Altruistic Capital is a donation in shares. Its goal is to assist public interest causes by giving them access to the substantial financial resources of private companies’ capital.

This preface is first and foremost a call to entrepreneurs. If there is one thing Eugène Rutagarama has shown in his life – the one thing I derived from our chats – it’s that every one of us can make a difference.

Entrepreneurs face a constant struggle in today’s economy, they are overwhelmed by daily tasks to the point that it’s almost impossible for them to act sustainably or altruistically over the long term. They can now very easily achieve this goal by embracing the Altruistic Capital model.

Altruistic Capital can be adopted by any company regardless of its area of activity. Each entrepreneur is free to select his non-profit organization and to decide what percentage of its capital should be donated. The NGO’s goal doesn’t have to be related to the company’s activity. The company’s profitability as well as the financial resources available to the entrepreneur are not hindered by such a donation. The company retains all of its performance and competitive edge and can even gain from the positive impact the donation may have on its public image.

In fact the more the company grows and develops, the more it contributes to its cause, one of its shareholders.

The main point here is for non-profit organizations to gain access to equity-based resources comparable to those of private companies, enabling them to act with comparable forces. Way too often do humanitarian efforts come to a screeching halt when Economic Interests take over.

Why the gorillas ? Much as for the White Whale, the Old Man’s fish, they stand for humanity itself. Most of Eugène Rutagarama’s preservation quest started after he escaped the Rwandan Genocide where his family was slaughtered.

Gorillas are also a personal and emotional choice. They inspire me, I’d like for my children to be able to see them someday – or at the very least know they exist somewhere outside of a zoo. Somehow it’s a choice from the heart – based on feelings I would have a hard time justifying rationally to anyone accusing me of excessive mushiness. This said, materialism – the holy grail of the past century – has caused millions of deaths. And we can now see the so called economic “logic” endangering the entire planet.

It’s time to give feelings a try.

The more the information support is lighter, smaller, readable, mobile, copy-able, shareable – in short, the more nomadic the support, the more information and knowledge are spread.

Then, I mentionned a quite extraordinary exception to this law, which spans over the last 40 years only, but has great importance to us since we litterally live in this exceptional time.

I will unmodestly name this exception the “Klein exception” and add a note for future generations that scientists that discover a general application law and one of its notable exception within the same post are not so frequent: my fight for truth is really priceless.

In the last 40 years, for the first time in history, the reduction of the volume of information, the ease in re-copying it, sharing it, etc… has not been 100% correlated with its utility. The main reason in this limitation is that information has been so much reduced that it is not as accessible or as readable by a human being as it used to be.

The eBook is an interesting illustration of both the Klein law and the Klein exception. The first eBooks appeared about 10 years ago. They then consisted in “simple” digital screens, comparable to laptop screens. These eBooks have been a market failure. Palm, Apple, Microsoft and in France, Cytale, had diverse initiatives in the field that failed.

However, attempts to create a peripheral that could replace the book in our everyday life never ceased – and we have been observing a real renewal of concept for several months. We now have daily annoucememnts (Amazon, PRS505, SEIKO, SONY..etc)

The eBook reveals the gap between the quantity of information and the readability of that information as well as the general, powerful dynamics that are acting to try to bridge this gap: despite all commercial failures, initiatives towards a more readable eBook have become more and more frequent, although the problem is not often stated as clearly as in the Klein law.

The advances of the last 2 years are almost uncorrelated with the advances in computers and flat screens and in some way even correspond to a real step backwards. Current eBook screens are usually black and white screens, with a quite low contrast, and a refresh rate mostly 10 to 50 times weaker than that of classic TFT screens – it is totally impossible to play Tetris or watch a video on a modern eBook.

EBook designers try by all possible means, to recreate the comfort of paper and they only recently understood that the increase of the pure performance of screens (miniaturization of transistors) is not necessarily the answer to the problem.

Where will the success of the eBook come from ? From the new techniques of digital ink that improve readability? From the reduction of weight and size of the eBooks? From the physical improvement of screens, that will make reading of an eBook as comfortable as reading of a book? From the decrease in cost? From the development of ePaper techniques that will a enable reading of a book on a simple digital paper?

