Dave :: Blog

http://lnx-otecexp-009v.ou.nl/wg/wordpress/?p=329

We need not complain about web censorship in China, there is plenty of this around here. Apple has been rightly criticised for pushing it’s own measures of what goes and what not on the iPhone.

We don’t want to be dictated by a commercial company that iFart, an application to produce electronic sounds of hot air, is socially more acceptable than iBoobs (no explanation needed). In the context of OER for mobile devices, anatomic study materials may be excluded for silly Puritan reasons, whereas brainless shooter games are seemingly o.k for educating our citizens.

Reliability of content applications (even kosher ones) on the iPhone is relatively low, and may depend on the daily corporate mood. This does not make it a good distribution network for serious content development of mobile educational products.

The other annoyance is ad-supported applications (ad-ware) which obviously do not contradict Apple’s terms, but leads to frequent application updates perceivably only serving the purpose of spreading more ads around - I call this “apps-spamming”. A clear distinction in freeware, ad-ware, and trialware would be useful.

http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2008/10/14/elgg-conference-2008/

Just a quick note to say that I am very pleased to announce that the 2008 Elgg Conference is going to be at the Brighton Creativity Center in Brighton, UK on the 1st December.

Sign up is free but places are limited so over to http://elgg.org/events/ and sign yourself up!

Ira Socal makes a couple of  passionate posts calling for:

It is time to make 2009 the Year of Universal Access: in education. in employment. in communication.

It is time to stop making - and stop accepting - excuses. It is now 2009. The tenth year of the 21st Century, and more than a dozen years after court and US Department of Ed decisions made it clear that everyone has a right to information and communications in real time and in 'equivalently effective' forms. 25 years after the Macintosh PC appeared and 15 years after "Windows95" created standard, accessible, computer platforms. All the reasons, all those "we wish we coulds" have now fully expired.

[snip]

What is the hold up? We could do away with 90% of "special needs" today, and instead make all those tools and resources available to every child to use every time "this way" would make education work better than "the old way." Stigmas would drop away, as would the self-limits of low-expectations. Student interests would create groupings rather than measurements of single abilities. Students would find lifespan methods to support their learning. 

Amen to that Ira.

http://www.liquidelearning.com/2008/10/irish-web-award-winner.html

Congratulations to Fís Book Club, who won the Best Education Website at the Irish Web Awards. Fís (Irish for both Video and Vision) is a great little site for teachers and pupils in Irish schools who can use it to upload video reviews of the books they love. Users can browse all the video reviews to see if they can find a great new book to read. Congrats again!

http://www.liquidelearning.com/2008/03/lexdex-online-and-mobile-flashc

LexDex is a new mobile and online language learning tool I found recently. It's pretty simple to use (though a bit buggy at the moment).

LexDex is a website with a database specialising in language textbooks. You can browse the database, select a textbook and use LexDex to output the content to flashcard for online or mobile study.

First you have to create a profile (which refreshingly just requires your email address and mobile/cell phone number). In order to output to mobile, you have to choose your phone make and model.

After that, I found it quite easy to search for a textbook, and to select a chapter, then select the words I needed to learn. LexDex does output them to online flashcards,mobile flashcards or as a study guide.

The online flashcards are quick to generate and are pretty standard, although I couldn't get the audio file to work. Maybe this is coming soon?
The study guide is just a HTML page with the words you're trying to learn in table format - you can also output to PDF, although I imagine have an editable doc is more important.

I found I could output a limited number of flashcards to my mobile. The process worked - I got an sms with a link to my flashcards, and I downloaded and installed the java app. Pretty soon I could view my cards on a clean, easy to use GUI. There was no audio. But when I decided to download a second set of cards, I got into trouble. Both files seemed to have the same name, so I couldn't get the second set of cards to work. LexDex still feels like a beta product.

LexDex was designed specifically to produce mobile flashcards for foreign languages. But now the team are expanding towards other subjects and are developing games. The tool was created by 3 Americans - Edward Kim, Joseph Constanty and David Pauker. They recently graduated from university and are now living in Shanghai, China. To date, LexDex has not been used by any universities or businesses, although the team are working on developing partnerships with local schools in Shanghai.

