OUseful.Info, the blog…

Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, gave a speech yesterday on rethinking the ICT curriculum in UK schools. You can read a copy of the speech variously on the Department for Education website, or, err, on the Guardian website.

Seeing these two copies of what is apparently the same speech, I started wondering:

a) which is the “best” source to reference?
b) how come the Guardian doesn’t add a disclaimer about the provenance of, and link, to the DfE version? [Note the disclaimer in the DfE version - "Please note that the text below may not always reflect the exact words used by the speaker."]
c) is the Guardian version an actual transcript, maybe? That is, does the Guardian reprint the “exact words” used by the speaker?

And that made me think I should do a diff… About which, more below…

Before that, however, here’s a quick piece of reflection on how these two things – the reinvention of the the IT curriculum, and the provenance of, and value added to, content published on news and tech industry blog sites – collide in my mind…

So for example, I’ve been pondering what the role of journalism is, lately, in part because I’m trying to clarify in my own mind what I think the practice and role of data journalism are (maybe I should apply for a Nieman-Berkman Fellowship in Journalism Innovation to work on this properly?!). It seems to me that “communication” is one important part (raising awareness of particular issues, events, or decisions), and holding governments and companies to account is another. (Actually, I think Paul Bradshaw has called me out on that, before, suggesting it was more to do with providing an evidence base through verification and triangulation, as well as comment, against which governments and companies could be held to account (err, I think? As an unjournalist, I don’t have notes or a verbatim quote against which to check that statement, and I’m too lazy to email/DM/phone Paul to clarify what he may or may not have said…(The extent of my checking is typically limited to what I can find on the web or in personal archives…which appear to be lacking on this point…))

Another thing I’ve been mulling over recently in a couple of contexts relates to the notion of what are variously referred to as digital or information skills.

The first context is “data journalism”, and the extent to which data journalists need to be able to do programming (in the sense of identifying the steps in a process that can be automated and how they should be sequenced or organised) versus writing code. (I can’t write code for toffee, but I can read it well enough to copy, paste and change bits that other people have written. That is, I can appropriate and reuse other people’s code, but can’t write it from scratch very well… Partly because I can’t ever remember the syntax and low level function names. I can also use tools such as Yahoo Pipes and Google Refine to do coding like things…) Then there’s the question of what to call things like URL hacking or (search engine) query building?

The second context is geeky computer techie stuff in schools, the sort of thing covered by Michael Gove’s speech at the BETT show on the national ICT curriculum (or lack thereof), and about which the educational digerati were all over on Twitter yesterday. Over the weekend, houseclearing my way through various “archives”, I came across all manner of press clippings from 2000-2005 or so about the activities of the OU Robotics Outreach Group, of which I was a co-founder (the web presence has only recently been shut down, in part because of the retirement of the sys admin on whose server the websites resided.) This group ran an annual open meeting every November for several years hosting talks from the educational robotics community in the UK (from primary school to HE level). The group also co-ordinated the RoboCup Junior competition in the UK, ran outreach events, developed various support materials and activities for use with Lego Mindstorms, and led the EPSRC/AHRC Creative Robotics Research Network.

At every robotics event, we’d try to involve kids and/or adults in elements of problem solving, mechanical design, programming (not really coding…) based around some sort of themed challenge: a robot fashion show, for example, or a treasure hunt (both variants on edge following/line following;-) Or a robot rescue mission, as used in a day long activity in the “Engineering: An Active Introduction” (TXR120) OU residential school, or the 3 hour “Robot Theme Park” team building activity in the Masters level “Team Engineering” (T885) weekend school. [If you're interested, we may be able to take bookings to run these events at your institution. We can make them work at a variety of difficulty levels from KS3-4 and up;-)]

Given that working at the bits-atoms interface is where the a lot of the not-purely-theoretical-or-hardcore-engineering innovation and application development is likely to take place over the next few years, any mandate to drop the “boring” Windows training ICT stuff in favour of programming (which I suspect can be taught in not only a really tedious way, but a really confusing and badly delivered way too) is probably Not the Best Plan.

Slightly better, and something that I know is currently being mooted for reigniting interest in computing, is the Raspberry Pi, a cheap, self-contained, programmable computer on a board (good for British industry, just like the BBC Micro was…;-) that allows you to work at the interface between the real world of atoms and the virtual world of bits that exists inside the computer. (See also things like the OU Senseboard, as used on the OU course “My Digital Life” (TU100).)

If schools were actually being encouraged to make a financial investment on a par with the level of investment around the introduction of the BBC Micro, back in the day, I’d suggest a 3D printer would have more of the wow factor…(I’ll doodle more on the rationale behind this in another post…) The financial climate may not allow for that (but I bet budget will manage to get spent anyway…) but whatever the case, I think Gove needs to be wary about consigning kids to lessons of coding hell. And maybe take a look at programming in a wider creative context, such as robotics (the word “robotics” is one of the reason why I think it’s seen as a very specialised, niche subject; we need a better phrase, such as “Creative Technologies”, which could combine elements of robotics, games programming, photoshop, and, yex, Powerpoint too… Hmm… thinks.. the OU has a couple of courses that have just come to the end of their life that between them provide a couple of hundred hours of content and activity on robotics (T184) and games programming (T151), and that we delivered, in part, to 6th formers under the OU’s Young Applicants in Schools Scheme.

Anyway, that’s all as maybe… Because there are plenty of digital skills that let you do coding like things without having to write code. Such as finding out whether there are any differences between the text in the DfE copy of Gove’s BETT speech, and the Guardian copy.

Copy the text from each page into a separate text file, and save it. (You’ll need a text editor for that..) Then, if you haven’t already got one, find yourself a good text editor. I use Text Wrangler on a Mac. (Actually, I think MS Word may have a diff function?)

The difference’s all tend to be in the characters used for quotation marks (character encodings are one of the things that can make all sorts of programmes fall over, or misbehave. Just being aware that they may cause a problem, as well as how and why, would be a great step in improving the baseline level understanding of folk IT. Some of the line breaks don’t quite match up either, but other than that, the text is the same.

Now, this may be because Gove was a good little minister and read out the words exactly as they had been prepared. Or it may be the case that the Guardian just reprinted the speech without mentioning provenance, or the disclaimer that he may not actually have read the words of that speech (I have vague memories of an episode of Yes, Minister, here…;-)

Whatever the case, if you know: a) that it’s even possible to compare two documents to see if they are different (a handy piece of folk IT knowledge); and b) know a tool that does it (or how to find a tool that does it, or a person that may have a tool that can do it), then you can compare the texts for yourself. And along the way, maybe learn that churnalism, in a variety of forms, is endemic in the media. Or maybe just demonstrate to yourself when the media is acting in a purely comms, rather than journalistic, role?

