CIS471: Network-based applications

A student's evaluation of Stanford's massive, free, online courses

2012-01-09T06:58:00.000-08:00

I wrote a couple of blog posts about Stanford's experiment with massive, free online classes when they were announced. The courses are now over, and Ben Rudolph, a Stanford student who took one of them on campus, has written a blog post describing his experience.

The basic format of the class was: watch 5-6 short (~10 minute) videos with interspersed review questions and complete a programming assignment each week.

Rudolph thought the video lectures were excellent, but found the programming exercises and review questions too simple. It seems the programming exercises were simplified so that they could be graded automatically and, while he found that the review questions helped him refresh what he had learned, "they hardly ever asked anything that the lecture didn’t explicitly state."

(This is not surprising, since making up short answer questions that require thinking and deduction is very difficult).

The bottom line is that he considered the course to be easier than other Stanford computer science classes he had taken.

There has been lively discussion of his post on his blog and others. I would particularly recommend that you read Debating the ‘Flipped Classroom’ at Stanford, which includes the reaction of Andrew Y. Ng, the professor who taught the course, to Rudolph's criticism.

Global Voices and The Guardian review the Arab Spring

2012-01-05T10:33:00.000-08:00

Global Voices has posted an extensive retrospective of the Arab Spring.

They've pulled together their coverage of the events in the Tunisian and Egyptian revoutions and the protests in Bahrain, Morocco, Syria and Yemen.

The retrospective includes pictures from and overview articles on each country and links to hundreds of chronologically organized posts that appeared on Global Voices during the year.

Global Voices is an international community of over 500 bloggers and translators who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world. Founded at Harvard in 2005, they emphasise content that is not ordinarily seen in international mainstream media.

For another year-end overview of the Arab Spring, check out this interactive timeline from The Gaurdian.

Is fair use moot in the Internet era?

2011-12-29T11:16:00.000-08:00

Today's New York Times has an excellent article on a case in which the court ruled that artist Richard Prince had broken the law by using photographs from a book about Rastafarians in a collage without permission.

The article (and its enlightening comments) goes well beyond this case. It examines the notion of "fair use" of copyrighted material, in which the result transforms the thing used, adding value to the original and culturally enriching society.

But, cultural enrichment is in the eye of the beholder.

Do you think Stephanie Lenz should pay the musician Prince a royalty because his song "Let's Go Crazy" is playing in the background of this video of her baby?

U.S. Federal District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel answered "no" and the video was restored to YouTube.

That case is pretty blatant -- it did not cost Prince sales and was not intended for the same audience as his recording. But, how about this case -- do you think 2 Live Crew should reimburse Roy Orbison for their sampling of his song "Oh Pretty Woman?"

The Supreme Court decided in favor of 2 Live Crew, ruling that their recording was a parody of Orbison's and was aimed at a different audience.

Regardless of your viewpoint on any of these cases, it is clear that there can be no definition of "fair use" that will satisfy everyone. Indeed, the whole thing may be moot in the Internet era. Do you really expect me to contact the copyright holder and get permission before I use an image I find using Bing or Google to illustrate a blog post?

I cut the cord -- no more cable TV

2011-12-28T10:28:00.000-08:00

In this video, Verizon tells us the future of home video will be a wireless LAN connecting our TV sets and other devices to a Verizon FiOS server:

I agree that we will be distributing video around our homes on LANs, but don't expect mine to be connected to a FiOS server. For a start, Verizon does not offer FiOS in my neighborhood and from what I hear and read, they have no plans to do so.

Moreover, if they eventually do offer me FiOS, I suspect that it will be expensive and I will have to purchase a bundle of video "service" -- forcing me to pay for a lot of channels that I will never watch.

But, I don't want video service from Verizon, I just want bits.

I want my home LAN to be connected to the Internet (by Verizon or any other ISP), allowing me to watch ala carte IP video.

