Eric Baber's blog

The article Upload University came my way via www.edutopia.org . It's about a newish website called TeacherTube which - you guessed it - is a video-sharing site along the lines of YouTube but containing home-made educational videos. Unfortunately, the site - or rather many of the videos contained on it - epitomises everything that's wrong with how technology is used for "educational" purposes. I thought I'd head over to the Top Favourites - sorry, Favorites - and got assailed by the embarrasing Walkthroughs and Learning Objectives, the dreadful Mrs. Burk Perimeter Rap and the brainwashing Pay Attention. I don't know what's worse - that people actually produced, uploaded and made these videos publicly available, or that they got 5-apple-ratings (that's right, on this site you don't get gold stars but red apples).

I suppose the site is a good idea, and you can't really blame the site for the content given that it's all user-created, but still; much more of this and it'll get even more difficult still to convince certain teachers, academics and institutions that the judicious use of learning technology can be a good thing.

An excellent idea and a very well-implemented website. It's simple, really: a database for and of anyone involved in English language teaching in any way (teachers, authors, trainers, consultants, etc etc). You register (free), add information about yourself, and can then search the database by a number of criteria (name, interest area, employer, geographical region...) to find other people. I've already found two people I'd lost touch with; this really is an excellent idea.

One of my OU students (thanks Mark!) has just made me aware of a new videoconferencing solution. I can't quite figure out whether it runs over the Internet, an Intranet or via ISDN, but its main feature is that it allows multiple parties (up to three?) to see each other in something that looks almost three-dimensional, and with cameras mounted in such a way that it looks like you're making eye-contact with each other without actually having to stare at the camera. Especially using desktop conferencing this is an annoying feature - if you're looking at your own screen in order to see the other person it looks like you're not looking at them, but if you look into the camera to give the other party the feeling that you're looking at them you can't see your own screen. This looks like a possible solution. It looks like it's still under development by the Fraunhofer-Institut für Nachrichtentechnik, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, Berlin, and not by a commercial organisation, and there's not much information available. The demo video at http://ip.hhi.de/imedia_G3/impointdemo.htm is useful, though it would be even more useful if the chap on the right would stop nodding at random intervals and actually say something.

"The One Laptop per Child project has delivered its first laptops to children Villa Cardal, Uruguay." Good stuff.

"The nation is looking to set up an "experimental landmass" where a smorgasbord of sensors will "allow doctors to remotely monitor the health of the elderly," and in another instance, "monitor the movement of pedestrians and notify nearby drivers." " Wow.

A good article/guide on electronic publishing - its pros, cons, and who it's best for.

Neat - 5000 of Charles Darwin's letters are online, including ones written by him at the age of 12 and others written during his voyage on The Beagle. The letters themselves are here.

This is to remind you of the free online conference starting in a few days, May 17/18-20.

Our theme this year is CONNECT: Conversations on Networking, Education, Communities, and Technology, and though not specifically mentioned in the theme, many members of the Webheads community of practice, http://webheads.info, are practitioners in language learning.

This is the second time our community has hosted a free online conference. You can replay the first one at http://2005.wiaoc.org

This year we kick off in a pre-show event at 22:00 GMT May 17, with the start of a Webcastathon hosted by http://www.worldbridges.net. The conference itself starts at midnight GMT May 18 (evening of May 17 in the USA) with a keynote speech by Leigh Blackall and continues for three days with more talks by Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Etienne Wenger, Robin Good, Barbara Ganley, Teemu Leinonen, and many other presenters whom you can see on the schedule at http://schedule.wiaoc.org.

To attend the conference you can register for free at http://www.webheadsinaction.org and use the calendar there or the schedule link above, or our online help pages, to work out how to access the presentations and make comments or join forums. The will be a voice stream of most events available at http://www.webheadsinaction.org , as well a live chatroom for use during the conference, and we hope to have someone live online available to assist you at any time during the conference at http://www.tappedin.org

We look forward to your joining us May 17/18-20 for this unique adventure in online professional development. We hope it will be educational and F.U.N.