PS other phrases in the area: “computational thinking”. Hear, for example: A conversation with Jeannette Wing about computational thinking

PPS I just remembered – there’s a data journalism hook around this story too… from a tweet exchange last night that I was reminded of by an RT:

josiefraser: RT @grmcall: Of the 28,000 new teachers last year in the UK, 3 had a computer-related degree. Not 3000, just 3.
dlivingstone: @josiefraser Source??? Not found it yet. RT @grmcall: 28000 new UK teachers last year, 3 had a computer-related degree. Not 3000, just 3
josiefraser: That ICT qualification teacher stat RT @grmcall: Source is the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jan/09/computer-studies-in-schools

I did a little digging and found the following document on the General Teaching Council of England website – Annual digest of statistics 2010–11 – Profiles of registered teachers in England [PDF] – that contains demographic stats, amongst others, for UK teachers. But no stats relating to subject areas of degree level qualifications held, which is presumably the data referred to in the tweet. So I’m thinking: this is partly where the role of data journalist comes in… They may not be able to verify the numbers by checking independent sources, but they may be able to shed some light on where the numbers came from and how they were arrived at, and maybe even secure their release (albeit as a single point source?)

Way back when, when I first started blogging, I tried to push the idea of “live documents” that supported transclusion of content from elsewhere (e.g. Keeping Courses Current with Live Links; there was also a demo, but I think it’s rotted…?) A couple of days ago, Owen Stephens (re)introduced me to the notion of literate programming, “a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language”. The context was active reading of reactive documents, in which a reader interacts with a document that contains human readable paragraphs that describe some sort of mathematical or logical model which is embedded in the text as interactive, parameterised elements. (I can’t give a demo in this WordPress.com hosted blog because what I am allowed to do is really locked down… so to see what I’m talking about, check out the Explorable Explanations) example document… I can wait…)

Done that? Up to speed now?

I’d also come across the reactive document model recently through seeing a link (form somewhere… I can’t remember where now?:-(, to the Javascript library that was used to implement Explorable explanations: Tangle. (Having a play with it is very much on my to do list…)

My immediate impression was that it reminded me of the interactive, browser based programming style (e.g. Online Apps for Live Code Tutorials/Demos), in which learners can read and run, edit and run, and write and run, code examples in the browser (or more generally, in the context of an “electronic study guide” (eSG). It also brought to mind similarities with dexy.it and Sweave, a couple of (literate programming;-) frameworks that allow you to include programme code within a document and them execute it in order to produce an output that also appears in the document. (I remember one of the joys of course writing for an eSG is that you often have to hand over the text (including code and output in situ), a text file containing the code (for testing), and a text file containing the output. If (when) an error is found, version control across the various files can be come really problematic. Far easier if the document were to include code fragments that are then executed and used to produce the actual output that is in turn piped directy into the final document.) Wolfram’s Computable Document Format also comes to mind, as a document format that allows a reader to express executable mathematical statements, whether formally specified or, increasingly, using natural language.

So the document space I’m imagining here is one in which the document contains one or more components that are generated in response to some sort of request from an operational part of the document, or a part of the document that encodes some sort of performative action[?????], such as a search term that is used to trigger a search whose results are then included within the page, a piece of programme code that can be executed in order to generate an output, or a parameter for a model that can be run with the specified parameter value in order to produce an output that is rendered live within the document.

For example, this might include a ‘live’ document, that transcludes content from an external source:

A literate programme, that combines:

- some explanatory text;
- fragments of, or complete, programmes;
- the output of the programme.

Or a reactive document which contains:

- some explanatory text;
- parameterised programme code, or a parameterised mathematical or logical model; the code/model should also be executable, using parameter values specified by the reader;
- the output from executing the code or model.

(I guess a live document might be viewed as reactive in certain cases, for example, when a user specifies a search term or query that determines what content is pulled live into a document from an external source.)

There is something almost cell like going on here, in that part of the document contains the instructions that some document machinery can process in order to produce other parts of the document…

One obvious use case for living documents is in educational materials. For a long time now (even before the time of education CD-ROMs;-), eLearning materials have included interactive components. But these have often be external components that have been slotted in to the educational text, rather than being generated from the execution of a specified part of the the text. For example, many OU course materials include interactive self-assessment questions, or Flash based interactive exercises (hmm… I wonder when these are going to be rebranded as edu-apps and made available, for a fee, or via open license, in an OU edu-app market;-) [Note: the OU used to be a pretty significant educational software house in terms of output, with large numbers of highly skilled educational software developers who knew how to turn out software that worked in educational terms... but that was before the VLE came along...;-)]

Another use case is the area of data journalism. A criticism of many interactive visulisations produced to support news stories is that whilst they’re all very nice and shiny, they don’t actually work that well to communicate anything of substance at all (for example, see my comments on Michael Blastland’s talk at the OU Stats conference). Maybe a few well crafted reactive documents might start to address this balance, and engage at least part of the audience in a contextualised consideration of data (or model) based story…?

A third area I’d like to spend some time mulling over (maybe even in the context of Public Platforms…?) is policy development and public consultation, scoping out what may be possible and plausible if consultation documents were to propose particular models and then allow the engaged reader to explore the various parameter regimes associated with those models?

Hmmm…. maybe I need to start working on my resolutions for next year…?!

PS just in passing, as well as treating documents as living things, it can also be instructive to think of them as databases. This is a trivial mapping if the document has a regular tabluar structure, such as a spreadsheet sheet, or is otherwise formally structured (as for example in the case of an XML document, which typically describes some sort of hierarchical (document as data) structure) ,or even if it contains conventions in either style or content (for example, section headings being phrased in the form “Section NN: blah blah blah”; “Section NN: ” is a convention that can be used to identify the semantics of the text “blah blah blah” (in this case, as the text representing the header of section NN).

I notice that there’s a couple of days left for institutions to get £10k from JISC in order to look at what it would take to start publishing course data via XCRI feeds, with another £40-80k each for up to 80 institutions to do something about it (JISC Grant Funding 8/11: JISC ‘Course Data: Making the most of Course Information’ Capital Programme – Call for Letters of Commitment; see also Immediate Impressions on JISC’s “Course Data: Making the most of Course Information” Funding Call, as well as the associated comments):

As funding for higher education is reduced and the cost to individuals rises, we see a move towards a consumer-led market for education and increased student expectations. One of the key themes about delivering a better student experience discussed in the recent Whitepaper mentions improving the information available to prospective students.