I don’t want to answer this question, but the Klein law tells me that in 2, 5 or 20 years – a ridiculous duration at the scale of the history of information but probably long enough for another great number of eBook companies and projects to fail – we will indeed use the eBook.

[Translated from L’eBook: une bonne illustration de la loi nomade de Klein. Please note that due to lack of time, I don't translate posts myself and usually do not review translations, so they may not be fully accurate and/or present some imperfections. Thierry]

The Economist talks about “a new version of a very old idea: nomadism” (just as I do).

The Economist insists a lot more than I do on the importance of the “wireless” in the development of nomadism and the way in which the workspace gets reorganized on campus and in american companies.

The key figure is the curve showing the progression of mobile phones compared to the progression of Internet: mobile phones are becoming the convergence medium, as I mentionned two years ago.

Via SmartMobs

[Translated from Un excellent article sur le nomadisme digital dans The Economist. Please note that due to lack of time, I don't translate posts myself and usually do not review translations, so they may not be fully accurate and/or present some imperfections. Thierry]

A fantastic work was accomplished and I particularly recommend the commented scenarios on Video (fr).

It is really interesting because:

• This work was performed under a loan (thanks to Robert Crépeau of Tedelec) and is a validation of the ‘natural approach’ I have often written about in the blog (ithe simpler the more useful).
• It was done in an atypical class (interactive whiteboards are usually not so used in sports…I think it’s a mistake)
• It takes advantage of all multimedia techniques that can be used in a class (video, podcast, web 2.0) while staying simple and cheap (using open source software). To achieve such results, an enormous teacher investment is necessary – and also talent.
• It also validates the “nomadic” approach that we have been developing for the last 3 years (the lighter, the simpler, the more mobile, the more open the approach, the more useful).

I have many things to say about the amazing examples that have been created and I will probably come back to it later, as Sylvie Lallet’s post is too rich to be described in a few lines …

See for instance the table tennis case or the work done on moving video images (as well as the video sample which is very useful to understand how students apprehend this new technology) .

[Translated from Un article fantastique sur l’utilisation du TBI mobile en cours de sport. Please note that due to lack of time, I don't translate posts myself and usually do not review translations, so they may not be fully accurate and/or present some imperfections. Thierry]

More than 60 courses were recorded; these courses were routinely made available to the 43 students at the end of the class.

Following this experience, a survey was conducted among all students. I deliver to you the main results.

1. Massive consultation and adoption of Speechi by the students
Speechi was massively used by the majority of students. 60% of them followed more than 20 courses online (of which 20% followed more than 50 courses!). 3 students out of 4 use Speechi to view or review more than half of the course, which means that Speechi is used for long review sessions.

2.  Speechi is a complement to lecture hall training, but does not replace it.
Only 4% of the students systematically replaced lecture hall sessions with Speechi. The others used it to review some points, take notes …etc

3. 100% of the students think Speechi is useful, very useful, extremely useful or even “absolutely necessary” (but how did they do before!). These results go beyond expectations.

4. Speechi allows the student to focus on the understanding of the course.
According to me, the most interesting consequence, to my opinion, is that students coment that Speechi allows them to focus on the understanding of the course, rather than on pure note taking (and yes, as I metionned in a previous post, it is difficult to do both tasks at the same time, especially when the subject is rather complex).

Students know that they can complete their notes later and they focus on understanding.

5. Speechi allows better documentation
Other interesting consequences. Since the students review a great part of the course at their homes, they have internet available and this tremendously helps them for documentation, and studying further misunderstood passages..etc

Prof. John Livesey, helped by Sandrine Thuret, obtained these results, which are to my opinion outstanding.

I thank them warmly for their work. Here are the complete results of the survey as well as students comments .

[Translated from Un retour d’expérience très positif suite à l’utilisation massive de Speechi au King’s College.. Please note that due to lack of time, I don't translate posts myself and usually do not review translations, so they may not be fully accurate and/or present some imperfections. Thierry]

“School Capital” is a term originally used by Bourdieu and has NOTHING to do with the economical sense of the word “capital”.

