"Repeat the Past" - Scott Gould ; eg High Tech U, CES

I still have a sort of double take on #likeminds. I realise something happens occasionally in Exeter for an intense few days. But most of the time #likeminds seems more online from somewhere else. Anyway it is still good to follow ideas in the Scott Gould blog for example.

Recent advice on what you need to blog includes number one video, and secondly offer a practical guide to something. Well, I still have a lot of video to edit so this will come later. Practical guides also will have to wait till I emerge from the Winterlude.

Number three is "Repeat the Past".

If you scroll through all the past posts you’ve written, you’ve got some real gold that is now buried and gone and you need to bring it back to the fore for both your new readers, and also to refresh the minds of your regulars.

Once a month, find an old post that was a big hit and re-communicate the truth with a new example. Remember that it’s only when you feel you’re making your point too much that people start to get it. You have to get re-iterating your ideas if people are to consider you to be the go-to person for that topic.

This is another version of time travel. I try to vary things a bit. Something changes. 

But maybe not much. Earlier today I was trying to find some report on the Hight Tech U panel at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). I thought I had found a blog post till I realised it is from last year.

Apparently ACU ( I think this is Abilene Christian University ) was the first site to distribute iPhones etc. and YouTube has an education site

Also there is a link to iStanford, news from 2009

The only recent link to High Tech U I can find is about Texas Instruments DLP 1080p 3D Projectors. They showed this off during a High Tech U panel.

This reads like pure science fiction. I cannot imagine UK education investing in this sort of thing anytime soon.

Tina Brown has a point re Murdoch press, Princess Diana. Why no UK interest?

I am repeating an earlier post but this is still a puzzle. There is interest in News of the World at the moment, with a Guardian Editorial calling for more investigation.

Last year Tina Brown published a blog asking about an earlier occasion when a phone tape of Princess Diana became available. She suggests that the conventional explanation is not the only one.

I am surprised that the blog post is not commented on. I cannot find other UK blogs that have linked. 

I am not going to get into the issues around how the original Squidgygate story came to be published or the plausibility of whether a radio ham would happen to overhear a particular conversation. But I will try to follow up whether other UK blogs check this out. Surely the Daily Express would welcome another Diana story?

XO-1.75 launched at CES, is it One Tablet Per Child?

As reported by Computerworld. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) showed off the XO-1.75 at CES this week. This moves towards a tablet design. "The entire motherboard, which holds the chips and other components, is behind the laptop screen, leaving the other half of the laptop for the keyboard and battery. The move simplifies the design so the next step can do away with the bottom half and end up with a tablet."

The cost will be $165. "The biggest obstacle has been power. We are pretty excited about getting a lower power laptop out there," said Edward McNierney, chief technology officer of OLPC. The XO-1.75 uses chips from ARM Holdings. McNierney recharged the XO-1.75 with a hand crank, claiming that it takes 1 hour and 47 minutes to fully recharge the battery.

The Armada 610 chip is supplied by Marvell, who also support OLPC research. The chip is intended for all Mobile Internet Devices (MID). 

As reported by Ubergizmo, the Marvel 100 is shown at CES this week. Marvell have financed some of the research for the One Laptop Per Child project. The 100 is presented as tablet, not a laptop. It will be launched in the USA later this year priced at $199. There is support for wifi but not 3G.

Previously at BETT there has been an Open Source Village where a demo device from OLPC has been available. This has been of great interest, with visitors including people from Intel for excample. I am not sure yet where the Open Source stand will be at BETT 2011. But the OLPC design will influence much of the discussion.

In November Xconomy reported that The One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) were working on the XO3, to be released in 2012 with Linux rather than Android as used for what is now known as the Marvell 100. “The first one would definitely not have our brand. It’s a First World machine.” said Nicholas Negreponte, OLPC founder.

It appears that Marvell will use Android and OLPC will use Linux but I am not sure how this will develop or what else will happen. CES is not always a reliable guide to what turns up somewhere else.

Is MoSO timely? Chart raises a query #mosothecqi @orwant

Bookchart

I recently tried to start a page on Wikipedia about MoSO -  a model of sustainable organisation.

It was deleted pretty quickly. No evidence of the importance. My idea was to start something off for others to add to so it was more or less a stub. I did not explain the CQI but this is a credible source. The Deming SIG has spent ages on this project, a reasonable set of free resources. But it is an example of self promotion so we will need to have a better effort next time.

Maybe somebody reads this who knows about Wikipedia style and finds MoSO with a fresh take?

Also I started to think about the other pages that exist and I began to link to. MoSO updates Deming ideas but most of them are already in the Wikipedia. There is a case for drawing attention to them but there is not much novelty.

Through Twitter I found a Google chart device based on searching books. ( NOT websites, books back for ages) I tried it out for "systems thinking" and "learning organisations", two aspects of MoSO that I find interesting. This shows that both peaked around 2000, In practice the overlap is widely understood, I think, even though the academics work in different disciplines.

So I think the next steps with Wikipedia could include checking out what is there already and adding something to it.

By the way, previous Tweets end up at a tricky form of the chart. Several words with a comma results in a dodgy url.

edit the search box

Flash / HTML5 "non-issue" - Shantanu Narayan

Tiernan Ray reports for Tech Trader Daily on the Nvidia press conference yesterday at CES.

Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang claimed that there will soon be tens of millions of devices in the world (population not much more than six billion) and announced that the company "has teamed with Adobe (ADBE) to develop the world’s first fully accelerated Flash processor".