Nowadays, information about a college or university is more likely found via a laptop than in a prospectus. In this competitive climate publicising courses while embracing new technologies is ever more important for institutions.

JISC have made it easier for prospective students to decide which course to study by creating an internationally recognised data standard for course information, known as XCRICAP. This will make transferring and advertising information about courses between institutions and organisations, more efficient and effective.

The focus of this new programme is to enable institutions to publish electronic prospectus information in a standard format for all types of courses, especially online, distance, part time, post graduate and continuing professional development. This standard data could then be shared with many different aggregator agencies (such as UCAS, the National Learning Directory, 14-19 Prospectus websites, or new services yet to be developed) to collect and share with prospective student

All well and good, but:

- there still won’t be a single, centralised directory of UK courses, the sort of thing than can be used to scaffold other services. I know it isn’t perfect, but UCAS has some sort of directory of UK undergrad HE courses that can be applied for via central clearing, but it’s not available as open data.

- the universities are being offered £10k each to explore how they can start to make more of their course data. There seems to be the expectation that some good will follow, and aggregation services will flower around this data (This standard data could then be shared with many different aggregator agencies (such as … new services yet to be developed). I think they might too. (For example, we’re already starting to see sites like Which University? provide shiny front ends to HESA and NSS data.) But why should these aggregation sites have to wait for the universities to scope out, plan, commission, delay and then maybe or maybe not deliver open XCRI feeds. (Hmm, I wonder: does the JISC money place any requirements on universities making their XCRI-CAP feeds available under an open license that allows commercial reuse?)

When we cobbled together the Course Detective search engine, we exploited Google’s index of UK HE websites to provide a search engine that provides a customised search over the course prospectus webpages on UK HE websites. Being a Google Custom Search Engine there’s only so much we can do with it, but whilst we wait for all the UK HEIs to get round to publishing course marketing feeds, it’s a start.

Of course, if we had our own index, we could offer a more refined search service, with all sorts of potential enhancements and enrichment. Which is where copyright kicks in…

…because course catalogue webpages are generally copyright the host institution, and not published under an open license that allows for commercial reuse.

(I’m not sure how the law stands against general indexing for web search purposes vs indexing only a limited domain (such as course catalogue pages on UK HEI websites) vs scraping pages from a limited domain (such as course catalogue pages on UK HEI websites) in order to create a structured search engine over UK HE course pages. But I suspect the latter two cases breach copyright in ways that are harder to argue your way out of then a “we index everything we can find, regardless” web search engine. (I’m not sure how domain limited Google CSEs figure either? Or folk who run searches with the site: limit?))

To kickstart the “so what could we do with a UK wide aggregation of course data?”, I wonder whether UK HEIs who are going to pick up the £10k from JISC’s table might also consider doing the following:

- licensing their their course catalogue web pages with an open, commercial license (no one really understands what non-commercial means…and the aim would be to build sustainable services that help people find courses in a fair (open algorithmic) way that they might want to take…)

- publishing a sitemap/site feed that makes it clear where the course catalogue content lives (as a starter for 10, we have the Course Detective CSE definition file [XML]). That way, the sites could retain some element of control over which parts of the site good citizen scrapers could crawl. (I guess a robots.txt file might also be used to express this sort of policy?)

The license would allow third parties to start scraping and indexing course catalogue content, develop normalised forms of that data, and start working on discovery services around that data. A major aim of such sites would presumably be to support course discovery by potential students and their families, and ultimately drive traffic back to the university websites, or on to the UCAS website. Such sites, once established, would also provide a natural sink for XCRI-CAP feeds as and when they are published (although I suspect JISC would also like to be able to run a pilot project looking at developing an aggregator service around XCRI-CAP feeds as well;-) In addition, the sites might well identify additional – pragmatic – requirements on other sorts of data that might contribute to intermediary course discovery and course comparison sites.

It’s already looking as if the KIS – Key Information Set – data that will supposedly support course choice won’t be as open as it might otherwise be (e.g. Immediate Thoughts on the “Provision of information about higher education”); it would be a shame if the universities themselves also sought to limit the discoverability of their courses via cross-sector course discovery sites…

Some threads that I can see tangling:

• as Google starts to fight back against content farms such as Demand Media (e.g. New York Times on Google’s War on Nonsense), the Digger seems keen to get into education: Murdoch signals push into education;
• for a long time I’ve imagined some sort of sensemaking spectrum that leads from news stories, through analysis and feature articles, to a more academic take on subject (if I can get my act together, I’d like to try to pull a workshop together in the Autumn between media and education folk to look at this…); I’m not necessarily suggesting a bigger role for “celebrity academics”, more a consideration of how academics can make content available to the media to add depth and deepened engagement to a story, and how the media can provide timeliness and news hooks to education as a way of adding contextual relevance. Here are two short (2 minute) takes on it, one from Martin Bean, the OU VC, in hist ALT-C 2010 keynote, and the other from Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, on the Radio 4 Media Show:
  • Martin Bean, ALT-C 2010 Keynote

  • Alan Rusbridger, on BBC R4′s The Media Show

• the OU starts a new sort of campaign: Youtube learning campaigns, such as this one on The History of English…

So where’s all this going? And what role might openly licensed content created by academics as part of their daily duties have to play in it?

I seem to have posted a lot of F1 related items recently (there seem to have been a lot of Bank Holidays and weekends lately – and F1 diversions feed into those; normal service will be resumed shortly….) and here’s another one, in part inspired by Joe Saward’s post on Lap Charts (and as discussed in the most recent Sidepodcast Aside With Joe), but also harking back to something I though about at the BTCC/Brands Hatch race last year, and in mind because I hope to get to Thruxton tomorrow…

The problem? Capturing lap chart information like this:

Image used, without permission, from: Joe Saward, A great race in Shanghai

I’ve been experimenting with various ways of displaying this data, such as “augmenting” traditional lap charts with additional colour and size dimensions:

(In the above case, node size is proportional to time to car in front (or denotes a pit stop); colour is related to time to car behind (red is hot – car behind is close), or choice of tyres in a pit stop. Laps count across the screen, colours are ascending race position. A bright red dot with a large dot above it shows two cars close together. A trace for Car 18 on the grid (Webber) is shown throughout the race.)

Now I now there is is probably a way of grabbing this data, for F1 at least, from something like the BBC live timing feed, or from live timing feeds for other races from TSL/Timing Solutions Limited or MST Systems, but I’m thinking more generally for cases where live timing isn’t available…

So here are a couple of possible ideas for apps to support the collection of lap chart data: a tablet (e.g. iPad) app, and a mobile (e.g. iPhone or Android phone) app.

