in the theory underpinning Dylan Wiliam's approach, it is worth reading his and Paul Black's Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Some compulsory viewing/listening for leaders in post-compulsory education? Though don't bulldoze your campuses.

Below is a six minute talk by Sir John Daniel, who headed the Open University between 1990 and 2001, and who therefore knows a lot about large-scale distance learning.

Based on work by Tony Bates, Daniel's carefully summarises three key developments in online learning, focusing on the US.

In short:

• the proportion of students embracing online learning is growing fast;
• for-profit providers dominate the market because they have understood the importance (for doing things at scale and for achieving consistent quality) of the division of labour and of specialisation, and because they've understood how students need the flexibility of online learning if they are to earn whilst they learn;
• public providers wanting to get in on the act need either to do it in partnership with private providers, or they need to move to a team-based approach in which different parts of provision are done by people with different roles;
• the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is now taking off, with Governments cottoning on to the advantages of OER, and the cost savings to be had from them;
• mobile, connected technology is becoming ubiquitous and cheap and will change the face of provision because "people can now access learning almost anywhere and in many formats".

Snippets May 2 to May 18 2012

Here in one place are some largely unfiltered snippets from my FriendFeed "stream" (about 2 posts per day) for the period 2 to 18 May 2012.

Clayton Wright's June - December 2012 Educational Technology and Education Conferences listing

Clayton Wright - source

The 27th edition of Clayton Wright's superb conference listing [1.1 MB DOC] contains, according to Clayton "events such as 'Learning and Teaching', 'Innovation in e-Learning', 'Online Teaching', 'Distance Learning Administration', 'The World Open Educational Resources Congress', 'Mobile Health', and 'Realizing Dreams'".

He continues:

"Those seeking to improve the development and delivery of e-learning courses may find a few of the suggestions in this publication helpful: http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/11/developing-and-reviewing-online-courses-items-for-consideration/. And those working in countries with weak economies may want to refer to a discussion about distance education (http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2115/) or open educational resources http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1185/2161." 

Links for a session about technology and learning

Vielha Tunnel - South entrance - Picture by Adrian A. Lorente Grima,a geologist who worked on the tunnel's subsequent reconstruction

On Friday - my last day with ALT - I ran a two-hour session at the University of Sheffield with a group of nine students on a postgraduate module about technology in learning. The "slides" I used in the session - which on their own make little sense - are here [2MB PDF]. Below are some supporting links.

2030: Robot Competence Comparable to Larger Mammals http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/talks/revo.slides/2030.html

Maes-Garreau Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes-Garreau_Law

Boston Dynamics BigDog web site http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html

Oppenheimer/Einstein picture by Alfred Eisenstaedt http://www.photographersgallery.com/photo.asp?id=3545

Sitting in a bar with a really smart friend
Course web site - https://www.ai-class.com/home/
Small chunk #1: Unit 16, Computer Vision I,Sections 1 to 4, starting at https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/179 - work through the first four sections (~7 minutes)
Small chunk #2: Unit 5, Machine Learning, Sections 1 to 3, starting at https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/47 - work through the first three sections (~8 minutes)
Piece by Rob Rambusch of the same title http://fm.schmoller.net/2011/12/sitting-in-a-bar-with-a-really-smart-friend.html

Udacity - what the AI course has become - http://www.udacity.com/

The Wired interview/discussion with Sebastian Thrun http://fora.tv/2012/05/01/WIRED_Business_Conference_The_Intelligence_Revolution

The Internet in Britain - the Oxford Internet Institute's survey - http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/

Eric Schmidt's 2007 interview in Wired - http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/mag_schmidt_trans?currentPage=all

ALT-C 2007 keynotes - especially by Dylan Wiliam and Peter Norvig - in several different formats including text transcript and MP3 http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/

More stemming from the Lifelong and Lifewide Learning diagram - http://fm.schmoller.net/2008/11/roy-pea-at-bect.html