Yongseok Jang, VP for mobile devices with LG Electronics, announced the Optimus X2 - the first phone with the Tegra 2 chip. It has an 8megapixel camera and an HDMI output that for this demo plugged into a Panasonic television. What I gather from the report is that most of the demo worked out except for the bandwidth when web pages were slow to load. Later Manrique Brenes, VP of product development at Skype, was invited onstage as a planned video conference demo had some issues.

According to Tiernan Ray, "Huang feeds Narayan all sorts of softball questions, asking him to talk up the extreme important of Flash on the Web." Then there is a question about Flash versus HTML 5. All that is reported is this quote -“It’s really a non-issue.”

What could this mean? Presumably Adobe will never get into a situation where Creative Suite could not offer the technology designers require. So Adobe support for HTML5 is credible. But there could be a consequence on pricing for Creative Suite. HTML requires some way to edit text.

Also the interest in Flash and HTML5 clearly is an issue as it shows the Macromedia approach has taken over from Postscript and PDF. Previously I have objected to the lack of Adobe interest in the products many people are using, but the Flash emphasis makes more sense now.

Jen-Hsun Huang compared the new chip to the announcement of Windows 95 and DirectX at COMDEX. I think there could also be a comparison with the launch of the IBM PC in 1982. Later there was competiton with IBM as they used standard components but the PC sold well for several years. Apple went into one of their down phases.

According to the PC timeline for 1983

Market share of personal computers: Radio Shack 20%, Apple Computer 17%, IBM 1.9%.  

Welcome new followers @mlearningblog @learningcouncil #BETT2011

Not getting much info response from my direct questions about BETT. See below.

But I am reaching someone so will continue the direction. Not sure where they are.

@mlearningblog  looks like Seattle

@learningcouncil recently met in Houston

BETT is mostly for UK schools but is also the biggest UK tech show. It fills Olympia, an ancient building fill of nooks and crannies. Expect some news about mobile devices. Not exactly Las Vegas but most products are actually available in Europe.

Unanswered questions

Why is there an extra Adobe stand on the floorplan for the balcony?

Where is the Open Source village? If there is not one there this year, what links to check? (Search on Moodle finds stands, they may know where elese to go)

Is there any UK gov presence? BECTA has been terminated. 

@educationgovuk @bisgovuk   any tweets on #BETT2011 ?

my guess so far is that UK gov is just in budget saving mode on this one, can't find any policy

"stand" is a UK word for "booth"

Reflecting on previous chatshow at Exeter Winter Beer Festival

The summer before last I tried out a YouTube chat show during the CAMRA Beer at the Castle. Main lesson is that YouTube works very slowly. It takes a while for a clip to be noticed. Also editing takes a while and as files get larger it even takes significant time to load.

But things change. Bandwidth may get better and now Animated Exeter has a Facebook page so there may be wider support for such an approach.

Next week is the winter event

Friday and Saturday. I will try to interest Chris Norton and the Wheely Wild show on Phonic. Mamian Houston is still doing some video and online sound for Barefoot Radio. the Football Club building could be a test example in a podcast report on access. Not sure when this will happen though. I am thinking about sound and vision as out of time. there will be something during the next few months.

Open University as a future role model

The online headline has changed. It was "What sort of role-models are Oxford and Cambridge" as in the printed version this morning. Now online it is "Change needed for Oxford and Cambridge to remain leaders". The original question is more interesting. Is there a model that others could follow? Probably not, tutorials person to person are very expensive. The model only works if they carry on getting more of the available budget.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jan/04/oxbridge-widening-participation

I am interested by the following papragraph

There are three possible reactions to this display of difference. The first is simply to accept that Oxford and Cambridge are different. So they should be protected and nurtured as part of the diverse ecology of British higher education – an argument that can equally well be applied to the Royal College of Art, the Open University, Birkbeck..

Should the Open University be seen as just another curiosity? They had a model of distance learning, now extended to the Web. However they score in research assessment exercises, e-learning is something they know about so the research is convincing. For a role model, the OU could be a useful place to look. The medieval methods were not designed to scale.

topic on Guardioan Talk

Sandbox at Networked Learning updated for 2011 http://bit.ly/gs7LU6

http://bit.ly/gs7LU6

Last year I found the site for Networked Learning was mostly about
text. It was not easy to add a graphic and I never found a way to
embed YouTube. I was a bit off topic so they set up a sandbox for me
to rave on.

Video did turn up though, they link to another site from the home page.

Next on in 2012, Open University of the Netherlands.

Learning Technology and BETT, limited time travel

I am still thinking about time travel over decades, but meanwhile it
should be easier to deal with the rest of this month as one phase in
time. Especially as the spaces are more or less exactly next to each
other. BETT is coming up soon in most of Olympia and then Learning
Technology is later in the month in Olympia 2, the rest of the
building.

I don't think there was enough reporting of the Apps show as an aspect
of Online Information. Bloggers who were actually there might have
mentioned it but not much came through press releases. But it was
possible to walk throughout Olympia on a couple of days. The apps
devices are around somewhere.

Learning Technologies also has another show that may not be about
technology though some of the stands seemed last year to be for people
who could not book into the upstairs. Anyway the scope is for most of
adult education and training, a pretty good fit with BETT.

One example of what this contributes is to think about BECTA and
Towards Maturity. BECTA has been closed down for budget reasons though
Towards Maturity continues. They did have some funding from BECTA but
presumably other sources are ok. Towards Maturity works mostly with
companies but their models work for any organisation including further
education etc. I will try to check the website as there may be new
announcements around the Learning Technology event that could be
guessed at in time for BECTA.

Meanwhile I have looked at the Education gov uk site and cannot find
anything about a BETT stand. I don't think they will be there in any
way that needs a budget. They have a link to BIS for universities etc.
Maybe they have a policy that relates?