First up, the tablet app:

The idea here is that you can click on the car number as the car goes past and build up a live view of the lap chart. The last car clicked is highlighted and can be annotated. It may also be worth having a setting so that after a car has been selected it is greyed out for 5 seconds less than the fastest expected lap time. (Except maybe for pit option, where possibly capture car going into and out of the pit?)

Here’s a sketch for a mobile app:

As before, you click on the car number in left hand column as the car goes past. To simplify matters, the car numbers in the left hand column are in an ordered list (by track position? Initial state is Grid position). After a few seconds, the car clicked on disappears from the top of the list an is added to the bottom of the list, the idea being that the top of the list shows cars you expect to come past next. As with the tablet app, the last car clicked is highlighted and can be annotated using tags from the right hand column,

On a final note, if the positions are being added in real time, the app can also collect rough timing information. That means we can then also start to produce crude gap charts that show the time/distance between cars. Something like this, maybe?

In this case, the chart shows gaps between cars, per lap (increasing lap number up the screen, car positions left to right). Gaps indicate a pitted or lapped car. From the lap chart data, and crude timing, we could automatically generate this sort of view.

PS I probably won’t get round to making either of these apps, (at least, not in the immediate future…) but if anyone would like to take them on, I’d be happy to test them and chip in ideas:-)

A couple of weeks or so ago, having picked up the TSO OpenUp competition prize for suggesting that it would be a Good Thing for UCAS/university course code data to be made available, I had a meeting with the TSO folk to chat over “what next?” The meeting was an upbeat one with a plan to get started as soon as possible with a scrape of the the UCAS website… so what’s happened since…?

First up – a reading of the UCAS website Terms and Conditions suggests that scraping is a no-no…

6. Intellectual property rights
e. Copying, distributing or any use of the material contained on the website for any commercial purpose is prohibited.
f. You may not create a database by systematically downloading substantial parts of the website

(In the finest traditions of the web, you aren’t allowed to deep link into the site without permission either: 6.c inks to the website are not permitted, other than links to the homepage for your personal use, except with our prior written permission. Links to the website from within a frameset definition are not permitted except with our prior written permission.)

So, err, I guess my link to the terms and conditions breaks those terms and conditions? Oops…;-) Should I be sending them something like this do you think?

Dear enquiries@ucas.ac.uk,
As per your terms and conditions, (paragraph 6 c) please may I publish a link to your terms and conditions web page [ http://www.ucas.com/terms_and_conditions ] in a blog post I am writing that, in part, refers to your terms and conditions?
Luv'n'hugs,
tony

As a fallback, I put a couple of trial balloon FOI requests in to a couple of universities asking for the course names and UCAS course codes for courses offered in 2010/11, along with the search keywords associated with each course (doh! I did it again, deep linking into the UCAS site…)

PS Please may I also link to the page describing course search keywords [ http://www.ucas.com/he_staff/courses/coursesearchkeywords ] ?

The first request went to the University of Southampton, in part because I knew that they already publish chunks of the data (as data) as part of their #opensoton Open Data initiative. (This probably means I was abusing the FOI system, but a point maybe needed to be made…?!;-) The second request was put in to the University of Bristol.

The requests were of the form:

I would be grateful if you could send me in spreadsheet, machine readable electronic form or plain text a copy of the course codes, course titles and search keywords for each course as submitted to UCAS for the 2010-2011 (October 2010) student entry.

If possible, would you also provide HESA subject category codes associated with each course.

So how did I get on?

Bristol’s response was as follows:

On discussion with our Admissions and Student Information teams, it appears that the University does not actually hold this data – it is held on a UCAS database. UCAS are not currently subject to the Freedom of Information Act (they will be in due course) but it may be worth talking to them directly to see if they are willing to assist.

And Southampton’s FOI response?

Course codes and titles may be found here: http://www.soton.ac.uk/corporateservices/foi/request-66210-6124d691.pdf Keywords were not held by the University – you should inquire with UCAS (http://www.ucas.com). HESA subject category codes may be found here: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/content/view/1806/296/

So what did I learn?

1. I don’t seem to have made it clear enough to Southampton that I wanted the the 2-tuple (course code, HESA code) for each course. So how should I have asked for that data (the response pointed me to the list of all HESA codes. What I wanted was, for each course code, the course code/HESA code pair).
2. Generalising from an example of one;-), there seems to be a disconnect between FOI and open data branches of organisations. In my ideal world, the FOI person (an advocate for the person making the request) would also be on good terms with the Open Data team in the organisation, if not a data wrangler themselves. For data requests, the FOI person would make sure the data is released as open data as part of the process of fulfilling the request and then refer the person making the request to the open data site (see also: Open Data Processes – Taps, Query Paths/Audit Trails and Round Tripping). Southampton have part of this process already – the course data is in a PDF on the their site and I was referred to it. (Note that the PDF is not just any PDF – have a look at it! – rather than the spreadsheet, machine readable electronic form or plain text I requested, even though @cgutteridge had posted a link to the SPARQL opendata query for the course code/UCAS code information I’d requested as a reply to my FOI request on the WhatDoTheyKnow site.)
3. Universities don’t necessarily have any record of the search keywords they associate with the courses they post on UCAS. The UCAS website suggests that (doh!) “[r]ecent analysis of unique IP address use of the UCAS Course Search indicates that the subject search is by far the most popular of the 3 search options currently available”, such that “[w]hen an applicant uses our Course Search facility to search for available courses, they can choose a keyword by which to search, known as the ‘subject search’.” Which is to say, universities have no local record of the terms they use to describe courses that are the the primary way of discovering their courses on UCAS? Blimey… (I wonder how much universities spend on Google AdWords for advertising particular courses on their own course prospectus websites and how they go about selecting those terms?)
4. Asking for a machine readable “data as data” response has no teeth at the current time. I don’t know if the Protection of Freedoms bill clause that “extends Freedom of Information rights by requiring datasets to be available in a re-usable format” will change this? It seems like it might?
   

   Where—
   (a) an applicant makes a request for information to a public authority in respect of information that is, or forms part of, a dataset held by the public authority, and
   (b) on making the request for information, the applicant expresses a preference for communication by means of the provision to the applicant of a copy of the information in electronic form, the public authority must, so far as reasonably practicable, provide the information to the applicant in an electronic form which is capable of re-use.