“School capital” rather means “quality of education” or “school quality”, this term taking into consideration the quality of teaching, and the quality and level of students.

So in fact, “Loss of school capital” is just a little pompous way to talk about the decline of the overall educational level.

I use these terms because they are Bourdieu’s, who inspired my thoughts for this ticket (if I wasn’t that modest, I would tell you I had precursors, but in fact, I just need to have more credible references than myself).

Information technologies are presented to us as the future, the panacea, the symbol of tomorrow’s education. Technologies that will create jobs, awaken our children and so on (I stop here, as other clichés fail me).

But to some extent, they are just symptoms of the deterioration of the quality of education.

It’s a situation that I quite frequently encounter. Some examples:

1. Eric Delcroix writes on his blog why he refused to let his daughter register to a special IT centric classroom. To summarize in one line: he saw brand new equipement with NOTHING behind. No suport, no followup, no competency, no IT insight. At the end, all that costly equipment (costly in capital, but failing to provide any school capital) was there only to hide the huge vacuity of the educational project.
2. The budgets of the french National Education are being sized down and the number of teachers decreases. But at the same time, all IT investments (language labs, IT resources, Interactive whiteboards…) are being showed off. This “show-off effort” indeed hides the average decline of our school capital.
3. French politicians (Mayors, Senators, President of general or regional councils and even ministers) now inaugurate interactive whiteboards ! I found a dozen newspaper articles on this subject in the last weeks. Unsurprisingly, the speech they deliver is always the same (finally a left/right consensus!). They speak about the future of the nation where IT are keys, of the reduction of the digital fracture (does it only exist ?). Again, nothing new – and even sometimes just nothing at all – under the sun. Agin, all this just masks a complete absence of real projects and vision.
4. The country where education has been the most disorganized in the last 10 years, the UnitedKingdom, is almost 100% equipped with interactive whiteboards (more than 400,000 IWB in schools, less than 15,000 in France). (Not to mention that that some people in France want to copy this !). The real reason is that Tony Blair’s reforms created intense competitions between UK schools so schools must display “visble signs” of school capital rather than really possess any. Again, a symptom.

Bourdieau always, in “La noblesse d’état”:

The logic that drives the schools that lack school capital the most[...] finds a counterweight that requires an effort in accumulating educational capital, event at the price of an ostentatious exhibition of the exterior signs of pedagogical avant-gardism: for example by deploying treasures of modernist inventions, both in terms of equipment, language laboratories, computer resources, audiovisual equipment… and in terms of pedagogical techniques, that are always presented as more active, more modern, more international.

Keep in mind that my post is written by someone who strongly believes that Information Technologies can help and be useful – as long as they have a meaning.

After installing Speechi, open PowerPoint and select the licence manager in the speechi menu.

Click on the “Get your free licence” button.

Enter your email as a “New user”, then finish completing the registration form.

Your Speechi Light code is immediately emailed to you.

When you receive it, enter Licence Manager again, click on “Get your free licence” button, paste it at the bottom of the form and click on “Register licence”.

• smart one-click post-sync.
• new custom sizing of left colum video by the author

The 4 Speechis can be freely accessed from the Society’s site. (just click on the red square).

Conference in Rennes

Conference in Grenoble

Conference in Toulouse

Conference in Paris

- Upgraded translations for Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Speechi 3 gives users the possibility to synchronize their PowerPoint with a Flash video in just one click (this is the smart mode). The person watching the Speechi on the Internet can then change the video size live by just pulling the small handle located at the bottom right.

But, until now, this modification could only be done at viewing time. Every Speechi would appear with same “default” proportions for the video.

Speechi authors can now modify the Speechi default proportions – video colum and slide size. They can do this very easily.

Everything happens in the “Theme” tab (you access that tab from the “Configuration” menu).

The same handle can be manipulated by the speechi author, from the Speechi back-office. You can now set up the default proportions and do this exactly the same way as viewers can do it.

I will publish some examples that show this new feature this week.

Note: This improvement will work from version 3.1.0.2 and on… All Speechi users who are up to date with their mention benefit from it, as always. You just have to do “Speechi -> Upgrade” from your Speechi PowerPoint menu.