eduauweb2

Looking forward to see what people think has changed

2006-08-04T12:06:00.000+09:30

At the moment I am listening to Gerry's opening address for the "So what's changed..." seminar. It sounds like it will be an interesting day and I look forward to listening to the rest of the sessions and the followup conversations on the web.
Just the fact that I can comment on the seminar while it is happening and in a time and location that suits me is an interesting example of whats changed and it will be very interesting to see what attendees think of the implications of what is changing and continues to change.

eduauweb2

iTunes U

2006-06-21T04:01:00.000+09:30

This looks really interesting - I have just seen a demo of it at Altilab. The main point of the demo was demonstrating how content can be published to multiple platforms such as Sakai, dSpace and iTunes U. So what's iTunes U? Its a free service offered by Apple to universities to enable them to deliver their content. It uses the iTunes Music Store platform. Each university can have its own skin and fully customisable tabs. Students log in using their university identity and they can download their course content (videos, audio, text, whatever) into their iPods.
Podcasts etc can be subscribed to so they get automatic synchronisation.
Trials with it have been extremely successful. There is a bunch of interesting content besides the usual lectures, images etc such as bird calls, brain scans and other medical content.
Feedback from students has been overwhelmingly in favour of this type of delivery compared to web delivery (so much for the argument on our side of the world that students would reject this use of technology as the system invading 'their world'.
An initial concern was that students wouldn't turn up as much to their face to face lectures but this hasn't happened. In fact, the interaction in lectures has increased substantially as students arent frantically taking notes - they just need to jot down the time that something of interest to them was said and they can later skip to that part of the audio to re-listen. They are also able to play the audio at twice the pace for their revision without any loss in sound quality.
Forget any of the drm or proprietary issues for the moment and think about the rich experience this is delivering and the extremely positive feedback that was mentioned. Its really worth looking at this stuff.

eduauweb2

Tagging Services

2006-06-16T09:29:00.000+09:30

Here's a list interesting list of tracking/tagging etc related services. I'd like to know if any of us are using these or others and what their experiences are:

webride - 'attaches' discussion forums to webpages which you can then tag to organise etc
co.mments - tracks comments that you make on blogs for you
RawSugar - guided search for tagged content
ma.gnolia - social bookmarking - tag your bookmarks and share them
digg - social bookmarking - submit your story and let the community decide how useful it is
newsvine - conversation tracker
del.icio.us - more social bookmarking/tagging
BlinkList - yet another social bookmarking/tagging site
Technorati - tagging for the blogosphere

Tag your blogs with all of these services and at the minimum you'll have an interesting set of icons splattered over your page.

eduauweb2

lets see if this washes up on our shore!

Cheers.

eduauweb2 first post

2006-06-15T08:41:00.000+09:30

So... as I will be missing a couple of the web 2.0 sessions I am going to start writing up some stuff that I find and start experimenting with. First of all here is an ajax application called protopage. I have created my own page with it and you can see it here.

eduauweb2