So what next? UCAS is a charity that appears to be operated by, for, and on behalf of UK Higher Education (e.g. UCAS Directors’ Report and Accounts 2009). Whilst not FOIable yet, it looked set to become FOIable from October 2011 (Ministry of Justice: Greater transparency in Freedom of Information), though I haven’t been able to find the SI and commencement date that enact this…?). IF it does become FOIable, we may be able to get the data out that way (although memories of the battle between open data advocates and the Ordnance Survey come to mind…) Hopefully, though, we’ll be able to get the data open by more amicable means before then…:-)

PS a couple of other things that I’ve been dipping into relating to this project. Firstly, the UCAS Business Plan 2009-2012 (doh!):

PPS Please may I also link to your Corporate Business Plan 2009-2012 [ http://www.ucas.com/documents/corporate/corpbusplan09-12.pdf ]

Secondly, the Cabinet Office’s “Better Choices: Better Deals” strategy document [PDF], which as well as its “MyData” right to personal data initiative, also encourages business to put their information (and data…) to work. Whether or not you agree that more information may help to make for better choices from potential students, or that comparison sites have a role to play in this, the UK government appears to believe it and looks set to support the development of businesses operating in this area. For example:

Effective consumer choices are also important in the public sector – such as decisions about what and where to study.
However, unlike in private markets, public services are generally:
● Free at the point of delivery, so prices do not give us clues about quality or popularity.
● Not motivated by profits, so there is little incentive to highlight differences and encourage switching.
● Supplied under a universal service obligation, such that they serve a particularly broad range of users, from the very informed to the highly vulnerable.
In the same way that comparison and feedback sites have developed for private markets, some choice-tools have already emerged for public services. For example, parents and prospective students can use league tables to compare school and university performance, while patients can access websites comparing waiting times for treatments across different healthcare providers, and feedback from fellow consumers about the performance of a local GP practice. Their role is likely to become more important in future as public service markets are opened up and there is scope for further choice-tools to be developed [Better Choices: Better Deals, p. 32]

If you’re looking to put a bid or business plan together based on using public data as a basis for comparison services, the Better Choices document has more than a few quotable sections;-)

[Related: Course Detective metasearch/custom search across UK University prospectus websites]

Here’s the presentation I gave to the judging panel at the TSO OpenUp competition final yesterday. As ever, it doesn’t make sense with[out] (doh!) me talking, though I did add some notes in to the Powerpoint deck: Opening up UCAS Course Code Data

(I had hoped Slideshare would be able to use the notes as a transcript, bit it doesn’t seem to do that, and I can’t see how to cut and paste the notes in by hand?:-(

A quick summary:

The “Big Idea” behind my entry to the TSO competition was a simple one – make UCAS course data (course code, title and institution) avaliable as data. By opening up the data we make it possible for third parties to construct services and applications based around complete data skeleton of all the courses offered for undergraduate entry through clearing in a particular year across UK higher education.
The data acts as scaffolding that can be used to develop consumer facing applications across HE (e.g. improved course choice applications) as well as support internal “vertical” activities within HEIs that may also be transferable across HEIs.
Primary value is generated from taking the course code scaffolding and annotating it with related data. Access to this dataset may be sold on in a B2B context via data platform services. Consumer facing applications with their own revenue streams may also be built on top of the data platform.
This idea makes data available that can potentially disrupt the currently discovery model for course choice and selection (but in its current form, not in university application or enrollment), in Higher Education in the UK.

Here are the notes I doodled to myself in preparation for the pitch. Now the idea has been picked up, it will need tightening up and may change significantly! ;-) Which is to say – in this form, it is just my original personal opinion on the idea, and all ‘facts’ need checking…

1. I thought the competition was as much about opening up the data as anything… So the original idea was simply that it would be really handy to have machine readable access to course code and course name information for UK HE courses from UCAS – which is presumably the closest thing we have to a national catalogue of higher education courses.

   But when selected to pitch the idea, it became clear that an application or two were also required, or at least some good business reasons for opening up this data…

   So here we go…

2. UCAS is the clearing house for applying to university in the UK. It maintains a comprehensive directory of HE courses available in the UK.

   Postgraduate students and Open University students do not go through UCAS. Other direct entry routes to higher education courses may also be available.

   According to UCAS, in 2010, there were 697,351 applicants with 487,329 acceptances, compared with 639,860 applications and 481,854 acceptances in 2009. [ Slightly different figures in end of cycle report 2009/10? ]

   For convenience, hold in mind the thought that course codes could be to course marketing, what postcodes are for geo related applications… They provide a natural identifier that other things can be associated with.

   Associated with each degree course is a course code. UCAS course codes are also associated with JACS codes – Joint Academic Coding System identifiers – that relate to particular topics of study. “The UCAS course codes have no meaning other than “this course is offered by this institution for this application cycle”.” link]

   “UCAS course code is 4 character reference which can be any combination of letters and numbers.

   Each course is also assigned up to three JACS (Joint Academic Coding System) codes in order to classify the course for *J purposes. The JACS system was introduced for 2002 entry, and replaced UCAS Standard Classification of Academic Subjects (SCAS). Each JACS code consists of a single letter followed by 3 numbers. JACS is divided into subject areas, with a related initial letter for each. JACS codes are allocated to courses for the *J return.

   The JACS system is used by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), and is the result of a joint UCAS-HESA subject code harmonization project.

   JACS is also used by UK institutions to identify the subject matter of programmes and modules. These institutions include the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), the Home Office and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).”
   —
   Keywords: up to 10 keywords per course are allocated to each course from a restricted list of just over 4,500 valid keywords.
   “Main keyword: This is generally a broad subject category, usually expressed as a single word, for example ‘Business’.
   Suggested keyword (SUG): Where a search on a main keyword identifies more than 200 courses, the Course Search user is prompted to select from a set of secondary keywords or phrases. These are the more specific ‘Suggested keywords’ attached to the courses identified. For example, ‘Business Administration’ is one of a range of ‘Suggested keywords’ which could be attached to a Business course (there are more than 60 others to choose from). A course in Business Administration would typically have this as the ‘Suggested keyword’, with ‘Business’ as the main keyword.
   However, if a course only has a ‘Suggested keyword’ and not a related ‘Main keyword’, the course will not be displayed in any search under the ‘Main keyword’ alone.

   Single subject: Main keywords can be ticked as ‘Single subject’. This means that the course will be displayed by a keyword search on the subject, when the user chooses the ‘single subject’ option below. You may have a maximum of two keywords indicated as single subjects per course.”