I've taken my first step in that direction. I “cut the cord" -- dropping our cable TV service and connecting our TV sets to our home LAN using Roku boxes. We (just barely) get local channels over the air using rabbit-ear antennas.

This set up and the available content is far from perfect, but it is my first step toward unbundled IP video.

Have you cut the cord? How do you like it?

Recommended podcast: Interpreting the Constitution in the digital era

2011-12-27T18:42:00.000-08:00

Jeffrey Rosen asks "Can the police, without a warrant, put a secret GPS device on the bottom of someone's car and track him 24/7 for a month?"

If you are interested in legal and moral issues of privacy and autonomy, you will like Terry Gross' interview of George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, who is co-editor of a new book called Constitution 3.0 Freedom and Technological Change.

In this NPR interview, Rosen says that information technologies are "challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways" and that "none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today." He discusses both current cases with today's technology and speculates on information and biological technology that may become available in the future and raise even thorniner problems.

The interview is 36 minutes 33 seconds, and you can stream or download it or read the transcript here.

James Fallows -- what happens when six years of Gmail is hacked and deleted?

2011-12-26T08:26:00.000-08:00

James Fallows is a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, who, in addition to award winning coverage of national and foreign affairs, has been using and writing about information technology for thirty years. (Check this 1982 article on WordStar and what word processing meant to a journalist).

This month in the Atlantic, Fallows recounts the hacking of his wife's Gmail account and the way Google dealt with it.

Everyone in her address book got one of those "I was mugged while in Madrid, please send money" messages and all of her email was deleted. After the account was restored, Fallows visited Google and interviewed security folks there. Here is one quote from the article:

At Google I asked Byrant Gehring, of Gmail’s consumer-operations team, how often attacks occur. "Probably in the low thousands," he said. "Per month?," I asked. "No, per day."

That should get your attention.

I recommend this article -- it is a harrowing story with some practical tips.

It is also a good introduction to James Fallows. If you have not read him, you should.

Data mining for science and marketing

2011-12-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

Researchers at Google and the U. S. Centers for Disease Control discovered a correlation between an index they compiled based on health related search terms and the incidence of flu recorded by the CDC.

Vicks has taken it a step further by sending ads for a safe home thermometer to mothers in high flu regions of the country. The ads offer the thermometer and give the location of nearby stores that carry it.

Is this a spooky invasion of privacy or targeted delivery of relevant information?

Video chat and the family

2011-12-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

The New York times has an article on the way video chat is reshaping domestic rituals like holiday parties and birth announcements. (Skype video chat averages 300 million minutes per day).

It can also reshape every day life. My wife is Chilean and chats with siblings or her mother in Santiago every day. Here you see her talking with her sister Anita, Note that they use both iPads and Skype while they are talking.

She and Anita often chat twice a day and it can easily be for more than an hour. I doubt that they would see each other that much if they were both living in Santiago.

When my grandparents came to the US from Europe, they knew they would never see the people they were leaving behind again. Times have changed.

MIT's online classes will be different than Stanford's

2011-12-19T22:46:00.000-08:00

MIT will follow Stanford's lead in offering online classes starting in the spring of 2012. They have not yet decided which classes they will pilot, but the courses will be free and open to all.

Stanford University is already offering three free computer science courses online this term. Stanford's classes are synchronized with on-campus sections and use short presentations punctuated by frequent questioning.

Stanford seems to be sticking closer to the traditional classroom structure and pace than MIT. MIT's press release promises self-paced instruction, interactive, online laboratories, and student-to-student communication. They are building an open source platform for their courses, which other schools will be able to use for their own online offerings.

Neither university will give online students credit, but both will offer certification for the successful completion of a class. MIT students will have the option of paying a small fee for assessment and certification, done by an independent organization in order to avoid confusion with MIT itself. Stanford students can do the same assignments and take the same quizzes and exams as regularly enrolled students, and can get a certificate showing how well they did relative to the rest of the students.

