Diversity rules: only Sri Lankan girls with one leg can apply for this job

Google seem to be apologising for the lack of 'diversity' in their staff. In the same article they quote just 18% of Computer Science degrees being awarded to women and considerably smaller percentages go to Blacks and Hispanics. Now, I appreciate that it isn't just people with Computer Science degrees that Google are looking for but it would seem a reasonable guess that they are generally looking for people with good qualifications in related fields.

The figures are as they are, unless I am missing something, because that's who managers have decided best meet the various criteria for appointment across the whole range of posts. Fewer women and people from certain races apply in the first place or have suitable qualifications. Google should not now decide that, to reflect the population, they have somehow to recruit women in a higher proportion. How can you explain to a chap who is, in all other respects determined by managers to be the best candidate, that he didn't get the job because, er, sorry, we needed a woman.

The same argument applies to trying to develop a workforce that has, say, the same proportion of Indian people as some sample population. What do you do if you have more Indians than you need? Next we'll be bringing back the Only White Need Apply lines in advertisements!

The population is as it is for a whole bundle of reasons and the make-up of an organisation's workforce is as it is for a whole other bundle of reasons. Those bundles will not be the same and no amount of social engineering is going to make any difference. Leave this alone. Provided that managers are, indeed, being truly unbiased and the whole process of recruitment and appointment is fair, that is all we should seek. 

I sometimes think that too much is made of the differences between people, especially in colour or race. Why don't we simply stop recording who comes from where? Ignore it. Just judge people for who they are and how they perform. End of story. Clearly, at least I think it is clearly, the difference between men and women will continue to be there for all to see and figures are bound to be maintained in some way or another. But I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Black African and West Indian, or Indian and Pakistani or, for that matter, White British and White American or however they're denominated these days.

Instead of trying to shove their workforce into some shape reflected by statistics, let them just recruit who's best. This diversity thing is getting out of hand.

Binging - it simply neither looks nor sounds right

It's amazing to watch students searching on the web these days. I nearly typed googling but that doesn't actually describe what they do . . .

You see at one of the places I lecture the IT technicians have made Internet Explorer the only browser they can use and left all the Microsoft defaults in place. That means the search box is for Bing. But that doesn't seem to affect students because as soon as you ask them to do anything they type google into the address bar anyway which produces a list of sites from which they choose google.co.uk and then, finally, type what they want to know about in the box. (In fact, they'd probably do this anyway even if the technicians did change the deafult search tool to Google.)

If we had Chrome then they could just type the search term in the address bar and they'd save a lot of time. I did ask why some of them did the long-winded thing and thought it might have been because they all now used Chrome at home but no, they just seem to have got into the habit and some didn't even notice the Bing box

I suppose that instead of googling we might have been talking of students binging. Hmm. I guess now I understand wht that never took off.

App Inventor for Android

This is quite remarkable. The very idea that 'normal' people can make applications, sorry, they're called apps now, for their mobile is just so hard to grasp. Yet it seems to be true and could be one of those massive leaps that happen from time to time in technology and what we do with it.

The GoogleLabs App Inventor for Android ..

"You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like MoleMash or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend's faces. You can even make use of the phone's sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior."

Apart from spelling behavior differently there'd be no point in me trying to put this any better. I carry on, with acknowledgements to the GoogleLabs writers..

"App Inventor is simple to use, but also very powerful. Apps you build can even store data created by users in a database, so you can create a make-a-quiz app in which the teachers can save questions in a quiz for their students to answer.

	Because App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are. You can build an app to help you remember where you parked your car, an app that shows the location of your friends or colleagues at a concert or conference, or your own custom tour app of your school, workplace, or a museum.
	You can write apps that use the phone features of an Android phone. You can write an app that periodically texts "missing you" to your loved ones, or an app "No Text While Driving" that responds to all texts automatically with "sorry, I'm driving and will contact you later". You can even have the app read the incoming texts aloud to you (though this might lure you into responding).
	App Inventor provides a way for you to communicate with the web. If you know how to write web apps, you can use App Inventor to write Android apps that talk to your favorite web sites, such as Amazon and Twitter."

