Britannica freely available for web publishers

I read in the TechCrunch and in the Standblog (in french) that Britannica was offering one-year free subscription for "web publishers" (which happens to include bloggers) that were frequently updating their content.

I subscribed yesterday and today, in less than 24 hours, I got the confirmation. Easy as a piece of cake! Good job Britannica! It is a small but important step in consolidating a strategy that may actually help the company catch up with Wikipedia.

Multiple mice in a single computer: Simple and innovative idea to help disadvantaged schools

I've just finished reading an article about the use of multiple mice plugged in the same computer to help children in disadvantaged schools.

The idea is to give the opportunity to all the students sharing a computer to interact with it instead of being passive while only one had the mouse control. This is done plugging in as many as necessary mice in the USB port and using a specific designed software to let all the students interact with the computer. In the authors field work, there were a maximum of 5 students using one mouse each but in lab tests they had tested up to 15 mice simultaneously.

The software - an educational prototype - has two modes of work: a racing mode where the students had to compete to click on the correct answer first; and a collaborative mode where all the students had to click on the same answer for the software to evaluate it as right or wrong.

Their findings, although slightly limited, show benefits in the learning process using the practice above.

For me, this is one of those ideas that make you think: "Why didn't I come up with that first?" When I was a kid, I had to share a computer at school and later, during a time when I worked as a teacher, I saw my students facing the same problems when they had to share a computer and one or two had to be passive while the other was actively following my instructions...

As of today, the article is available online here (PDF file), if you are interested. More publications of the TIER Project (Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions) can be found at the official web site.

The Productivity Paradox Revised

The Productivity Paradox, a concept to refer to the lack of return in productivity as investments in Information Technology grew, started to appear in many studies during the 80s. Managers begun to question their investments in technology as there were no evidence of return. This led researchers towards attempts to understand this relationship between productivity and information technology, what produced results confirming, to some extent, the managers’ view.

According to more recent firm-level and country-level researches, this misconception of lack of return in IT investments is becoming outdated (if not already). When taking into account a broader view including intangible aspects of investments and cross-country data from the past through more recent years, researchers have shown that investments in IT, mostly when aligned with business processes and strategies improvements, do result in gain of productivity.

You can read more about the Productivity Paradox at Wikipedia. For a deeper review on the topic, take a look at the paper I wrote (PDF format), after reading some authors working on it. Update: Sorry, I removed this link for personal reasons.