Both schools will study and evaluate their online classes, and Stanford, MIT and the rest of us will learn a lot about procedures and delivery platforms for online education.

(The New York Times covered the MIT announcement).

Louis CK goes direct to the consumer on the Internet

2011-12-15T14:44:00.000-08:00

Comedian Louis CK is distributing a high quality, DRM-free recording of a recent concert on the Internet.

After four days, he has sold 110,000 copies at $5 each

After deducting production, Web site and transaction costs, he has a profit of around $200,000 (so far). He says that is less than he would have made had a large record company produced the video, but the public is getting more this way:

They are paying $5, not $20 for a CD.
They can make all the copies they want to.
They can watch it on any device they have access to.
It is not restricted internationally.
The record company does not have their personal information for marketing purposes.

There has been some piracy -- you can get it for free using Bit Torrent -- but clearly many people prefer the convenience and karma of a purchase. Louis CK points out that the concert is all new material, which to him is life-and-death intellectual property, and he reserves the right to go back to a record company in the future. I hope he doesn't.

<aside to Louis>
Louis, don't forget that this is only the first four days of sales. You have also gotten a ton of favorable publicity -- I must admit that I had never even heard of you before this and now I am going to buy the video. You also learned a lot about producing concert videos and Internet marketing, so you will have better margins on the next one.
</aside to Louis>

This is a cool example of Internet going around the (fat) middle man. Even if you don't buy the video, you should read Louis CK's insightful, humorous summary of the deal.

Kickstarter -- "wisdom of the crowds" project funding -- like the Altair

2011-12-13T15:24:00.000-08:00

Kickstarter is a Web platform for funding projects in music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. People post project proposals on the Kickstarter Web site along with a financial goal. The public is invited to pledge financing for the project, and Kickstarter holds the pledges in escrow until the goal is reached.

The funds are only collected if the project meets its financial goal within a set time.

The folks who pledge funds do not get equity in the project, like a venture capitalist would, but they can get perqs like T-shirts or products, depending upon how much they pledge.

For example, I recently wrote a short post on a Kickstarter proposal for the TouchFire keyoard overlay, which claims it will improve touch typing on the iPad. Folks who pledged could either make a small contribution to encourage the idea or pledge more to get a T-shirt or purchase a TouchFire from the first production run.

TouchFire set a fund raising goal of only $10,000, and 3,146 people pledged $201,400 -- twenty times their funding target. (Since it was oversubscribed, the first production run is sold out, but you can place an order for one from the next batch at touchfire.com).

Kickstarter is a cool “wisdom of the crowd” way to raise capital, and the crowd seems to like this idea.

People also like the idea of Kickstarter. As of October 11, over a million people had backed projects, 166,823 of those had backed more than one, and they had pledged over 100 million dollars. To put that in context, the 2011 fiscal year budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is $154 million.

Kickstarter reminids me of the MITS Altair -- the first mass market hobbyist PC. MITS was a near-broke calculator company when they brought out Altair kits, which were featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. MITS financed the kits by asking for payment in full at the time you placed your order. I guess they cashed the checks, bought the parts, stuffed them in baggies and sent them out.

I sent my check and got my kit. There was no Kickstarter process to hold our checks in escrow, we were enthused about the Altair and trusted MITS. Those were different times.

iPad WiFi is poor

2011-12-03T09:42:00.001-08:00

My wife just got an iPad – the first tablet in our house. It was not easy to get it away from her, but last night I managed to take the iPad to bed. I was expecting an insanely great experience, but my first impression was that network access was slow and flaky.

To test my impression, I compared it to a Dell Precision laptop. First, I pinged UCLA, a nearby university, 100 times using both the laptop and the iPad. The average ping time for iPad was 63.7 milliseconds, over twice that of the Dell, and the standard deviation four times as great. No wonder it seemed flaky.