Walter Lewin's introductory physics lectures at MIT - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-mechanics-fall-1999/video-lectures/

Sheila Webber's "Information science in 2003: a critique" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.86.7450&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Hal Abelson's 2012 ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution acceptance talk http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2012/downloads/ha_sigcseTalk.pdf (the transcript is here http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2012/downloads/ha_transcript.txt - needs some reformatting by the user)

Lanier piece with links http://fm.schmoller.net/2010/10/jaron_lanier_asks_how_can_you_be_ambidextrous_in_the_matter_of_technology_and_education.html

The appeal of the brain in the popular press http://pps.sagepub.com/content/5/6/762.full

What I plan doing when I stand down from my role in ALT / People have started asking

I left my job of the last 9+ years on 8 May.

A friend emailed me with "what are your plans?".

This is most of my answer:

The short answer is that I'm not much of a planner. 

I only ever worked for ALT half-time and I will continue to do some independent work. My aim is to put my knowhow to good and productive use.

I will get back into writing Fortnightly Mailing more consistently. Tweet less, write more.

I fantasise about spending more time:

• reading the books that are stacked up on the floor of my office;
• practising the piano for the lessons I've been having for the last four or so years;
• fell-running.

A close friend has just bought two fields a shortish distance away (see below) that she intends to make back into a traditional hay meadow. I will help her with that.

I already spend quite a bit of time being an FE college Governor and earlier this year I was appointed for a second four year term.

I used to be quite good at advising and representing people on employment issues. If Citizens' Advice Bureaux will have me I may put myself forward as a volunteer.

I am intending to do some Udacity courses, compensating for the fact of having been diverted early on from a childhood interest.

I am standing for election - in a crowded field - to the Board of the Open Rights Group.

[Small edits 17 May 2012.]

Tyin to Finse, Easter 2012

Moon rising over Bjordalsbu hut (1580m)  in Skarvheimen, 6 April 2012

Over Easter I spent 10 days skiing with a friend, in a 200km upside down J shaped route, from Lake Tyin South of Jotunheimen, via Tomashelleren and Yksendalsbu to Fondsbu, and then more-or-less due South to Finse, the high point on the railway line between Bergen and Oslo.

Norway had had about its warmest ever March, with snow much reduced below 1000m. Luckily by the time we set out cold conditions had returned, with temperatures down to -20^oC on some nights (hence the semi-obsession with stoves in the pictures below).

From the second day, fresh snow had begun to cover the nasty  "boiler plate" left by the thaw; and from day three, with the North West wind largely gone, conditions gradually improved.

Douglas Adams via Donald Clark. This stuff is "alright really".

Donald Clark ends his recent talk at TEDxGlasgow with a nice quote from Douglas Adams's 1999 How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet:

1. Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal.
2. Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it.
3. Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

[Source]

The talk is a nicely condensed and developed version of Donald's "Don't Lecture Me" from the 2010 ALT conference, here presented alongside its associated Twitter-stream:

Disclosure. I (still, but not for much longer) work part time for ALT.

Regulating the Net - @JJN1's report from a talk by Simon Hampton, Google’s Director of Public Policy for Northern Europe

John Naughton provides the kind of really useful informal reportage that we need more of. I'll not try to summarise it, knowing that you will read it right away. One point that Hampton made that John questions was “The larger the haystack, the easier it is to find the needle.” I think that Peter Norvig's 2007 theorising from the data talk sheds light on this apparently counter-intuitive statement. If you've enough data then statistically based algorithms can home in the needles within the data, using other parts of the data to guide them.

Learning Technologies in adult learning: influence how a charitable trust employs >£40m to achieve its mission

Last year, with Dick Moore, Adrian Perry, and Clive Shepherd, I was commissioned to report to the Ufi Charitable Trust (UCT) on "priorities for interventions by the Trust and others through learning technologies in adult learning and employability in the UK".  This followed the Trust's October 2011 announcement of the sale of Ufi Limited. The Trust intends to apply the proceeds of the sale - which exceed £40m - to the mission of achieving "a step change in adult learning and employability for all in the UK, through the adoption of 21st century technologies". This 10 minute survey provides an opportunity to influence the way in which UCT employs its funds to achieve its mission. The closing date for completion is 6 March 2012. 