   “Between January and March 2010, approximately 600,000 unique IP addresses access the UCAS course code search function. During the same time period, almost 5 million unique IP addresses accessed the UCAS subject search function.” [link]
   —
   “New courses from 2012 will be given UCAS codes that should not be used for subject classification purposes. However, all courses will still be assigned up to three individual JACS3 codes based on the subject content of the course.

   An analysis of unique IP address activity on the UCAS Course Search has shown that very few searches are conducted using the course code, compared to the subject search function. UCAS Courses Data Team will be working to improve the subject search and course keywords over the coming year to enable potential applicants to accurately find suitable courses.” [link]
   —

   Course code identifiers have an important role to play within a university administrations, for example in marshalling resources around a course, although they are not used by students. (On the other hand, students may have a familiarity with module codes.) Course codes identify courses that are the subject of quality assessment by the QAA. To a certain extent, a complete catalogue of course codes allows third parties to organise offerings based around UK higher education degrees in a comprehensive way and link in to the UCAS application procedure.

3. If released as open data, and particularly as Linked Open Data, the course data can be used to support:
   - the release of horizontal data across the UK HE sector by HEIs, such as course catalogue information;
   - vertical scaffolding within an institution for elaboration by module codes, which in turn may be associated with module descriptions, reading lists, educational resources, etc.
   - the development across HE of services supporting student choice – for example “compare the uni” type services
4. At the moment the data is siloed inside UCAS behind a search engine with unfriendly session based URLs and a poor results UI. Whilst it is possible to scrape or crowd-source course code information, such ad hoc collection mechanisms run the danger of being far from complete, which means that bias may be introduced into the collection as a side effect of the collection method.
5. Making the data available via an API or Linked data store makes it easier for third parties to build course related services of whatever flavour – course comparison sites, badging services, resource recommendation services. The availability of the data also makes it easier for developers within an intsitution to develop services around course codes that might be directly transferable to, or scaleable across, other institutions.
6. What happens if the API becomes writeable? An appropriately designed data store, and corresponding ingest routes, might encourage HEIs to start releasing the course data themselves in a more structured way.

   XCRI is JISC’s preferred way of doing this, and I think there has been some lobbying of HEFCE from various JISC projects, but I’m not sure how successful it’s been?

7. Ultimately, we might be able to aggregate data from locally maintained local data stores. Course marketing becomes a feature of the Linked Data cloud.

   Also context of data burden on HEIs, reporting to Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Bodies – PSURBS.

   Reconciliation with HESA Institution and campus identifiers, as well as the JISCMU API and Guardian Datablog Rosetta Stone spreadsheet

   By hosting course code data, and using it as scaffolding within a Linked Data cloud around HE courses, a valuable platform service can be made available to HEIs as well as commercial operations designed to support student choice when it comes to selecting an appropriate course and university.

8. Several recent JISC project have started to explore the release of course related activity data on the one hand, and Linked Data approaches to enterprise wide data management on the other. What is currently lacking is national data-centric view over all HEI course offerings. UCAS has that data.

   Opening up the data facilitates rapid innovation projects within HEIs, and makes it possible for innovators within an HEI to make progress on projects that span across course offerings even if they don’t have easy access to that data from their own institution.

9. Consumer services are also a possibility. As HEIs become more businesslike, treating students as customers, and paying customers at that, we might expect to see the appearance of university course comparison sites.

   CompareTheUni has had a holding page up for months – but will it ever launch? Uni&Books crowd sources module codes and associated reading links. Talis Aspire is a commercial reading list system that associates resources with module codes.

10. Last year, I pulled together a few separate published datasets and through them into Google Fusion Tables, then plotted the results. The idea was that you could chart research ratings against student satisfaction, or drop out rates against the academic pay. [link ]

    Guardian datablog picked up the post, and I still get traffic from there on a daily basis… [link ]

11. The JISC MOSAIC Library data challenge saw Huddersfield University open up book loans data associated with course codes – so you could map between courses and books, and vice versa (“People who studied this course borrowed this book”, “this book was referred to by students on this course”)

    One demonstrator I built used a bookmarklet to annotate UCAS course pages with a link to a resource page showing what books had been borrowed by students on that course at Huddersfiled University. [Link ]

12. Enter something like compare the uni, but data driven, and providing aggregated views over data from universities and courses.
13. To set the scene, the site needs to be designed with a user in mind. I see a 16-17 year old, sloughing on the sofa, TV on with the most partial of attention being paid to it, laptop or tablet to hand and the main focus of attention. Facebook chat and a browser are grabbing attention on screen, with occasional distractions from the TV and mobile phone.
14. The key is course data – this provides a natural set of identifiers that span the full range of clearing based HE course offerings in the UK and allows third parties to build servies on this basis.

    The course codes also provide hooks against which it may be possible to deploy mappings across skills frameworks, e.g. SFIA in IT world. The course codes will also have associated JACS subject code mappings and UCAS search terms, which in turn may provide weak links into other domains, such as the world of books using vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject headings and Dewey classification codes.

15. Further down the line, if we can start to associate module codes with course codes, we can start to develop services to support current students, or informal learners, by hooking in educational resources at the module level.
16. Marketing can go several ways. For the data platform, evangelism into the HE developer community may spark innovation from within HEIs, most likely under the auspices of JISC projects. Platform data services may also be marketed to third party developers and innovators/entrepeneurs.

    Marketing of services built on top of the data platform will need to be marketed to the target audience using appropriate channels. Specialist marketers such as Campus Group may be appropriate partners here.

17. The idea pitched is disruptive in that one of the major competitors is at first UCAS. However, if UCAS retains it’s unique role in university application and clearing, then UCAS will still play an essential, and heavily trafficked, role in undergraduate student applications to university. Course discovery and selection will, however, move away from the UCAS site towards services that better meet the needs of potential applicants. One then might imagine UCAS becoming a B2B service that acts as intermediary between student choice websites and universities, or even entertain a scenario in which UCAS is disintermediated and some other clearing mechanism instituted between universities and potential-student facing course choice portals.
18. According to UCAS, between January and March 2010 “almost 5 million unique IP addresses accessed the UCAS subject search function” [link] In each of the last couple of years, the annual application/acceptance numbers have been of the order approx 500,000 students intake per year, on 600,000 applicants. If 10% of applicants and generate £5 per applicant, that’s £300k pa. £10 from 20% of intake, that’s £1M pa. £50 each from 40% is £10M. I haven’t managed to find out what the acquisition cost of a successful applicant is, or the advertising budget allocated to an undergraduate recruitment marketing campaign, but there are 200 or so HE institutions (going by the number of allocated HESA institution codes).