	Dell	iPad
Minimum	18	22.7
Maximum	120	231.9
Mean	30.2	63.7
Standard deviation	14.9	64.8

Next I tested file transfer times (Mb/s), and the laptop was faster:

	Dell	iPad
Upload	6.29	1.77
Download	1.83	.17

That was no surprise given the variability in ping times. It doesn't look like I'll be making a lot of Skype calls or watching movies in bed.

My bedroom is at the back of the house, so I checked the signal strength. As shown below, it dropped to around -65 db as I walked from the office, where the WiFi access point is located, to the bedroom.

The laptop is not perfect in the bedroom -- it does better when it is near the access point, but its radio is clearly more sensitive than that of the iPad. iPad Wifi is more like that of a netbook than a laptop.

Notes:
I measured iPad ping time using Typhuun System Scope Lite, the transfer rate using Speedtest.net and the signal strength with Metageek Inssider.

A reader pointed out that the results were affected by my pinging UCLA, which introduced Internet and server variability into the test. I repeated the test, pinging a machine within my house and found the following:

Dell: minimum 1, maximum 90, mean 5.96, standard deviation 12.6 with zero dropped packets (1 sec timeout)
iPad: minimum 5.04, maximum 202.02, mean 18.56, standard deviation 32.49 with 8 dropped packets (1 sec timeout)

Not surprisingly, the iPad remains relatively poor.

Is speech recognition finally going to catch on with Siri?

2011-12-01T09:28:00.001-08:00

Everyone agrees that some day we will be talking to our computers -- dictating memos, asking questions, giving commands, etc. The catch is that "some day" seems to be always five or ten years in the future.

People have been working on speech recogntion for a long time. My first exposure was a demonstration of Shoebox, a calculator with speech input, at the IBM pavillion at the 1964 World Fair. In spite of years of research and hacking, speech recognition has remained niche technology.

Have we finally seen the start of practical, ubiquitous speech recognition with Apple's Siri? Maybe.

Siri has a lot of infrastructure support that earlier speech recognition systems lacked. It sends the speech back to a server for recognition and that server has assimilated clues from massive amounts of data on speech patterns. Once recognized, it relies on other services for search and to look for answers to questions. If you ask how far it is from Los Angeles to New York, it will go to WolframAlpha for the answer. Ask it where to get Indian food in your neighborhood and it will go to Yelp. (What will Apple do if you ask where to find bomb-making instructions or dirty pictures)?

Google seems to have the recognition part down, but may be playing catch up with input parsing and answer retrieval.

In spite of Apple's secrecy, Siri has attracted a hobbyist following. Check out this video of a hobbyist using Siri to control lights and other things in a room.

The developer of that app had to jump through hoops using SiriProxy to get it to work. Here's hoping Apple provides tools to encourage this sort of thing -- that might be what it takes to finally get speech recognition off the ground.

A "post Gutenberg" e-text for biology 101

2011-11-20T03:58:00.001-08:00

In earlier posts, I talked about an electronic text Nature would publish this fall. I suggested that it was a noteworthy departure from the established textbook format and business model -- perhaps the first "post Gutenberg" text.

The etext is out now and being used on some campuses. I've had a chance to play around with it, and remain impressed. Here is what I've seen.

The professor creates a "classroom" like the one shown here. The classroom is personalized with her name and photo and an announcement welcoming the students to the class.

Click to enlarge

The classroom also contains the material she selected to include in the course. The material is organized into units, each of which contains several modules. In this example, she included four modules in the Introduction unit. She could also have included other material like summaries of and links to primary literature, and supporting topics like lab skills or hypothesis formation and data analysis.

Clicking on "textbook" takes us to the etext itself. I put quotes around textbook, because this is not a PDF-like reproduction of a typical textbook. It is not even a "book." It is a collection of 196 modules.

Each module begins with an introduction, listing the topics covered and the skills or learning objectives it teaches and concludes with a summary, which refers back to the topics and skills. Modules also have associated multiple choice quizzes. That is pretty standard textbook fare, but the teaching "pages" covering the material are not.

