As mentioned in a previous post, I've suddenly found myself in the position of teaching "expert systems". Starting a course like this at the last minute is tough. Not least because the college where I teach has a "locked down" policy and won't allow mere users like me to install any software on the student machines.

There is, of course, a process for requesting software to be installed, but I've been asking for a Java SDK and runtime for over six months now, and still haven't got it. I'm now reduced to teaching software development using in-browser JavaScript and a horrible DOS-box version of Basic. Sigh.

So, if I want to get the students actually using any expert systems, I need one that can be run with no installation. Don't even suggest the idea of a server-side thin-client approach. We're unlikely to ever get any chance of installing and configuring server-side software.

Luckily, I think I've found just the thing. A reasonable expert system which can be programmed by tinkering with a plain text file, requires no installation, and is small enough to store in individual student file space. It's called e2gLite, a "lite" version of the full-fat expertise2go system. e2gLite is just a 30k applet that loads from a file system or from a remote server. The look and feel is not especially pretty, but for educational use it's teriffic. I was able to get my students running and tinkering with an actual, usable, expert system in the very first lesson.

Many thanks to the guys at expertise2go for making this neat tool available for free!

Thanks to Steve Freeman at Mock Turtle Soup for pointing out this really useful looking CSS-based cross-browser slideshow technique. View the slideshow, then "view source" on the page to see just how neat it is. Then try a "print preview" or a "print" to see how smoothly it makes handouts from the same data.

I can really see myself largely dispensing with those huge and clunky powerpoint files in favour of these lovely lean, text-based ones. Best of all it's Creative Commons licenced, so we're free to use it as we wish. Sweet!

I've recently taken on teaching Information technology key skills to five groups of "hairdressing" and "hair and beauty" students. As part of the teaching and assessment process, I negotiate a project proposal with each of the students. They then use the key skills we cover in the classroom to build a portfolio of evidence based on their project.

Even though I have only been teaching this course for a few weeks, I have learned a lot. These students are in many ways different from the ones I teach on the full computer courses. I was prepared for a general lack of interest in IT, but some of the other differences in attitude have caught me off guard.

Of particular relevance to my grumble from a few days ago about lack of consumer choice is the (to my mind at least) strange attitude of some of the students to "fashion" and advertising generally. I can accept that they are much more interested in hair styles, beauty products, and clothing than I am. After all, that's the kind of course they have chosen to study. What really astonishes me is a kind of willing acceptance of "fashion" as a driving force. These people really don't want to be shown everything and allowed to choose. They want to be told what is the current fashion, and to immerse themselves in it.

This makes it very hard to choose individual project topics. It's as if they have been trained to eliminate all traces of individualism, with the greatest peer respect going to those who are more like the advertised shared ideal than any of the others. The saddest part is that several of the students are obviously only on the course because they think it is an acceptable thing for "people like them" to do. Motivation is completely external. They drift on the tides of advertised fashion and imagined opinion.

All of which makes getting much else than "I'll do what she's doing" when asking for a project proposal a tough process.

I regularly read Dennis Jerz's weblog, and I'm often impressed by the threads he chooses to discuss. I'm often also slightly worried by how he consistently writes about things I've only got around to musing on.

In this case, Dennis points out an article from Wired about online buying habits. This is a topic close to my heart, and I've had many a coffee-pot rant with colleagues around this topic.

Strangely enough, my first thoughts along these lines happened when I needed a replacement door handle. I went to all the local hardware and DIY stores, and was appalled to find that they all had exactly the same range. Even though the businesses were competitors, they ended up with the same stock. I guessed they'd all independently done the same profitability and demographics analysis, and were all chasing the same, increasingly elusive, "average consumer". I never did buy the replacement door handle. Everyone lost out.

Having observed this "chasing the mode" effect once, I began to see it more and more. Every time anyone complains about TV scheduling conflicts, or you can only find the top selling discs in the record store, or all the clothes shops are full of winter coats half way through summer, or you get massive deja vu in every shopping mall.

The more this happens, though, the more everyone loses out. Each retailer sells less product, because they are all fighting for the same small pool of customers (even though all their surveys no doubt point to it as the largest or most profitable group). Sure, these modal customers (or those who can convince themselves they want what "everyone else" wants) can probably get a good deal because of the competition, but all the rest of the possible customers are left unserviced.

Enter the internet. The first internet answer to this problem was one of copying and sharing. It's been branded as illegal, but it won't stop until it's no longer needed. Say I hear a track on the radio, and like it. I look in the record store, but it's an "oldie" and no longer available. It's obviously still worth listening to, so if I can't buy it I'll consider looking for a "pirate" copy. Say I'm looking for a book but it's no longer in print ("Fly Fishing" by J R Hartley, anyone?). If I can find the text online I'll download it.

eBay, has made massive profits simply by enabling people to bypass the market-share analysts and sell direct. All it takes is one interested customer and you've made a sale. Those modal customers are suddenly at a disadvantage. If I'm the only buyer, I get the item at a rock-bottom price. If I'm competing, the price drives up. Abebooks allows thousands of small used bookstores to sell to a global customer base, and I've now got on my shelf books I'd only ever vaguely heard of. Customers plumbing the depths of iTunes is just another symptom, but it shows how Apple have grabbed the idea and run with it.

Other sellers are now waking up to the notion of off-market selling. I don't want "the most popular". I don't want any "top picks". I don't want the seller to choose what I might want. Show me everything and let me pick. And you know what, I might just buy some of those things you thought you'd never sell...