Broadband Infrastructure - UK

We all know that you have to build a house on solid foundations, similarly e-learning and online technologoes have to be built on quailty broadband networks.  The article UK broadband 'not fit' for future shows that there are many countries better placed than the UK.  The UK came 25th out of 66 countries.

Wisdom of the Crowds

Wisdom or not?

Human Based Genetic Algorithm

HBGA has human interfaces for initialization, mutation, and recombinant crossover. As well, it may have interfaces for selective evaluation. In short, a HBGA outsources the operations of a typical genetic algorithm to humans.

Bad IT days

Do you ever get frustrated with IT?
Things I find annoying (today):

• Software that doesn't work properly - bugs in fundamental parts of the system
• Poor - or no - documentation

If a system, and its developers, can't address those points then perhaps it should be thrown in the skip.

Birmingham City University Social Media

Social Learning Reading List

The C4LPT list.

What's this a list of? What pedagogy?

List

Ok the title on the page gives it away, but if you didn't know would you have guessed that it's a list of the 

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009


I'm a little surprised that the top thing is Twitter.  Ok it's popular but what's its value in learning?  That falls under the pedagogy topic of ...?


It's easy to understand that these tools have a key roll in information dissemination and communication, but are people taking their eyes off the ball as far as (e-) learning is concerned?  

Where are the tools that have a specific focus on learning (only)?
Would it be useful to have a list rated by pedagogical criteria?
What tools exist just to facilitate learning? 

Social Networking / Web 2.0 in a Corporate Environment: Best Practice

A very useful report on...
BT's adoption of Web 2.0

• Made sure all employees can access social media sites.
• Use of these tools was covered by existing policies already.
• Agreed that all tools that allowed user-generated content would be behind our single-sign-on application to prevent any anonymous publishing.
• The ethos we would engender was one of allowing BT people to say anything they want, in the knowledge that they would be held accountable for what they say.
• All this functionality through a single ‘portal’ was incredibly powerful and sent adoption rates through the roof.
• There will always be a degree of friction between the need for robust IT processes to safeguard customer and business data and to effectively manage IT spending in a global corporation like BT, with the need for technical agility and to support the concept of the perpetual beta in which you try out quickly and cheaply often competing technologies and let users iterate and adopt as they see fit – ultimately, letting the users write the business case for adopting a particular option.
• The impact has been significant in some areas, subtle in others and in some cases has had no impact at all.
• Communications is becoming a ‘conversation’ rather than a managed activity which requires a different type of engagement by those traditionally responsible for communications activity.
• More and more content is produced and owned collaboratively.
• With no clear ownership, who manages a piece of community-owned content through its lifecycle and ensures it is deleted or archived appropriately?
• With increasing amounts of unstructured user-generated content appearing in disparate channels on the intranet, the challenge for users in finding and extracting value from that content increases exponentially.
• To help users find and keep up to date with new content, we are using a combination of ‘tagging’, where publishers and users attach key words to content which are then searchable by others, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS), where content is published into appropriate feeds to which users can subscribe for updates via a feed reader client on their PC or via an RSS server. Without RSS, the value of social media content would be very limited indeed. However, this does require both publishers, whose target audience may never actually visit their site but read content in their feed readers, and users, who are used to viewing structured content on the sites upon which it is published, to behave in very different ways.
• Contrary to popular opinion, these channels are being used in a constructive and positive way. To date, BT people have responded responsibly.
• A key lesson is to focus on the value social media tools can deliver rather than the risks.  There are risks, but the potential benefits are huge.
• Better to start small with simple and cheap tools with limited functionality.
• Let users dictate the direction and speed of adoption.
• Let users play with new tools as soon as possible, warts and all. We positioned all our social media tools are ‘beta’ applications when they were first released to set the right user expectations.
• Engage the policy makers as early as possible. Emphasise that these tools represent an evolution rather than a revolution in the use of the web.

A Free University

Wow, that's an interesting concept: a university that does courses for free!  (Well they are free at the moment during the pilot.  They say they may introduce a small charge after the pilot; but all the materials will be free anyway.)

It's another example of openness and cooperation on the Internet.  Volunteers facilitate the activities and peers work together.

The Peer 2 Peer University has some credible backers, and deserves a pat on the back for pioneering such an interesting concept.

Will it be the end of traditional universities?  They say that's not their aim.  I guess both can exist side by side: we have the web but we still have newspapers and books.  And, students still need somewhere to go to party ;-)

Day 1

Launch of The E-Learning Blog.

Can you guess what this is about?