I've put the word page in quotes because these are not what we think of as pages. For a start, they vary in length and are significantly longer than typical book pages. Lets look at a sample page.

The page I picked is 17 screens long on my laptop. In addition to text, it contains 13 figures, a table and six test your knowledge questions. (The page I picked did not include any animations or videos, but others do).

As shown here, the figures are like those found in Scientific American Magazine -- high quality images with relatively long captions so they can stand on their own. (Nature and Scientific American are both MacMillan Publising companies).

The page I selected contained six open-ended knowledge test questions. After reading the question, the student submits then a suggested answer is displayed. This example shows a question, my answer and the suggested answer. These are not graded or reported to the professor -- they are food for thought.

The pages also include links to supplementary material like essays on the importance of this particular topic and primary references in a narrow, right hand column. The essays on the importance of a topic are written by practicing scientists and are comparable in format and quality to the text pages. The primary references include both summaries and links to the journal articles, and there are roughly 100 all together.

Modules also include multiple choice quizzes. The first time a student takes a quiz, the results are reported to the professor, but they can re-take the quiz as often as they wish. The professor has tools to analyze the quiz data, for example comparing the scores of a particular student to the class as a whole and, most interestingly, to other classes around the world which use this text. My guess is that we will see more analytic tools in the future -- perhaps one day giving very specific feedback to students.

As you see at the top of the screenshot, the classroom also contains links to a threaded discussion, grade book, and teaching resources, which include PowerPoint slides for all of the figures, a list of all the primary sources, and 2,000 test questions.

We have been talking about the professor's view of the classroom. The student view is somewhat different. They have access to flash cards and cheat sheets for each module. They can take notes while they study, and aggregate those annotations into a single study guide for the module. They can also hide or display their notes while reading.

The professor can see a student's annotations, but, at this time, there is no ability for students to share them among themselves. Students expect social networking these days, so my guess is that Nature will probably build support for study groups and sharing notes in future etexts.

The modular structure and content of this etext is different than a traditional etext and so is Nature's business model. Traditional textbooks are written by one or a small group of authors who write the entire book and receive royalties. By contrast, Nature has contracted with teachers and scientists to write specific modules and supplementary essays for a fee.

The payment model is also different. Traditional textbook publishers bring out new every two or three years to create demand for new books instead of used or rented books. Alternatively, they offer access to an electronic version for a limited time.

Nature has a different model. The student pays $49, which includes lifetime access to the material. Nature is committed to making continuous updates as the science and pedagogy change. The student gets a subscription, not a book. The $49 price is less than that of a typical print or electronic textbook, but every student in a class must subscribe. It seems to me that this would be attractive to the general public as well as enrolled students.

I don't know Nature's costs and revenues, but, since fewer than half of the students taking a class today purchase a new book, this subscription model might be more profitable than selling books. If this model catches on, it will hurt the used book, college book store and book rental (hard copy or electronic) businesses.

The reader does not have to download and install a program to use the book. The book is published in HTML and CSS, so it can be used with any modern Web browser. The server automatically detects the size and resolution of a user's display and delivers appropriate content. That allows students to use laptops, desktops, tablets, etc., but imposes extra cost on Nature -- they have to prepare around twenty different versions of each piece of art.

Gutenberg would not recognize today's books. About fifty years after Gutenberg, Aldus made signficant changes in typography, book size and production and the publishing business model. But Aldus would not recognize today's books either. Things like paragraphs, punctuation characters, chapters, indices, and tables of contents would seem to be radical innovations.

Nature has gone beyond the traditional ebook with this text, but, as with Aldus, I think this is just the first step.