    For platform business – e.g. business model based around selling queries on linked/aggregated/mapped datasets. If you imagine a query returning results with several attributes, each result is a row and each attribute is a column, If you allow free access to x thousand query cells returned a day, and then charge for cells above that limit, you:
    Encourage wider innovation around your platform; let people run narrow queries or broad queries. License on use of data for folk to use on their own datastores/augmented with their own triples.
    Generate revenue that scales on a metered basis according to usage;
    - offer additional analytics that get your tracking script in third party web pages, helping train your learning classifiers, which makes platform more valuable.

    For a consumer facing application – eg a course choice site for potential appications is the easiest to imagine:
    - Short term model would be advertising (e.g. course/uni ads), affiliate fees on booksales for first year books? Seond hand books market eg via Facebook marketplace?
    - Medium term – affiliate for for prospectus application/fulfilment
    Long term – affiliate fee for course registration

19. At the end of the day, if the data describing all the HE courses available in the UK is available as data, folk will be able to start to build interesting things around it…

Over the last couple of months, I’ve had several folk enquiring whether I could develop some interactive visualisations for them. Whilst I’m usually happy to have a go at hacking something quick and dirty together, I don’t consider myself enough of a developer to be able to put together a production system. (I don’t really myself to be a developer at all…) Instead, I see myself performing more of a scout, or observatory, role, maintaining a reasonable current awareness of what tools are out there and how they might be combined in novel ways in order to support the development of rapid prototypes that can provide a basic functional and operational specification of a system that someone could then implement properly if it ever took off…

I do think I need to start bring some money into the OU, though, so here’s an idle lunchtime thought out loud: maybe I should take on some of this consultancy work, and wherever possibly get agreement that I can blog about whatever I do as part of an uncourse. This would allow me to learn more about the topic, do a better job, and teach on that experience as I do so. An “open working, personal learning journey”. This fits in with my view of teachers-as-co-learners, and is maybe a radical version of student-as-producer, with the “teacher” taking on the role of student, albeit as an auto-didactic student with (hopefully) pretty well-developed learning skills and a side-role in maintaining a learning journal that can be used vicariously as open educational resources by others.

Payment for the work would help cover some of the costs of producing the open materials, and a discounted charge for services would recognise the open working/transparent nature of the project. The project would be documented as much in terms of “how we learned how to create/develop this application” as “how it works”.

Related: @jimgroom’s #ds106 seems very much in this vein… Why shouldn’t the instructor have to be learning in public and teaching that learning process on by living it, rather than spouting stuff they learned and internalised years ago?

What do P2PU, the University of Mary Washington (UMW), and a joint venture between the National Research Council of Canada (Institute for Information Technology, Learning and collaborative Technologies Group, PLE Project), The Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University and the University of Prince Edward Island have in common? The answer is that they either have, or are about to, run open online courses, at undergraduate level, for free, on the web.

In the case of P2PU and the Canadian joint venture, the courses were run without credit. At UMW, the DS106 Digital Storytelling course ran for the first time in 2010 as a for credit course for registered UMW students, albeit largely in public. In 2011, it has run as a course with loose boundaries, open to all whilst at the same time providing a recognised course offering within UMW itself. In each case, the course duration was of the order of 10 weeks.

With HE in the UK going through a phase of soul-searching around the question of “where’s the money going to come from”, it could be argued that we need to start doing some work around business model innovation. So here’s one of my starters for ten… (I have floated this internally, and no-one’s picked up on it, so I feel as if I’m not giving away anything away by posting it here…)

The idea is simple: a recognised award offering body offers a module or course container that will allow participants in online courses to receive recognised academic credit points based in part on their participation in an open, online course, in part on their reflections about what they learned on the course.

What follows are initial (probably naive) thoughts on how it might work…

The module is inspired in part by the International Baccalaureate’s CAS (Creativity, Action, Service) component as well as HE level course modules developed to recognise work based or prior experiential learning; it provides a means by which paid for assessment may be decoupled from course delivery. To try and address concerns, the proposal in the first instance is that the container be used to award credit for students who have freely participated in one of a recognised number of open educational units, for example from the OU’s OpenLearn website or one or more courses offered by P2PU (subject to agreement).

OpenLearn Courses: participation in these courses is based on individual engagement with the course material, informally supported by one or more forums or social spaces open to all. This model allows us to explore the extent to which purely independent learning within a controlled open courseware context provides an appropriate context for accredited independent study.

One or more OU Uncourses/Learning Journey Courses (or open, online courses run by academics in other institutions): a significant part of the original course material drafted for the Relevant Knowledge short course T151 Digital Worlds was authored over a 15-20 week period on a public blog hosted on wordpress.com. The materials posted combined elements of personal learning diary as the OU author explored the subject area, as well as learning devices borrowed from the OU’s tutorial-in-print style of writing (in-line exercises, self-reflection questions, and worked through tutorials, for example). By running one or more new “learning journey” courses, such as in areas where material is being drafted for fully fledged future OU courses, where material is timely (for example, in response to a BBC series or short term skills gap (such as the opening up of data in central and local government)), or where there exists considerable vendor produced third party training material albeit in a poorly structured form as far as course design goes (for example, Google tutorials around Google Apps, or Google Analytics, or the Yahoo User Interface libraries), we can: i) pilot the open course container model; ii) create useful open resources “for the common good”; c) draft course materials for possible formal (paid for) OU course offerings.

P2PU Courses: P2PU runs 10 week courses for small cohorts starting throughout the year. Learners engage with each other as well as the course resources and course instructors. Recognising participation in this sort of course allows us to explore the extent to which an open accreditation module can be used to recognise participation in semi-formal courses. Recognising participation with P2PU courses also provides an opportunity for the OU to develop ties to the Mozilla Foundation, who support P2PU and are keen to see it develop a range of semi-professional courses based around the open web and open software development.

How the Container Works

The container awards credit based on the fulfilment of several criteria:

- demonstration of engagement with, or participation in, a recognised open, online course; this requirement means we know that learners were at least exposed to a certain of content we recognise;

- a reflective assessment component; this may take the form of a reflective essay, or piece of project work arising from the course and a critical review of that work.

- optionally, results from quizzes provided during the course. These not only demonstrate engagement with the course, but also provide some means of demonstrating a particular level of attainment in particular topic areas through computer marked assessment.

In the first instance, accreditation is offered for independent study based on participation with one of a limited number of pre-identified open online courses. In this way, we could artificially limit the range of subject areas and course models engaged with by the initial batches of learners to a know set of approved courses. This approach allows us to mitigate the risks involved with a prove the model and allow the course model to develop in a carefully controlled way.

