I have news!

Part one of my news is this: I have a new job!

Part two: It's a really awesome job!

Part three: It's an awesome job working on something awesome!

Part four: It's an awesome job working on something awesome that will help other people to do awesome stuff!

I have taken on a role with www.English360.com. It's a website that provides tools to teachers who teach English to speakers of other languages. And I think it's great.

Here's what it does:

It lets teachers author their own content. You can use it to Make Things. Quizzes and tests to start with, and you can embed whatever you like from wherever you like - English 360 loves your content, wherever you found it.

And then (here's the clever part) you can share what you made.

I know, I know, SCORM stands for shareable content object reference model, and we're all supposed to be reusing packages across different environments (read: ugly old VLEs), and there's merit in all of that but bear with me:

In English 360 you can write your own stuff.

And it's easy.

And it looks nice.

And students like it.

And you can share stuff inside the site instead of pulling it out and putting it in a repository and and then uploading it somewhere else (I'm looking at you, scorm).

And if you like, you can take someone else's work and hack it.

Yup, hacking. For me, this has been the Big Miss in learning technologies. Teachers have always been hackers, no matter what the technology, including paper. I never once went through a chapter of a textbook in highschool - it was always a bit from page 67, then read the photocopied handout, then partner up to do the questions on page 92 followed by the bonus questions on the blackboard (as in the one on the wall at the front). I've never met an educator in my life who doesn't bridle at Being Told What To Teach. Every time we throw a learning resource for teachers into the world that is harder to hack than paper, we let those teachers down. Hacking is valuable, hacking is important, hacking should be encouraged and supported.

'But', I hear you say, 'are you really giving your support to a repository made of 100% user generated material? What about professionally authored content? If you don't have that, how will you ever guarantee any level of quality?'

To which I say: Oh, but we DO have that. We do.

English 360 is chock-full of professionally authored material from Cambridge University Press. It's material that was originally created for paper textbooks. But here's the thing about textbooks: the vast majority of question sets found in them conform to six (only six!) question types, all of which are expressible in XML (just ask the QTI folk, they'll tell you). All that paper content has now been converted for a new lease on life. So English360 has both sides covered: user-generated and professionally-generated content living side by side, happily and in harmony. All of it rateable and shareable and - I must stress - hackable. Isn't that nice?

Naturally, there are also VLE-type functions like timetabling and class management (if you're into that kind of thing) and lots to play with. It's still super-new, so it's not polished up and perfect just yet, but the bone structure is good. And I am so looking forward to helping flesh it all out.

Facebook lite

...So we don't know much about facebook lite just yet, but according to techcrunch:

"...Facebook Lite has nothing to do with Twitter or FriendFeed — at least, not right now. Instead, it was designed to be used in parts of the world where broadband speeds vary and can be expensive, we’re being told by Facebook. Given that the initial testing of it has taken place in India over the past several days, this makes sense."

http://bit.ly/11ZXLg

Lots of places in the world have wretched internet access. For a taster on the troubles of wiring up Africa, for example, read this from Wired.co.uk:

http://bit.ly/XAozK

Short version: in the developing world, the connectivity isn't improving at the same rate that the user base is growing.

So what we have here is a bit of a Mohammed/Mountain situation. What's easier to move? The connectivity, or the sites at the other end of the connectivity? Short term at least, it's the sites.

And do bear in mind that, along with the rich of the developing world, very poor people collectively have a fairly substantial amount of money, so are more commercially viable a target market than you may think.

Here's the point: This is good for people. I assume the market being catered to is rich, but it will benefit poor people too.

Example: consider, just for a moment, refugees.

Consider a woman who has made her way from unsafe African nation A to slightly safer nation B. She got split up from her husband and kids. She doesn't know where they are, or if they're safe. She could easily spend months - or more - looking for them, without even knowing she was going in the right direction.

Access to facebook would change this woman's life.

Of course facebook lite wasn't designed to help displaced people. That doesn't mean it won't, though. I am thrilled about facebook lite, because (ever the optimist, me) it might - might - herald the start of Western web design optimised for use in the developing world. And that would do amazing, amazing things.

Facebook: bravo.