Recommended podcast: State for Sale

2011-11-18T09:42:00.001-08:00

I just listened to a Terry Gross interview of Jane Mayer on her New Yorker article "State for Sale," in which she describes project Red Map, which has the goal of winning control of state legislatures by conservative Republicans. Mayer's article and the interview focus on one state, North Carolina, because it is an important swing state and provides an example of Red Map in action.

She reports that foundations controlled by Art Pope, a discount-store multimillionaire, have spent $35 million pushing a far-right political agenda in North Carolina during the last decade. In 2010, they spent $2.2 million on state legislature elections, defeating 18 of 22 targeted democrats. Republicans now control both both North Carolina legislative houses for the first time since 1870.

There is a lot more in the podcast. For example, Mayer discusses the collaboration between Pope and the Koch brothers, backers of the Tea Party movement, the impact of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling on large, tax-decutible political contributions, and the critical role of state legislatures in Congressional re-districting.

The interview reminded me of an earlier post on James Allworth's Harvard Business Review post suggesting that we may have to choose choose between democracy and captialism and a quote by Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis, who stated that "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

It is also noteworthy that Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig, who has shifted his interest from Internet copyright reform to campaign finance reform, offers an antidote to concentrated political influence in his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress -- and a Plan to Stop It, which is reviewed here.

I feel a little guilty about recommending an explicitly political podcast, but there is a connection between Red Map and the anti-competitive political efforts by large Internet service providers. For example, I doubt that new North Carolina legislature will be supportive of efforts at municipal ownership of local backbones.

Irony: Perhaps the Chinese can bring competition to the US wireless market

2011-11-10T08:56:00.001-08:00

The US Congress tried unsuccessfully to introduce competition into our telecommunication industry with the passage of the 1996 Telecommunication Act. Congress and the FCC were no match for the incumbent telephone companies with their lobbyists and legal staffs, and their efforts were defeated.

Might the Chinese have a better chance than the US Congress and FCC?

China Telecom intends to enter the US market as a "virtual" mobile network operator. They will partner with a US carrier and plan to sell handsets and services to Chinese Americans and to students and tourists who travel regularly between the US and China.

Donald Tan, president of China Telecom Americas, said they may even consider building or buying their own wireless network in the US -- "If the service is growing fast, maybe we can set up our own infrastructure. The money is no big problem for us."

Of course bastions of capitalism like AT&T and Verizon will do their best to stop Chinese competition. This was foreshadowed last month, when the US Department of Commerce excluded Huawei from bidding on a national emergency network project.

Cool historic Usenet posts

2011-10-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

Usenet News, is a threaded discussion application that started in 1980, long before today's Web-based threaded discussion forums. Usenet news groups circulated globally and covered many technical and non-technical topics.

Google has archived over 800 million Usenet posts in Google Groups. You can search through them here.

They have also pulled together a timeline listing important Internet-related posts from 1981 to 2001.

For example, this is the post where Tim Berners-Lee announced the Web and invited people to download the "very alpha" software and try it out.

The Usenet map shown here was made by Brian Reid in May, 1993. He estimated that around 87,000 sites with some 2.6 million users were exchanging Usenet news at that time.

The Energy and Emergy of the Internet

2011-10-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

(To find out what "emergy" is, you have to read the rest of this post).

Google and other operators of huge data centers spend a lot of money on power, which leads them to locate server farms near sources of cheap, renewable energy, frequently near rivers in rural areas.

Two recent news items, one on Facebook's planned data center near the arctic circle and a study of the energy and emergy of the Internet remind us that the Internet consumes a lot of energy.

Facebook announced plans to build a server farm in Luleå Sweden, about 100 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. They will benefit from low cost electricity generated by dams on the Luleå river and from savings in cooling. The average temperature is around 2 degrees centigrate, which will enable them air cool the datacenter, which will consume enough power to run about 50,000 houses.

Powering data centers and the computers and devices that use them is only about half the story according to a recent study by Barath Raghavan and Justin Ma. We must also consider embodied energy (emergy) — the energy used in making the devices and infrastructure that make up the Internet. They remind us that we can save energy by extending the life of our computers and smart phones as well as by reducing operating power.