This all sounds great and I can imagine students will really love this too. Now, I wonder just how 'easy' it really is? I'll let you know in a while.

When will they ever learn?

You know you're getting older when everyone in the audience appears younger than you are! Still, that helped my theme along a bit as I had an opportunity to get good minds a-thinking at Cambridge Regional College for a VLE Forum earlier today.

A last minute change of agenda meant that I got to speak earlier than expected so it was a relief to find the internet was nice and quick and my sample moodle site opened up reasonably quickly. Not as fast as my own site would have but I couldn't recall where I'd put the link on that one. I started by recalling a visit to Hertfordshire Regional College some weeks ago where the blisteringly fast speeds made web pages sort of snap at you and you seemed only to have to imagine a page and up it appeared.

Back in 2004 or thereabouts I had taken part in an end-of-event show entittled The Good the Bad and The Ugly in which I bemoaned the slow progress in getting some pretty simple ILT and e-learning ideas into the mainstream, especially with people who really should have been setting a good example.

I recalled:

VLE courses that were just lists of links to Word documents in blue text, interspersed with the occasional PowerPoint link, none of which would exactly open in a hurry or without umpteen further decision-making clicks on the way.

• SharePoint coming on the scene but only being understood by pretty techy people who produced similarly long lists of blue text links for staff à la form for students' courses on a VLE. What was good enough for students must have been good enough for staff, I mused,

• I recalled inboxes stuffed with huge 1MB attachments and sometimes several Word files attached to All Staff e-mails. Word documents staff were expected to complete and then save and return so that maybe 20 or 30 individual documents could then be combined in some way by some hapless secretary; Excel spreadsheets that tutors were expected to complete and return every month in order to update some central record that must have caused headaches for the ultimate recipient when he or she received 56 files with names like achievement[23].xls, achievement [22].xls and so on.

• There were a few odd geeks like me around in 2004 who were creating web materials for students but not many and we were seen as a bit odd.

• Portfolios were made of something called cardboard. Thick card which folder in such a way that, by placing sheets over two metal pillars stuck inside somehow, papers could be retained. The papers themselves needed to have holes punched in them by gadgets most people had somewhere other than where they looked first.

Ah, how times have changed, haven't they? Or have they?

Finally getting to the second slide of the presentation the screen changed to reveal a massive list of links to Word documents, so many on a VLE course that the complete list wouldn't fit on the screen print I'd taken. That was a current 2010 course I'd copied from a VLE I had seen. It wasn't at all unusual.

The third screen showed a staff intranet page made by IT Technicians using SharePoint. Another long, long list if tiny blue lines of underlined text, more links to hundreds of Word documents. That was a current 2010 page being used at another institution.

A fourth screen showed my own College e-mail inbox. Top of the list were files with attachments. Yes, things had changed here - the size. Two were over 7MB and several at 3 or 4MB! I recalled how I used to get messages from someone called System Administrator. System would write to tell me that I had exceeded my limit. Another click revealed yesterday's mail which included, yes, you've guessed . . Mr Administrator was still employed and still sending me the same message.

I wailed a bit about this as I tend to do when stuck for words (although I certainly couldn't have been stuck for Words). then, in the spirit of being helpful I went to slide five and illustrated how a VLE page could be a happier place altogether. Adding images would be a good start. There they were. Replacing Office documents with web documents would be a good move too. I showed people both the use of moodle web documents using text simply copied and pasted from Word and the lovely Google documents solution.

I emphasised how several people could be given permission to edit a single document using Google Docs and how the application would retain all the versions and changes and indicate who had done waht. It would be saved automatically and kept safe and sound my the mighty G team.

The multiple spreadsheet file nightmare could be solved by using an on-line spreadsheet too.

Then I showed how a presentation needn't be PowerPoint and how a mini version could be used to display ideas on a VLE, blog or web page. I was, indeed, using a Google Presentation there and then and had arrived with zero materials to plug in or worry about.