Having recently joined the ranks of new parents I found this article particularly entertaining. Fortunately for me our Audi doesn't interfere with my wireless Internet connection, my cableless digital telephone nor my mobile phone. Just as well otherwise I wouldn't get any work done even when the little darling was asleep, nevermind when he's awake.

Nothing new in general, but apparently new in the UK: the University of Essex together with Kaplan have launched an online-only business foundation degree. I've tried to find out more about it other than what's in the article but can't find anything on the U of Essex website nor the Kaplan one.

My main question is about the format, and what the studies involve. According to the Guardian article, "The course, which is taught in modules, starts in July. Unlike traditional foundation degrees, it will run for 52 weeks of the year with an option of start dates.

Because the course is modular it offers flexible learning, so students can step in and out of the course as their commitments change."

My main question is whether students study in cohorts or not. It almost sounds as if a student can start at any time, and dip in and out as they like. While this sounds great, the only way this can happen is if it's a materials-driven course - "here, here's a whole bunch of stuff, read through it as you like, take the quizzes, then sit the exam at the end of the x years". If this is so I can't see it taking off. Instead, an approach in which groups of students start together, work through materials together and engage in discussions together is more likely to retain students and yield a better outcome.

As I say, it's a question really, and one I can't find the answer to. I'll keep looking though....

Funnily enough this dovetails nicely with something I was thinking about this morning.

Charles Arthur quotes from a blog in which that author describes how he's impressed by Microsoft Vista. He's a long-time user of Apple Macs and didn't really want to like Vista, but did, and now uses it (alongside Apples as well).

So that's nice, but not really what I was thinking about this morning, which is this:

Isn't it funny how life, and the world, goes. (Profound, I know). Let's take a look at Apple and Microsoft:

* Apple designed an OS which people generally agreed was excellent. They took the decision that the OS could only be sold on hardware designed and built by Apple.

* Microsoft designed an OS which many people saw as a copy of Apple's OS. However, they allowed the OS to be put on any machine. Possibly/probably as a direct result, MS took off immensely while Apple fell further and further behind.

Since MS has become bigger and bigger, it has become the target of more and more attacks. Demands to open up their code, demands to unbundle the browser from the OS, etc.

Now imagine if the tables had been turned, and if Apple had stormed ahead of MS and were now rich and powerful. Can you imagine the broo-ha-ha that would have arisen from their refusals to allow anyone else to install their OS on anything other than an Apple-built machine? If bundling a browser with an OS is naughty, surely forcing people to buy hardware they don't really like in order to get the software is naughty as well?

Actually, forget that, it's not naughty, just silly really; and it explains why Apple lags behind (and will, almost definitely, continue to do so).

The tone of this article really grates.

The premise, in a nutshell, is that kids are very high-tech outside the classroom and heave a sigh of frustration every time they go into the classroom because the IT used there is very basic.

Now - in most cases this is probably so. At home, the kids may well have iPods, a Nintendo Wii, a Playstation, 764 channels on satellite TV etc etc etc. However, as Lord Puttnam himself (author of the article) says, "Most kids probably cannot tell you whether they are actually learning anything from ... the hours spent playing computer games".

So what if the kids have to "power down" in the classroom? Why should the classroom be the same as their bedroom? Since when has it been mandatory that kids' forms of entertainment have to be adopted as learning and teaching tools? (Physics AS levels through fishing, anyone?)

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the sensible deployment of technology where it's appropriate, but it's just plain not always sensible, reasonable or even desirable. And statements like "although, needless to say, there are some pockets of enlightenment and even excellence" really irritate me - he's basically saying that schools that use a lower level of technology than he would like are unenlightened. Surely that's a biased view?

And another thing: the view is often posited that the classroom has to prepare kids for the post-school working world, and that therefore kids need to be introduced to technology since they'll need to use it in the workplace. Absolutely, I agree with that, but - as we've just seen, (most) kids already know their way around technology. So if they already know what they need, why spend classroom time on something that they already know? And anyway, the types of IT skills they're likely to need in most jobs are unlikely to go beyond using wordprocessors, spreadsheets, and querying databases in some way. So by all means integrate those into the curriculum, but there's really no need to go overboard.