Taking both energy and emergy into account, Raghavan and Ma estimate that the Interent consumes between 1.1 and 1.9% of the 16 TW used by humanity. That is a lot less than we devote to transportation, so we will still be ahead if we can subsitute communication for transportation.

Two studies of concentration of power -- government and industry

2011-10-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

A study of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group, including many banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

(Study details are available in this paper).

The image shown here (click to enlarge) represents the 1,318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red and very connected companies yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue. Each of the 1,318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. The anlysis revealed that 147 even more tightly knit companies controlled 40 percent of the 43,000 corporations analyzed.

Characterizing the concentration of power in this way is time timely in light of the recent "occupy Wall Street" demonstrations, and provides background for James Allworth's suggestion that we may be facing a choice between capitalism and democracy.

This sort of concentration is worrisome from the standpoint of stability as well as equity. What is the effect of the failure of one of a limited number of large entities -- like banks that are "too big to be allowed to fail?" Note that the database used in the study was compiled in 2007, so it does not refelct changes that have occured during the current economic crisis.

This study reminds me of another case of concentration of control. Around ten years ago, I worked on a study of the state of the Internet in Singapore for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). I noted at the time that the government played a central role there. They picked critical areas of the economy -- oil, shipping, banking, information technology, biotechnology -- and acted as a heavy-handed venture capitalist. With the help of my nephew, who was working for Goldman Sachs in Singapore, I put together this diagram showing government ownership in the telephone and ISP industries.

The government was not a passive investor. They hired the best and the brightest coming out of the universities. They created some of the earliest strategic IT forecasts and plans, which were put into effect through significant investment. (The best and the brightest avoid government in the US, but that has not always been the case).

This approach has served Singapore well. Today, they are ranked 19th in the world on the ITU ICT Development Index. The top twenty nations all have powerful governments -- most would be considered socialist failures in tea party circles.

We've seen two studies of the concentration of power -- one in the hands of business, the other government. No study or theory will ever be able to fully comprehend anything as complex as an economy or an industry, but these cases indicate that government has a place in ensuring stability and encouraging the development of infrastructure.

Draft of IT literacy paper

2011-10-24T07:35:00.000-07:00

I just posted the draft of a paper called IT literacy – evolution, curriculum and a modular e-text.

In the paper, I review the evolution of the IT literacy course from the 1960s to today, then describe my Internet-era curriculum and the modular e-text (currently 104 modules) I am developing to teach it.

TeleGeography’s interactive submarine cable map

2011-10-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

I love things like TeleGeography’s interactive submarine cable map.

You can zoom and scroll and click on the map for descriptions of the cables or search their cable database.

It is an anatomy diagram for the global nervous system with us as neurons.

Compare that to this map of the NSFNet in 1986:

(Those are 64kbs links).

Worries about OpenClass -- a new learning management system from Google and Pearson

2011-10-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

Google and Pearson, a large textbook and etext publisher, are joining forces to offer a free learning management system (LMS) called OpenClass. OpenClass will be competition for Blackboard since it will be free, and, given the skills and resources of Google and Pearson, well done. It will also compete with Moodle, which is open source, but requires a significant staff committment to run.

That is the good news for OpenClass. The bad news for OpenClass is that the LMS market is not competitve -- it is dominated by Blackboard, Moodle and a few less popular LMSs.

Even if OpenClass is better than Blackboard and Moodle -- "open and not clunky" as they claim on their Web site -- it will take time to become a major player because we are locked into current LMSs by the material we have created, the training our students and staff have accumulated, and the systems we have built around them.

Do you use an LMS on your campus? If so, how many students and faculty know how to use it? Do students expect it to be used in a class? Have faculty invested in material that is now loaded into the LMS? Do they use it to automate testing and grading? Is it integrated with student records applications and the textbooks faculty adopt?