What is vision for, and how does it work? Aaron Sloman

What is vision for, and how does it work? Some considerations for philosophy of perception [600 kB PDF] is a 12/2/2012 talk by Aaron Sloman from the School of Computer Science, at the University of Birmingham. Unusually for a "slide-based" presentation, you get much more than the gist of the talk from the slides, which read more or less as the script for the talk itself. I'd have really liked to have been at the talk, which tackles amongst many other things "the representational problems arising from complexities in the perception of processes". [Sloman has a terrific, uncompromising web-site.]

Richard O’Dwyer, a student and his computer – an American perspective by Jim Farmer

Photo-credit awaited

So the question being asked around the world in the wake of Obama's online forum is the following: Who is this Richard O'Dwyer, and why is he so important?

International Business Times, 30 January 2012

A query about Richard O'Dwyer, a 23-year-old Sheffield Hallam undergraduate who faces jail if sent for trial and convicted in the US, was the most [2,073] asked of more than 133,000 questions submitted to a live online Google+ "hangout" with the [U.S.] president broadcast on Monday.      

The Guardian, 31 January 2012

Recent actions of the U.S. government have shattered our understanding of copyright. Universities now need to provide new detailed guidance to faculty and students. They will also need to action to protect Internet Domain Names of their affiliates.

On January 13^th a Magistrates' Court in the United Kingdom ruled that Richard O’Dwyer, a student at Sheffield Hallam University, could be extradited to the U.S. on U.S. charges of copyright infringement, even though he has never left England and never had infringing files on this computer.

One week later two helicopters, 76 New Zealand police and 4 U.S. FBI agents raided and searched Kim Dotcom’s home in Auckland arresting Dotcom and four colleagues ¹. The U.S. Department of Justice seized Megaupload.com and fifteen other domain names, all but one of his bank accounts, and his physical assets. Computers were seized for evidence. He is currently in custody. The New Zealand police were careful to say they did not file charges, but rather executed the raid on behalf of the U.S. government.

The strategy used by the U.S. government against O’Dwyer was explained by a U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement [ICE] official who said: “This was like drugs. You want to cut out the middle man.”

Electronics and the Dim Future of the University

John Naughton's Welcome to the desktop degree... today pointed to Electronics and the Dim Future of the University by Eli Noam, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science (Vol. 270, pp 247-249, October 13, 1995), in which Noam (who has been ploughing a deep furrow at Columbia University for over 30 years as a professor of economics and finance) provides a brief, forceful, and exceptionally far-sighted analysis of why the Internet, computing, and the exponential growth in the production of scientific and other knowledge, will change universities.

The article deserves to be read in full.

To whet your appetite here are its concluding three paragraphs.

Montessori schooling

Laura Flores Shaw's interesting piece in today's Huffington Post Montessori - The Missing Voice in the Education Reform Debate reminded me of Donald Clark's 2006 Brin, Page, Bezos and Wales? which pointed out that all four of them and - but NB! the 16 February 2012 comment from David Jennings on Donald's 2006 post - (and Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, Sigmund Freud, Buckminster Fuller, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget and Hilary and Bill Clinton before them) had early Montessori schooling.

Shaw writes:

"Over a century ago, Dr. Maria Montessori discovered through scientific observations of children that they are not empty vessels to be filled -- they are intrinsically motivated doers. She saw that providing a hands-on learning environment that valued choice, concentration, collaboration, community, curiosity, and real-world application produced lifelong learners who viewed "work" as something interesting and fulfilling instead of drudgery to be avoided. Now, research in psychology and neuroscience continually validates Dr. Montessori's conclusions about children and learning, and Montessori schools are flourishing -- not just preschools but, increasingly, elementary, middle and secondary schools."