The penultimate slide was a recommendation that we should see these types of provision of materials and communication and the new 'basics'. There was nothing particularly complicated about using any of the tools now available and anyone who can find headers and footers on the Office 2007 ribbon in under 10 minutes would be able to do what I had done. The people at the meeting were those who could make a difference and help bring the new ideas to colleagues. Training programmes and staff development sessions on these topics could be fun as well as genuinely useful rather than merely ticking boxes on the latest Government educational 'initiative' compliance list.

But it isn't really our colleagues who need the real help. From what I could tell by observing a range of senior staff at work over the last few years it is the institutional leaders and even some heads of organisations supporting change who need to change the most. Because they haven't had anyone nagging them or insisting they include ILT in their 'lesson plans' for staff development, teacher training, academic board meetings, Startegic Annual reviews, statistics gathering and all the rest, or maybe just because they didn't feel comfortable with new ICT, many have fallen far behind or not moved an inch since the start of the Century.

Just as Government departments and various quangoes are now urging us to help Granny get connected, I suggested that we could do our bit by 'adopting an Executive' or 'supporting a Senior'. If we see something that can be improved by utilising the very same tools tutors are being exhorted to use then we should, as delicately and tactfully as we can, show them how they can demonstrate so much better practice.

Otherwise, now that they don't teach . . . when will they ever learn?

My thanks to JISC RSC Eastern for inviting me to speak at this event and for Cambridge Regional College for hosting such an excellent day, including a wonderful five course lunch! But that's another story.

Catch a wave

Delighted to get a Google Wave account at the weekend. And 20 invitations which I have already had requests for at a ratio of about 5:1. If you haven't heard of this then you soon will (and there are links in some previous posts). Think e-mail, IM, live collaboration on a document, image or video sharing, maps showing where you or something mentioned is, polls all rolled into one application that lets you see someone's message or additions as they enter them rather than waiting for them to hit send and you may get the idea.

I'll be trying it out with some carefully chosen friends, probably doing something silly like planning a trip to Greece or boring like agreeing a meeting agenda at first and then hopefully extending it as we get more expert and figuring out what we can achieve.

If you think you could be a useful ally in this trial then contact me - there should be a link somewhere on the blog. Or look on my web site.

So, to end as I started, with a Beach Boys track, Let's go surfin' now, everybody's surfin' now, surfin' USA . . . and UK.

Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age: what people said

This excellent discussion produced a host of intelligent and thought-provoking comments, as well as reassurance that there appear to be plenty of others who share my views on how well and how not so well e-learning is developing.

Fifty statements/quotes from panelists taken from notes at the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age Forum, Oct 27 & 28, 2009 made by Cheryl Davis, Miramonte High School can be seen at the link below. What I really like is the use of Google Sites to publish this! That makes it 51 statements!

https://sites.google.com/site/breakthroughforum/home

My Google day

It's just occurred to me how seldom I use hard drives or even USBs these days. Google Documents provide a perfectly acceptable alternative to Word for all the word processing type of things I need, like handouts, instructions, notes etc. and students are now happy to save their work in the same way, sharing it with me which makes giving them feedback and correcting things so much simpler. My son shares a folder called 'homework' with me which I don't look at as often as I should but it's there if ever he's stuck with something, wherever I am.

I use Google presentations to display quick mini slide shows on either students' VLE pages or course pages I publish elsewhere. They love them and one or two have started doing their own presentations that way too. It will be a while before the majority do, as instant pretty designs are thin on the ground and layout controls still a bit basic. For simply getting a message across, though, rather than creating something along the lines of a Hollywood movie, the application's great.

Google spreadsheets found their way to my heart as soon as they came out, what seems many years ago now, saving all those problems when you wanted to share data with lots of people and maintain an up-to-date record of your and their amendments. Everyone should use these, I reckon. Just so sensible.

Today I needed to update some records and provide colleagues with some data which was so straightforward. Really, really cool, though, was when it came to collecting students' opinions, targets and the like during tutorial sessions.

The official College method is to download and print about 8 pieces of paper Word documents (in regulation Arial 11 and various boxes outlined in black). then you trot down to the Library and photocopy them 40 times. Well, no you can't do that becuase you're restricted to 20 at a time so you do it twice. Sometime through this process a ream of A4 needs to be added to the tray, of course, but you eventually walk away with this massive pile of hot paper under your arm. Next you try and hide the mass of paper as you enter the classroom and slowly get the students round to the idea that they have to write in the boxes with black lines and tick other boxes, not forgetting, of course, to write their name and a whole load of data we already have on file. To do this they need pens which is often another problem but I'll skip that now. Finally, if you're lucky, the forms come back in grumpily and the comments are about as short as they can make them as they just hate writing these days. Forget trtying to analyse the data. It's a mess anyway and you just stuff the forms in their files and hope they haven't set themselves too silly a target or said anything disastrous about you or a colleague.

Being the rebel that I am, though, I thought there must be a better way. Google Forms! Brilliant! I copied the questions onto a Google Form and selected the type of response required (short text, paragraph, tick boxes, etc) and put a link to each form on a course web page. There are some good, simple designs available which make the form a little more inviting too. Not Arial 11 so I'll be in trouble but never mind. I was a little nervous when I watched the first few students clicking the link but slowly screens around the room filled with my new creations and I was amazed at how little objection exactly the same questions raised. Within a short sapce of time I could open my copy and see who had responded and review comments.

Nicest of all were simple charts illustrating things where choices were available so I could instantly see which type of assessment was proving the most popular, for instance, or what proportion of the class felt they needed to improve their time-keeping or whatever.

Later in the day someone wanted some text from a novel which Google Books found smartly for them and no doubt Google Mail and Google itself got in on the act too. I showed another class what Google Chrome's nice new designs looked like but no-one could use the browser at College as they're locked in to IE8. Still, something to do at home, maybe.

Oh, nearly forgot, to show my last class some of last year's students' work I used the blogs they had created with posts for each task and images uploaded with Google Picasa and more of those mini presentations. That was a Level 1 class too - far more impressive portfolios that many of the Level 3 bundles of grey Word documents in Times New Roman I had.

So, unless I've missed something, I don't think I saved anything or carried anything around at all. Remarkable. I'll still be in trouble for the Arial 11 omission, though, and not having piles of standard documents in their folders. Pity. Nice day, though, for all that. One day I'll be appreciated.

Etherpad brings real-time collaboration to documents

While Google Wave developers are polishing their product for launch Etherpad have slipped in with one bit that will certainly cause quite a stir - the document screen where you and others can interact in real time. It's quite an odd experience at first, watching someone else move your text around and add theirs - but you'll get used to that soon enough and appreciate the benefits and advantages.



This is certainly worth experimenting with - public spaces are free but if you want to work privately with a title.etherpad.com address to store work the free version is limited to 3 colleagues. I'm a bit surprised at the $8 a month fee for more people at this early stage. Few people will have heard of this and are unlikely just to buy, however cool the instant participation is. And, of course, Wave's on its way, and that will be free and, I rather suspect, knock anything like this into the wilderness.

Google Chrome OS

Well-written article on what I think will be big changes in the way we use applications and our computers.

http://zenhabits.net/2009/07/what-google-chrome-os-means-for-computing/

Well worth a read, especially if you have no idea what Google Chrome OS is!

Here's a link to the Google updates blog to keep up-to-date:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com

Wave Hello

This is going to change everything. The video's long but well worth watching.

Live Mesh: it works, and works well

I am very enthusiastic about Microsoft's LiveMesh. It has proved itself genuinely useful twice this week.

Once was with photos. I had taken loads in the snow and downloaded them onto my main PC. Later I wanted to use some of them on my laptop. In the old days I would have had to put them on to a USB stick and move them from one place to another, attach a data cable between the two machines or maybe uploaded them to an on-line album and then downloaded what I required. This time all I had to do was check a folder which I had set to be synchronised between the two and, sure enough, there were all the new pics for me to do what I wanted with.