Don't get me wrong -- this is not a defense of the current LMSs. My campus uses Blackboard, but it is way too "clunky and closed" for me to use. I am just saying that it will be hard to displace even if OpenClass is superior.

Don't get me wrong on that either. I am not enthusiastic about OpenClass. For a start, I worry that it will favor Google Apps and Pearson teaching material. More important, I worry about the pedagogical impact of any LMS. If OpenClass were to become dominant, would it push us to teach within the confines of the OpenClass LMS -- a Procrustean fit?

On my campus today, on-line education is synonymous with Blackboard. We are in the very early stages of networked education and educational technology. It is too early for such standardization.

Don't get me wrong one last time. I believe the folks working on OpenClass at Google and Pearson are smart and mean well. I just wished they worked for a small startup that did not have such deep pockets.

For more discussion see:
Google Plus discussion
Chronicle of Higher Education discussion
Pearson announcement

New IT literacy teaching modules

2011-10-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

I've recently posted or revised 12 IT literacy teaching modules:

This brings the total to 102 modules. Each module has an annotated PowerPoint presentation and assignment, and many have videos, transcripts and other components. (I am adding them as quickly as possible).

Perhaps you can use one or more in a class or for self study. You can see how the modules are structured here and browse through them and here. You can also subscribe to announcements of future modules.

More on massive, open, online classes (MOOCs)

2011-10-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote a post on the mother of all MOOCs, the computer science classes getting under way at Stanford this week.

If you found that interesting, check out this podcast interview of George Siemens, who leads Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute.

Siemens is a MOOC practitioner and researcher. His classes have enrollments in the thousands, and he handles the large number by decentralizing -- encouraging students to help each other and form study and discussion groups using whichever social media tools they prefer, He is distributing the teaching responsibility to the network as a whole.

Siemens does not suggest that he has found the optimal model -- he is experimenting. He says "we need to tweak or in some cases completely remodel the university system," and he is trying to learn what works and what doesn't.

One thing is for sure -- there is no single answer. What works for a math course may not work for a literature course and what works for an upper division course may not work for a lower division course.

This interview is the latest installment of a monthly educational technology podcast from the Chronicle of Higher Education. I'd recommend checking that out too.

Open online classes starting soon at Stanford – 130,000 students in one class

2011-10-03T06:28:00.000-07:00

Stanford's experiment with free, online classes for thousands of students is getting under way. They are offering online sections of three undergraduate computer science courses: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Databases.

The classes are organized around blogs, as shown here. The lectures, assignments, exams, forums, course materials, quick guides to software and optional exercises are the same whether you are online or on campus.

I took a similarly open course a few years ago from the Harvard Law School. There were three groups of students -- regular law students on campus, an extension class, which met in Second Life, and an open section for those listening to podcasts. I was in the third group, and enjoyed it very much.

The Stanford class is more highly structured and the experience of the online students will be closer to that of the on-campus students than was the case at Harvard. Also, Stanford's online students will receive a certificate of completion, showing their relative rank in the class if they complete the full course. There was neither social media support nor formal feedback at Harvard.

Others who have offered massive, open online courses (MOOCs) are generally positive, but they report some problems with privacy and spamming and rude behavior. Since Stanford will allow open students to take exams and do assignments, there is also the possibility of cheating. (When you enroll, you agree to abide by an honor code).

The Stanford courses are unique in several ways. They are large. The AI class has over 130.000 students from 190 countries. Stanford will grade and rank open students who choose to be graded. Most earlier MOOCs have been on educational technology, but these are standard academic courses offered by well-known experts in their fields. They will also be using newly developed tools. The AI course is offered in partnership with a start-up called Know Labs, but, for now, there is no information about their tools on their Web site.

This is a bold experiment -- what are the implications for future undergraduate education if these and other experiments with MOOCs succeed?

For links to and discussion of other MOOCs: