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October 15, 2007Watchdog defends universities' low ranking in leaguesSo - I saw this report in the Irish Independent The basis of the story is that the old universities (TCD, UCD, UCC et al) ranked poorly in the Shanghai University Rankings. Dr Padraig Walsh, of the Irish Universities Quality Board (IUQB), said in the article that such rankings tended to rate institutions on their research output, citations in journals and the number of Nobel prize-winners on their staff, rather than on the quality of teaching. So I had a look at the ranking site: Firstly, the top ten are very predicable: 1 - Harvard Univ; 2 - Stanford Univ; 3 - Univ California Berkeley; 4 - Univ Cambridge; 5 - Massachusetts Inst Tech (MIT); 6 - California Inst Tech; 7 - Columbia Univ; 8 - Princeton Univ; 9 - Univ Chicago; 10 - Univ Oxford.
http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007Methodology.htm Thirdly, I think the IUQB's is trying to reframe the debate (in the wrong way) in defence of the old universities poor performance by focusing on the quality of teaching. According to the Irish Independant, Dr. Walsh, who was speaking ahead of the board's annual conference in Galway, said none of the league tables such as the Shanghai rankings, evaluated the quality of teaching and they "don't measure how happy students are". Seriously? Does anyone think that students don't get a good education from Harvard? Or MIT? Or Berkeley? Or Cambridge? I think not. I think a better approach to these rankings is to evaluate how they can suggest improvements in what we do, learn from them, and work to improve our rankings! Also, what's wrong with evaluating universities on: Nothing in my opinion. They are all academic achievements of the highest level. We should all be working towards these goals. I do have an obvious and serious criticism of the rankings methodology though and this is a point the IUQB seems to have missed. The current rankings methodology primarily assesses knowledge creation. However there are no criteria that assess the universities' performance at exploiting the new knowledge they create. No assessment of patent's filed or technology transfer (license agreements for the exploitation of, for example, a patent). This I see as the major weakness of the ranking methodology. Increasingly it is a key objective of most universities to exploit the new knowledge they create by filing a patent and then licensing it; or even developing a prototype to validate the patent (and dare I say it - the market opportunity) and transfer it to an existing company or to help create a new company (the so called Campus Company). It is a major oversight in my opinion that patents filed and technology transfers executed are excluded from the methodology of the Shanghai University Rankings. Perhaps our universities would rise in the rankings if such criteria were included? I know WITs ranking would! Posted by bdownes at 3:46 PM | Comments (0) October 12, 2007What does the iPhone mean for the future of mobile services?So I am one of those lucky enough in Europe to own an Apple iPhone and I have used it heavily for the past three months and still love it. In my opinion the recent launch the iPhone, and in particular the YouTube service on the iPhone, has redefined what subscribers will expect from advanced mobile services in the future. Even though the iPhone is (in effect) a closed, propriety platform and the YouTube service on the iPhone has been highly customised for this one specific platform, the resultant user experience of the iPhone YouTube service is phenomenal – a major leap in the performance and usability of mobile media services. The result is that service providers should realise that any mobile service that they launch in the future will have to compete in this post-iPhone world and this raises serious issues and challenges as to how they should approach their mobile strategy. These recent iPhone (YouTube and Google Maps) services parallel similar developments on the Web. The World Wide Web (delivered over broadband) originally signalled a decrease in the popularity of the desktop (thick client) application, as many comparable services became available online in the form of Web applications. However, despite this, many users felt that they were missing some of the usability that was engrained in the desktop equivalent. The Rich Internet Application (this term RIA was I believe introduced by Macromedia in 2002) has recently emerged to addresses these issues. An RIA is a web-based application that has the features and functionality of a traditional desktop application and although they can run inside a web browser (with the aid of Ajax, Flash and Applets), a truly integrated user experience often requires the installation of a thin client on the desktop (e.g. Apple iTunes, Google Earth). GoogleMaps and YouTube on the iPhone use a similar approach: a thin client on the phone, server based technologies and rich web experience through Ajax to deliver an incredible mobile experience. The result is a new class of mobile application that goes beyond the capabilities and user experience of WAP and On Device Portals (ODP) to completely redefine the standard for compelling mobile services. As a result, these new iPhone services should be classed as a new category of mobile service – a Rich Mobile Internet Application (RMIA). The Apple and Google RMIA have effectively raised the bar for all new mobile services; even though they are effectively "hard-coded" to the iPhone. The challenge for other service providers is to provide an iPhone/YouTube-like experience for their mobile service across Open Mobile Environments (OME), including IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). As a result, a leading Internet Brand has turned to the Telecommunications and Software Systems Group (TSSG), as recognised leaders in the field of mobile and communications services, to help them with the research and development required to deliver a similar RMIA service for open mobile environments. The goal of this joint research programme will be to analyse current and future technologies and trends to determine the optimum approach to delivering next generation RMIAs across open mobile environments (i.e. access network; core network – e.g. IMS; service delivery platform (SDP); and terminal operating systems, functional and development environments). Furthermore, the research programme will assess the companies requirements for its mobile service and create a service framework for OME Rich Mobile Internet Applications. The project will then validate this service framework with a demonstrator and the company will use this demonstrator to obtain market feedback (Operator and Subscriber), which will help further refine the results of the project. We expect a number of mobile service innovations to result from this work and I look forward to highlighting them here over the coming months. Posted by bdownes at 2:47 PM | Comments (0) |