The OpenLearn Context (2011I-2011L)

To a certain extent, the idea is based on a particular vision of how we might go about assessing participation in open online courses run outside the OU. However, I think it might also be used to provide a way in to formal study for students wishing to take formal OU awards based on prior engagement with OpenLearn materials.

By accrediting engagement with two OpenLearn based units derived from current Technology short course/Relevant Knowledge programme courses, we can compare achievement levels across formal and informal presentations of the material. For example, if material from Relevant Knowledge short courses in the their final presentation are released to OpenLearn immediately prior to the final presentation, we can engage learners around course material that is concurrently being offered in a supported fashion as an officially recognised OU course through the VLE, and informally via OpenLearn. As such, we can explore the extent to which an open course container might: i) extend the life of a course; ii) provide alternative pathways to credit and assessment models for students interested in a particular topic area but not necessarily interested in “named credit” for a course.

The Uncourse/Learning Journey Context

As institutions such as the OU continue to innovate in the areas of informal and semi-formal education through OpenLearn and emerging practice in Digital Scholarship, the uncourse/learning journey, originally inspired, in part, by the notion of “misguided tours”, provides a framework for digital scholars to record their learning journey through a new subject area as a learning pathway that others might follow. By employing writing devices that well are proven in the delivery of “tutorial-in-print” style learning materials, the learning diary becomes a piece of instructional material in its own right. Through openly recording the learning journey, and ideally engaging with other learners interested in the topic area, the author should also remain free to negotiate the future direction of the learning journey (hence its declaration as an ‘uncourse’) and so discover a curriculum that fairly reflects the learning needs of its participants.

The P2PU Context

If, as seems likely, ad hoc open online courses continue to emerge as a consequence of: a) the increasing availability of high quality content that can be put to use as a learning resource, even if not originally designed as one; b) the growth in online social networks and an apparent desire and willingness for learners to come together and participate in semi-structured learning directed activity, there will be a growing market for recognising participation in such activities and acknowledging it in some way. Through recognising participation in P2PU courses in certain areas, it may be possible for HEIs to develop closer ties with the Mozilla Foundation and engage with open courses in areas complementary to formal offerings (e.g. in the OU’s case, the Web Certificate, Open Source Tools and Linux courses). Such engagement provides opportunities for using P2PU courses as a marketing channel similar to the way in which OpenLearn units may be used, as well as providing a continuing education context for alumni in areas where an institution may not provide courses. P2PU may also provide a slightly more structured context than is offered by the uncourse/learning journey model for the developmental testing of formal course materials as they are being developed for fully fledged distance online courses.

What’s in it for folk offering online courses?
An obvious argument against the above approach is that folk running courses may get upset that someone else if offering (for a fee) accreditation around their course materials. (I always thought non-commercial could be a Bad Thing ;-) However, a couple of benefits come to mind.

Firstly, the institution offering the accreditation may pay to advertise on the site offering the course. (Yes, I know this might seem as if it’s a way for an institution to essentially outsource its course production and delivery, and in a way it is… But if open courses take off, and if they offer educational benefit, and if there’s value in proving to someone else you have taken an open course, and if HEIs don’t start offering certification around open courses, then someone else will. Such as an organisation like Pearson…

Secondly, by accepting that participation in a course can be used as partial fulfillment of requirements for the receipt of formal academic credit, it reflects back some of the authority of the award offering body on the course, showing that the course has something of educational value to offer.

Isn’t the Audience Limited?
Open educational courses aren’t for everyone; they require some element of motivation on the part of the learner, they are often best followed in a social way. At times they may lack structure, and instead focus on resource investigation activities, which can be hard for learners who prefer very heavily structured courses with linear narratives and “teacher” leading from the front. But if you want to develop skills and a model of learning that helps you exploit the power of the web, then open courses may help you on your way…

Conclusion
Err, that’s it… ;-)

Related: Massive Open Online Courses – All You Need to Know…

As I get was getting increasingly annoyed by large flashing display ads in my feedreader this morning, the thought suddenly occurred to me: could Google serve me ads on third party sites based on my unread Gmail emails?

That is, as I check my feeds before my email in a morning, could I be seeing ads that foreshadow the content of the email I’ve been ignoring for way too long? Or could I receive ads that flag the content of my Priority Inbox messages?

Rules regarding sensitivity and privacy would have to be carefully thought through,m of course. Here’s how they currently stand regarding contextual ads delivered in Gmail (More on Gmail and privacy: Targeted ads in Gmail):

By offering Gmail users relevant ads and information related to the content of their messages, we aim to offer users a better webmail experience. For example, if you and your friends are planning a vacation, you may want to see news items or travel ads about the destination you’re considering.

To ensure a quality user experience for all Gmail users, we avoid showing ads reflecting sensitive or inappropriate content by only showing ads that have been classified as “Family-Safe.” We also avoid targeting ads to messages about catastrophic events or tragedies. [Google's emphasis]

[See also: Ads in Gmail and your personal data Share Comment]

Not quite as future predictive as gDay™ with MATE™ that lets you “search tomorrow’s web today” and “[discover] content on the internet before it is created”, but almost…!

It’s also a step on the road to Eric Schmidt’s dream of providing you with results even before you search for them. (For a more recent interview, see Google’s Eric Schmidt predicts the future of computing – and he plans to be involved.)

Here’s another, more practical(?!) thought – suppose Google served me headers of Priority Inbox email messages that were also marked as urgent through Adwords ads, in a full-on attempt to try to attract my attention to “really important” messages?! “Flashmail” messages delivered through the Adwords network… (I can imagine at least one course manager who I suspect would try to contact me via ads when I don’t pick up my email! ;-)

Searching the internet of things may still be a little way off though….

PS thinking email address targeted ads (mailads?) through a bit more, here are a couple of ways of doing it that immediately come to mind. Suppose I want to target an ad at whoever@example.com:

1) Adwords could place that ad in my GMail sidebar; (I think they’d be unlikely to place ads within emails, even if clearly marked, because this approach has been hugely unpopular in the past (it also p****s me off in feeds ); that said, Google has apparently started experimenting with (image based) display ads in gmail;

2) Adwords could place the ad on a third party site if the Goog spots me via a cookie and sees I’m currently logged in to Google, for example, with the whoever@example.com email address.

As Facebook gets into the universal messaging game, email address based ad targeting would also work there?

PPS interesting – the best ads act as content, so maybe ads could be used to deliver linked content? Twitter promoted tweets – the AdWords for live news?. Which reminds me, I need to work up my bid for using something like AdWords to deliver targeted educational content.