Category Archives: stuff

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Infringement of Copyright

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I have in the past delivered a fair few workshops on Copyright for JISC Collections, at ALT-C and across the country.

One question I am sometimes asked is “how easy is it to get caught” and “what will they do”. Most cases I know of which involve FE have been settled way before it gets to the court (or the press); however now and again cases involving copyright infringement do come to court.

This case is interesting because of the defendent, well they should know better, and the accusation that they ignored the concerns of the company involved.

FTS said it raised its copyright concerns with West Yorkshire Police in late 2006, but that the force and Hirst went on to repeat the alleged infringement in a 2007 update to their software, dubbed OLiVE. The package was made commercially available.

The issue with infringement of copyright is that the law is complex and surrounded by myths, so it is easy for any educaition provider and the staff who work there to at some point infringe copyright. They may do so accidently, they may do so thinking that they are okay too, or in extreme cases deliberatly infringe copyright. An institution needs to consider how it will react to any concerns that arrive at their door over cases of infringement of copyright. The key thing that you shouldn’t do, is ignore it and hope it will go away.

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Augmented Reality

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Today at the MIMAS Mobile Learning event, Gary Priestnall – Associate Professor within the Geographical Information Science research group, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, and manager of the Nottingham arm of SPLINT (SPatial Literacy IN Teaching) gave a really interesting presentstion on his work on augemented reality.

I do think that augemented reality has huge potential for learning and for providing information to learners, not just in an interactive engaging way, but in an accurate way as well.

TAT has been doing some work on augemented reality.

When someone views you through their handset’s camera, pre-selected info and social networking links appear to hover around you, letting your new found friend in on more than just your pretty smile.

So is this creepy or no different to putting your Twitter name on the final slide of your conference presentation?

via Engadget

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Wifi – Venetian Style

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venicewifi

BBC reports on Venice’s new wifi network.

The Italian city of Venice has launched what is believed to be the most extensive, wireless internet system anywhere in Europe.

Ten thousand kilometres of cables have been laid, establishing wi-fi hotspots just about everywhere in the city.

So now when in Venice you will be able to use your laptop, UMPC, micro-laptop, wifi phone,  iPhone, even an iPod touch to connect to the internet over wifi.

Here in the UK we have Norwich however not much else seems to be happening with city wide wireless networks. Gloucester doesn’t have one, neither does Bristol; my two big local towns. Even finding free wifi is problematic with most wifi hotspots are charging, sometimes silly amounts of money.

If we are serious about personalisation of learning, mobile learning and enhancing e-learning, we need to allow our learners to be able to communicate, collaborate and reflect anywhere, anytime and at a pace to suit the learner. This more often then not, means that the learner needs to be connected. If they are using the VLE, Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, blogs, e-portfolios, or whatever; all these tools generally need an internet connection.

3G which isn’t available on all devices: is too expensive for most, not reliable enough for all, patchy for some and leads to digital exclusion.

City wide wireless networks like in Venice and Norwich would allow learners to access learning when and where they wanted to.

Photo source.

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A battery life of days…

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Though I do think netbooks have a future (even if Intel don’t) however what computer do I carry around with me to meetings, events and conferences?

My MacBook Pro!

So is it just that I prefer OS X over Linux and Windows?

Well not really, I do like OS X, but do like Xandros and Windows 7.

The main reason I don’t carry a netbook, is the battery life.

Now it is getting better than it was, but the three cell batteries most of the netbooks I have only last an hour or two, which isn’t good enough for a long train journey or a conference.

This is also an issue with learners having netbooks, they arrive at college at 9 am and most will be there until 4 or 5 pm. What’s the point of carrying a netbook, if well before lunch the battery has run out? Most colleges I am aware of, don’t allow non-college devices to be plugged in, so unless you have an enlightened institution with a sensible “personal applicance” policy, they won’t be able to charge up their netbook during the day.

So was quite pleased to hear from the Computex trade show via the BBC that:

some manufacturers are convinced cheap, low power computers with days of battery life are the future…

The new Tegra system has a lot of potential

Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang claimed a Tegra system could play HD video for 10 hours, compared to 3 hours for a netbook powered by Intel’s rival Atom CPU, and an astonishing 25 days of MP3 playback, compared to 5 hours for current netbooks.

The key to embedding and transforming learning through the use of mobile technologies is dependent on many factors, decent battery life is certainly in there.

These new chips could make a difference.

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FENC Symposium

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I have spent the day in Birmingham at the FENC Symposium. Colleges who had submitted Beacon applications for the FENC award were invited to show and tell what was in their application.

Our original submission was on how we had embedded the use of Interactive Whiteboards across the college to enhance and enrich the learning experience for our learners.

At the Symposium thanks to Promethean we had a mobile board in place and we were able to show and explain not only how we had embedded the practice of using the boards, but we also could demonstrate the board itself.

Quite a few colleges were presenting and had stands. A few caught my eye. Telford College reminded me that not everyone can read text and using images for navigation can be a useful way of presenting course information, especially course information for courses that teach people how to read, or ESOL or EFL courses.

Dumfries and Galloway College showed how they were using WordPress for ILPs. A simple way to allow students to post information about their learning.

Overall an interesting day and again realising that it is never about the technology, it is all about the people, learners, staff development and key figures moving things forward.