The Auricle

In my recent Auricle article A filling station model of e-learning? I suggested that integrated mobile multimedia players and communication devices could be the 'googly' which catches advocates of centralized e-learning solutions unawares. So are the major proprietary interests responding to this? Apparently not. But … At least one vendor has now pitched in to […]

The Guardian Online recently ran a story Risk Free Rebellion (11 November 2004) which I thought was quite interesting. The story described how 'Live CDs' provide a risk free mechanism for testing distributions (distros) of the open source Linux operating system without having to install it on your system and run the risk of giving […]

One of the tools my colleague Brian Kelly from UKOLN provided for delegates to yesterday's UCISA workshop in Leeds was the Mozilla FireFox extension Wikalong. Here's some brief initial commentary on this interesting 'e'-tool. Basically, Wikalong puts an editable web page (a Wiki) in the sidebar of Firefox. So why would Wikalong be of relevance? […]

Today I'm in Leeds where I'm one of the speakers at the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) event Beyond Email: Strategies for Collaborative Working and Learning in the 21st Century. I'm here with Brian Kelly, one of my colleagues from UKOLN, which is also based at the University of Bath. Brian holds the […]

If you fancy access to 100,000 images and sounds courtesy of the British Library then visit Collect Britain which describes itself as “the British Library's largest digitisation project to date.” Several things are of note. It's UK National Lottery funded (New Opportunities Fund), so we, mainly the great British public, have paid for its development. […]

The beta of Google Scholar is now available. This new area of Google activity describes itself thus “Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic […]

David Wiley's online course Understanding Online Interaction is well worth a visit. Why? Several things stand out. First; it's a model of clarity. Second; the content is reusable because it's offered under a Creative Commons 'Attribution Share-Alike' license. Third; note the use of Plone the extensible open source content management system I highlighted in an […]

The Rice University Webcasts are another excellent example of the power of syndication. I've added the RSS feed to Auricle's Learning Objects drop down menu (top of the home page). If you want to add the RSS feed to your own RSS aggregator or RSS capable web site the URL is http://www.rice.edu/webcast/webcasts.rss. Download article as […]

The BBC doesn't seem to want to make a lot of noise about it, but they appear to be running a very low profile podcasting trial at the moment. The BBC has been running their excellent 'listen again' streaming service for a while now but what's important about this trial is that the audio link […]

There's an interesting update on the James Farmer situation over on his blog. James' institution seem a tad more flexible but I daresay there's a number of people wondering why the only way space for such innovation can be found is via the language of spin and obfuscation. The comments to James' article add further […]