I've mentioned that LexDex use a team of databasers to input all the information from text books for use on the site. The input is checked before publication to the site. I'll admit my main concern about this website and tool is the copyright issues behind behind this.

When I asked LexDex for more info on their relationship with publishers, I was assured that publishers have been 'pretty receptive' to the idea of LexDex using their books to create flashcards, as they see LexDex as a complementary tool rather than a supplementary one. LexDex openly states it does not intend to replace the teacher, class or even the textbook, but to help students study.

I imagine the idea of generating more sales of a textbook through LexDex does appeal to publishers. However, LexDex does not actively promote the sale of any of the textbooks from its site. I imagine it would be easy to hook up to the Amazon book store, so users can purchase the textbook they aim to study, if they don't already have it. LexDex haven't (yet?) implemented this step.

And what will happen if any of the publishers decide that they want in on the revenue stream from the flashcard sales? LexDex will soon be charging a very reasonable $7 per book for the ability to access and create flashcards for 6 months. Although it's early days, and there can't be a huge revenue stream in this tool alone, I can see publishers in a tightly-squeezed publishing industry eventually demanding their slice of this pie.

http://www.liquidelearning.com/2008/02/learn-about-ancient-celtic-lawa

I didn't know that St Patrick and St Brigid were the two who started the whole tradition of enabling women to propose marriage on a leap day.

Apparently St Brigid had a chat with St Patrick about letting women have the right to propose to a man. And the cautious St Patrick ruled that woman could certainly propose to a man. But only on a leap day, which falls once every 4 years.

In Scotland, the tradition developed that if a man rejected a lady's proposal on a leap day, he had to pay a fine, ranging from a kiss to a new silk dress.

And did you know that if you're proposing to a man, all you need is a football, not a diamond ring. Are men really so easily pleased?

Anyway. I'd advise anyone to have an enlightening 3 minutes with this videojug.com production, and then to spend the next 12 hours either hiding from ladies, or stalking gentlemen.

In a fascinating report on the progress of NVDA Screen Reader work funded by the Mozilla Accessibility Grant scheme, James Teh outlines the excellent progress he and Mick Curran have made in the last year. It also shows how mature NVDA is becoming and is now an Open Source Screen Reader suitable for everyday use by most people. NVDA also has leading edge features like IAccessible2 and ARIA support for the best possible user experience with web applications. This neatly demonstrates how effective Mozilla Accessibility grants can be, as recently described by Frank Hecker.

An interesting side note that provides a good example of how Open Source working methods add value to the wider community is that James just contacted me to explain a feature they had discovered that will be useful in our  DKey project and pointed me at his code. Such open sharing of information and time makes better tools for users and a better environment for developers.

Thought you might like to know that Mick recently discovered that you
can actually set global keyboard and mouse hooks in pure Python using
ctypes; i.e. without needing a dll or extension. NVDA has now switched
to using this technique. The relevant modules are called keyHook.py
and mouseHook.py in our svn.

Thanks James. FTW!

http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2009/01/05/corrupted-downloads-via-scri

I have spent the last couple of hours grappling with this problem, and having finally got to the bottom of it I'd thought I'd share my solution.

Ok, so the problem was that a PHP script which prepared a download (in this case a .zip) from Elgg's file store was working ...

http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2009/01/04/elgg-scalability/

"I am creating an Elgg network and I am expecting 10 million users, can it cope?"
This question gets asked in one form or another almos tevery week, but I believe this is the wrong question to be asking. Perhaps the more pertinent scalability question is:
"I am creating an Elgg network, ...

http://bodmas.org/blog/ilt-ideas/personalised-learning/

• Individual attention?
• Self-directed learning?
• Tailored Curriculum?
• None of the above?

The BETT 2009 homepage has a poll on the right hand side of the page. After some deliberation, I went for ‘tailored curriculum’ and found myself in the majority (a fairly unusual position for me). I was dithering over ‘none of the above’ for some 30 seconds or so however.

I’m thinking more of Vygotsky and his Zone of Proximal Development and the student having someone [ or a system? ] that knows them, their cognitive style and how to challenge them just enough so as not to overload or bore.