The hole in the wall: self organising systems in education

Transcript of a keynote speech by Sugata Mitra at “Into something rich and strange” – making sense of the sea-change, the 2010 Association for Learning Technology Conference in Nottingham, England. In the chair, Richard Noss, Co-director of the London Knowledge Lab. This text transcript is at http://repository.alt.ac.uk/855/ [82 kB PDF]. A one hour video of the talk is on the ALT-C 2010 web site at http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2010/ and on the ALT YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/ClipsFromALT/. Alongside this there will be an experimental version of the video that includes the #altc2010 twitter stream at the time of Sugata’s talk. Made publicly available by ALT in November 2010 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wale

Older Australians and the Internet

In late 2009, Sandra Haukka secured funding from the auDA Foundation to explore what older Australians who never or rarely use the Internet (referred to as ‘non-users’) know about the types of online products and services available to them, and how they might use these products and services to improve their daily life. This project aims to support current and future strategies and initiatives by: 1) exploring the extent to which non-users are aware of the types and benefits of online products and services, (such as e-shopping, e-banking, e-health, social networking, and general browsing and research) as well as their interest in them b) identifying how the Internet can improve the daily life of older Australians c) reviewing the effectiveness of support and services designed to educate and encourage older people to engage with the Internet d) recommending strategies that aim to raise non-user awareness of current and emerging online products and services, and provide non-users with the skills and knowledge needed to use those products and services that they believe can improve their daily life. The Productive Ageing Centre at National Seniors Australia, and Professor Trevor Barr from Swinburne University provided the project with in-kind support

Minds, Brains and Programs

This article can be viewed as an attempt to explore the consequences of two propositions. (1) Intentionality in human beings (and animals) is a product of causal features of the brain I assume this is an empirical fact about the actual causal relations between mental processes and brains It says simply that certain brain processes are sufficient for intentionality. (2) Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition of intentionality The main argument of this paper is directed at establishing this claim The form of the argument is to show how a human agent could instantiate the program and still not have the relevant intentionality. These two propositions have the following consequences (3) The explanation of how the brain produces intentionality cannot be that it does it by instantiating a computer program. This is a strict logical consequence of 1 and 2. (4) Any mechanism capable of producing intentionality must have causal powers equal to those of the brain. This is meant to be a trivial consequence of 1. (5) Any attempt literally to create intentionality artificially (strong AI) could not succeed just by designing programs but would have to duplicate the causal powers of the human brain. This follows from 2 and 4

The Ever-Shifting Internet Population

Presents findings from surveys conducted between March and May 2002. Takes a new look at Internet access and the digital divide. Explores factors of cost, lack of technology skills, and physical access (particularly for persons with disabilities)

Employment Assistance Program Focus Group Report

The September 11th Fund, working with the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, created the Employment Assistance Program to help dislocated workers regain employment and wages lost in the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. The project consisted of eight focus groups conducted at a professional focus group facility in Manhattan between June 25 through July 9, 2003. This publication reports on the findings of those focus groups

The Digital Disconnect: The Widening Gap Between Internet Savvy Students and Their Schools

Presents findings from a survey of public middle and high school students from thirty schools across the U.S. Looks at how students rely on the Internet to help them do their schoolwork, in addition to dozens of other education related tasks

Harnessing Technology: the learner and their context – interim report: benefits of ICT use outside formal education

How ICT supports learning outside of the education setting (year 1 interim report

RDF, the semantic web, Jordan, Jordan and Jordan

This collection is addressed to archivists and library professionals, and so has a slight focus on implications implications for them. This chapter is nonetheless intended to be a more-or-less generic introduction to the Semantic Web and RDF, which isn't specific to that domain