The second occasion was when I needed a bundle of old files which I knew lurked in the depths of the PC but I was somewhere else with my laptop. I was able to access the desktop of the PC, open folders, open files until I found the ones I wanted. Then I could just copy and paste them to my laptop.

Quite brilliant.

Whilst it won't do staff or students' carbon footprints much good to leave their PCs running at home when they come to College, it will enable them to access and save files and even use home software if they prefer and no longer need 'Sorry, I left it at home' be a valid excuse.

Yes, I know there have been similar applications around for a while that allow remote access but this is free and just works in a familiar way. Microsoft have stolen a march on Google with this. It will interesting to see how Big G respond as, with Live Mesh, Big Blue cannot fail to reclaim users to their other Live products where Google Documents have flourished.

At last . . . [2]

Google have made some improvements to the look and feel of their brilliant GMail. It has worked wonderfully but looked awful. Now it can look a bit better with the addition of a Themes option under Settings. Still a long way to go before my daughter will tear herself away from the smooth looking and very well-designed MSN but a move in the right direction.

News from Brighton Peer

Lecturer bans students from Google and Wikipedia

January 14, 2008
Brighton Argos and PC Advisor, Feb 2008 issue

Professor Tara Brabazon, a media studies lecturer from the University of Brighton (apparently there is such an institution), has banned students from online research.

Specifically, the Prof is unhappy with the feckless, unwashed layabouts simply rehashing the first thing they find on Google or Wikipedia. (Media studies or no, she should never meet any actual journalists. The disappointment may finish her off.)

In a move that may give dangerous ideas to the good, good people at Google, Professor Brabazon dubbed her students efforts as 'the University of Google', - although I imagine the diet would be much more healthy at that particular institution. She bemoaned her students' disinclination to double check facts. Note to subs: can you check this bit?

According to Brabazon, too many students turn to the internet for easy information, hampering their development and their forensic research and analysis skills. (A travesty, when you consider the amount of 'Quincy' and 'Columbo' they must get through.)

"The education world has pursued new technology with an almost evangelical zeal and it is time to take a step back and give proper consideration of how we use it," she told the the Argos in Brighton.

Frankly, hanging is too good for the lot of them.

When I was a student I wrote essays by hand. It once took me (literally) all night - fueled only by penny sweets and Channel 5 - to plagarise a book I found at the back of the library, only to turn the final page and see the beaming face of my tutor gurning back at me. It took me the whole day find something else to copy (I missed Hollyoaks).

Kids today don't even know they are born.

Couldn't do better than reproduce this amazing bit of news posted by Matt Egan on the PC Advisor blog.

Google documents get better and better

The addition of a presentation tool isn't why I had to be so enthusiastic. In fact I still prefer Thumbstacks. What I really find useful is the addition of folders so that I can finally organise what was becoming a huge list. Sharing items with people is now a dream. Write some notes in class and then e-mail them to a group. Charts in spreadsheets too and several other tweaks regular users will appreciate.

Read all about them here.

Google desktop search to the rescue!

You know you've got that document somewhere. But where did you file it? One of the nice things about having huge hard drives these days is being able to save things without pausing for a moment to think whether you actually need to. One of the consequences, though, is that you have an awful lot of clutter to go through when trying to find something!

I wanted a document I wrote back in April (nearly six months ago). Trawled through the obvious places where, if I'd been vaguely awake and sober, would have been sensible places to put it. No luck. Tried the less obvious places. Found lots of things I'd forgotten I had but still not the document I needed.

So I typed web design degree into the Google Desktop search bar that floats around the screen and hit Enter. Not obvious in the first few items it offered so I went for the View the 1086 results in your browser. They arrived in date order and I reached April without a problem. And there it was! But that alone wouldn't have prompted me to scribble this in celebration. No, it was where it was filed: it was a document saved on my pc at home, not on the laptop I was using! Amazing. OK, so I couldn't open the document there and then but I could see the text which was really all I wanted.

I keep saying this but it's a really good idea to get a Google account and try out some of the tools available.