This may sound like a peculiar rant coming from an educational technologist, but I really get annoyed when IT is heralded as a holy grail. As long as the teacher is good the tools (s)he chooses to use are largely secondary - whether that's a computer, an electronic whiteboard, a book or coloured chalk.

Good stuff: "A new web-based television service, or IPTV, for British Sign Language (BSL) users has recently launched in the UK." Now this is what the web is good for - making something available to a market that in any one country is perhaps too small, but that on a global scale is considerable.

Great idea - "social lending[:] the idea is to introduce people who need money to people who want to lend some - cutting out the middlemen like banks and mortgage companies."

Basically, anyone who would like to lend money can go to one of several social lending sites, and people who would like to borrow money visit the same site. Both parties enter various pieces of information and the site links up borrowers and lenders. There are various security measures put into place. Still not completely foolproof by the sounds of it, but pretty good.

I've just booked a flight online with Swissair and have received the following automated e-mail:

***
SENT BY BSLR7LX
YOUR WORLDWIDE CONTACTS www.SWISS.COM/CONTACTS
YOUR PHONE CONTACT FOR SWITZERLAND - 0848 700 700

*** NOT VALID FOR TRANSPORTATION ***

PASSENGER RECEIPT
AND ITINERARY
*****************

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR YOUR BUSINESS
AS REQUESTED AN ELECTRONIC TICKET HAS BEEN ISSUED WITH THE
FOLLOWING DETAILS
***

etc etc etc. Two pages worth of stuff in UPPER CASE.

Two things about this:

1) Surely this is basic email netiquette by now (not writing in upper case) that a big company like Swissair must know about!

2) In a way I'm secretly pleased that they don't, because in my new book that's coming out next month one of the things I mention is not to write in upper case. That tip nearly didn't go into the book because it's so basic, but I'm now pleased it did actually go in since it apparently needs saying.

A friend of mine went to Morocco a while ago and has put her photos onto Flickr. Some of the best-taken photos I've seen in a while, really stunning.

A very sensible article about how to get teachers to blog. I particularly like "Give reasons to blog. Being easy to set up isn't a reason. Because everyone else is doing it (even if it were true) is not a reason. Is it going to help them in some way? If not, or if they can't see it, then why should they blog?"

Absolutely right. Too many people think teachers should use blogs "because they can". That's not a good enough reason in my opinion; there needs to be a real purpose to it.

(I've just realised this article is ancient by Interent standards, written in September 2006, but I've only just discovered the site and it looks good).

How peculiar. In a bid to find out where culture, art, and humour come from and how they develop, a bunch of "quite dim" robots are being put together in a robot village, to see how they evolve. Intriguing idea, but

"The behaviours that emerge and evolve will not be human but decidedly robotic. We do not expect these artificial memes to have any meaning in a human cultural context - they will only be meaningful within the closed context of this artificial society. One of our key challenges in this research will be to identify and interpret these patterns of behaviour as evidence for an emerging robot culture and to see whether this new understanding may shed some light on how culture emerges and whether this has any implications for human, animal or artificial societies. In a sense we will be using robots like a microscope to study the evolution of culture."

Sounds quite far-fetched to me, with sufficient scope for disagreement to keep dozens of PhD students occupied for years to come.

Ucas, the UK universities and colleges admissions service, is getting hip. It's launched a new website "which allows university students to meet and talk to each other online before they start their course". Nice idea. Students can also share stuff on the site - music etc - until such time as the site gets wise to copyright infringement no doubt. Very nice idea, though. The site is at http://www.yougofurther.co.uk.

I've just found out about Microsoft Silverlight through a post on Nick Bradbury's blog. Silverlight is a "cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web." Reading more about it it seems to me that it's trying to do the same sort of things Adobe Flash does. It'll be interesting to see whether it manages to establish itself as a major player; this is the first I'd heard of it and it seems to be in beta at the moment. Flash is already well-established so it'll have a bit of a battle on its hands, I'd say.