The Auricle

by Derek Morrison, 13 December 2008 So the UK Competition Commmission has put a barrier in the way of the launch on the joint BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 Video on Demand (VoD) service with the working title of the Kangaroo project (perhaps to be called the SewSaw VoD portal?) Sky and Virgin Media weren’t […]

by Derek Morrison, 3 May 2008 The central argument of Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It is that the concept of “generativity” that has been unleashed by Web 2.0 is being increasingly compromised by increasingly ubiquituous appliances that may do limited things well but which lock or tether […]

So Amazon enters the ebook fray with its new paperback sized Kindle ebook device. There’s plenty of media coverage on this with arguably the best of these being the Guardian’s Paperback to the Future (Guardian 22 Nov 2007). But despite some interesting features its the same old “lock em in” model at work here with […]

I’m authoring this short article from a small town in Malaysia which is many miles from many of the main cities and which doesn’t enjoy, currently, the level of broadband connectivity many of us in large parts of the West have come to consider normal. It has been back to using a modem from a […]

I’m playing catch-up here but I did promise the University of Chester that I would add some further narrative to my image rich (but text poor) slides supporting the keynote ‘e-Learning: Opportunities and Threats in the 21st Century’ I gave at their recent annual staff conference (25 May 2006). Here, therefore, is my ‘value added’. […]

As some Auricle readers will know I’m seconded to the Higher Education Academy where, among other things, I’m helping get the national HE e-learning benchmarking exercise (e-benchmarking) underway. We’ve got twelve UK HEIs taking part in the pilot phase of e-benchmarking and three consultancies supporting the initiative. We are using some interesting, and for some […]

A colleague pointed me in the direction of the audio podcasts on the Learn 4 Life site. They should make interesting listening. Of particular note is the recent interview with Jason Cole about Moodle use at the UK Open University (mp3). But then I got to thinking rather more broadly about the way we are […]

So what’s a mashup? A web site or application that combines the content of one or more other sites into something new. Take bashR which blends Wikipedia, Flickr, and social bookmarking del.icio.us. Result equals article from wikipedia, photo from flickr and links related to the search areas from delicous. Other example is Chicago Crime which […]