The Hindu Business Line : When today’s devices become ‘glorified typewriters’

The biggest likely development in e-learning will be in new interfaces, says Kenneth Fee in Delivering E-Learning: A complete strategy for design, application and assessment ( www.vivagroupindia.com). Voice recognition and handwriting recognition software, and touch-sensitive screens, show the way ahead, and the current standard interfaces — the mouse and the keypad — will become obsolete, he foresees. “How much longer will it be until, like Mr Spock in Star Trek, we simply talk to our computer and it talks back to us?” reads an impatient poser.

Predicting the relegation of today’s devices to the realm of ‘glorified typewriters,’ the author expects computing to become pervasive in all aspects of our lives, not just learning, as we adopt more natural ways of interacting with digital technologies. “Even the desktop or laptop computer is under threat, as hand-held devices can increasingly replicate the work of their bigger counterparts, and the long-term trend in electronics is always for devices to get smaller.”

Fee sees personal learning environments as the logical development of increased personalisation in virtual learning environments (VLEs). The idea is that each individual learner will have his or her own Web space linked to all the resources that the person requires, he explains. “In personal learning environments, learners will achieve the ultimate in blended learning, picking and choosing the elements that suit them and rejecting whatever they consider unsuitable.”

The author, however, rues that virtual reality has not taken off in e-learning the way it was predicted it would, some five years ago. “There are signs that it is taking off in the gaming industry, with developments beyond the purely audio-visual to include tactile information, and this could be useful for learning applications. The barrier to growth has been limitation of processing power, but this will be overcome soon, just as bandwidth problems were resolved.”

He forecasts growth in scale of use and complexity of mobile learning. Acknowledging that the concept of using mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) in learning has been criticised owing to the smallness of the screen, the author reasons that e-learning is about more than what can be displayed. What mobile learning should harness above all is the power of handhelds as communication tools, for EPS (electronic performance support), he urges.

“As handhelds become more sophisticated, it seems likely that people will be using them to learn much more, and this break from the environment of the desktop or laptop PC may open up new ways of thinking about how technology can aid learning. One possibility is that handhelds will become wrist-mounted devices…”

Imperative read.

Four types of creeps

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death, says Macbeth, after hearing from Seyton that the queen is dead. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” continues Macbeth, philosophically.

Were you to creep further in the Bard’s works, you’d find Hamlet wishing, “Let the birds fly, and, like the famous ape, to try conclusions, in the basket creep, and break your own neck down.” And then there is the Lion, in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ addressing ladies, ‘whose gentle hearts do fear the smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor.’

Not too differently, a monstrous fright for project managers is about ‘creeps.’ Granted, that some of the team members ‘may occasionally seem like creeps to you,’ but that is not the ‘creep management’ Robert K. Wysocki discusses in Effective Project Management: Tradition, agile, extreme, fifth edition ( www.wileyindia.com).

“Creeps here refer to minute changes in the project due to the obscure, and for awhile unnoticeable, actions of team members. Many of these go undetected until a problem raises its ugly head.”

There are the ‘creeping hours of time’ in ‘As You Like It,’ and Shakespeare allows ‘shadows’ to creep in ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ and writes in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ that ‘idea of her life shall sweetly creep.’ The ‘creeps,’ however, in Wysocki’s book are four in variety: scope, hope, effort, and feature.

‘Scope creep’ is the term that has come to mean any change in the project that was not in the original plan, he describes. “Scope creep isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. It is just a reality that has to be dealt with. It doesn’t matter how good and thorough a job you and the client did in planning the project, scope creep is still going to happen. Deal with it!” Your job as project manager is to figure out how these changes can be accommodated, tough job, but somebody has to do it, the author advises.

‘Hope creep,’ the second type, happens when a project team member falls behind schedule but reports that he or she is on schedule, hoping to get back on schedule by the next report date, Wysocki notes. “There will be several activity managers within your project team who manage a hunk of work. They do not want to give you bad news, so they are prone to tell you that their work is proceeding according to schedule when, in fact, it is not.” Random checks can be an effective antidote, he counsels.

A book worth crawling over and scrawling through, before the creeps get you!

Future of Google

Google may know everything about us, but it may be tough for us to know everything about Google. “Future courses of action for any company are, to some extent, unpredictable. Add to that the fact that Google loves secrecy and considers it a strategic tool, and the crystal ball into which we gaze to try to determine Google’s future gets murkier,” concedes Virginia Scott in How Google Changed the World ( www.jaicobooks.com). She anticipates the core mission of Google to remain the same albeit with reinterpretations, and surprises to unfold as has become usual, as long as Larry and Sergey continue at the company’s helm.

“Given that Google has the largest computing system in the world with a mammoth index of Web-based information and the capacity to transfer that search capability to other large organisations, it will be interesting to see how its projects with NASA go and what other partnerships might evolve with governments and global organisations,” writes Scott.

She envisages the deployment of ‘several tactics’ to bolter the Web-based advertising revenue streams, the biggest source of revenue to Google. “It can sell more Web-based ads connect to search to more advertisers worldwide. It also can sell more ads for placement within other kinds of media such as Web-based video and wireless devices.”

The author observes that the maintaining of its position as the number one search engine in the world, based on volume of users, will continue to help the volume of its Web-based ads to grow. “Since it continues to research ways to improve the relevance of its search results and to return them quickly, it seems likely to continue to attract more users for search…”

Recommended study.

Smart testing

One of the biggest IT challenges is to minimise the risk of introducing changes to systems, databases, and applications in critical production environments, say the authors of Oracle Data Guard 11g Handbook ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). “How often have you seen changes implemented over a weekend, when everything looks fine until Monday morning and real users get on the system, performance slows to a crawl, and the CEO wants to know why the problems weren’t discovered in test and addressed before they disrupted business operations?” ask Larry Carpenter et al in the collection of ‘Undocumented best practices and real-world techniques.’

They suggest that ideally you could avoid this risk by thoroughly testing any proposed changes on a true replica of your production system and database using actual production workload. “Ideally, you would also be able to run multiple tests using the same workload and data. This lets you establish a meaningful baseline against which you can iteratively assess the performance impact of proposed changes, optimising the strategy chosen without impacting production.”

For the hands-on techies.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

Tailpiece

“The debtor was taking too long to repay, and I resorted to tweets as my last weapon…”

“And he paid off?”

“No, I began getting attractive tweets from many recovery agents!”