The Auricle

If you want to automatically download programmes for use in your media player instead of listening to them live then the new BBC Podcast trial has now got an index page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/downloadtrial/subscribe.shtml Just copy the relevant Web addresses from the index into your favourite podcast application and it will do the rest. Download article […]

Interesting news on the open-source betrothal front with Moodle (usp = high student centredness) and LAMS (usp = high teacher design) deciding to live together and perhaps even becoming more integrated if things work out. The concept here appears to be that Moodle provides the course management whilst LAMS provides its activity-based digital lesson planning […]

At the moment, the majority of the global higher education sector and supporting cast, e.g. academic publishers and database brokers/owners still seem keen to ring fence what they perceive to be their prime assets or 'crown jewels' e.g books, journals, data, VLE 'courses' etc … let's call these resources. But we live in a world […]

Some Auricle readers may remember that, back in February, the UK's BT gained a lot of positive publicity from their announcement that they were uprating their broadband for existing customers to 2 Mbps. I'm one of those existing customers and today I offer my experiences of trying to benefit from what was promised. I do […]

Some major players are now entering the mobile device market. I think what we are seeing is the start of a change in which such mobile devices will very much become the norm. This change will offer considerable opportunities for learning and teaching, but will also become a significant challenge to our existing infrastructures and […]

Imagine this. You teach 'Intellectual Property' at your institution. You are invited to make a presentation on the 'Legal Use and Benefits of Peer-to-Peer Networks' to a conference hosted by your institution. Everything's fine until that phone call. Apparently, vested commercial interests don't like the theme and have threatened to make life 'difficult' for your […]

The BBC's announcement of a video download service for broadband users should be a cause for celebration. But their new interactive Media Player (iMP) carries a sting which could have implications far beyond this project. For a bit of background read the Guardian article BBC invests in a world of endless repeats and then pop […]

There's a new podcast interview available today in which I interview Brian Kelly of UKOLN about his reflections on the 14th International WWW Conference held in Japan in May 2005. Non PDA users can download the MP3 file from the Most Recent Auricle Podcasts panel at the top of Auricle. (PDA users may not see […]

Now I'm still someone who reckons that the average web page is best viewed at a minimum of 1024×768 resolution … which isn't an unreasonable expectation for someone with even a modest desktop or laptop nowadays. But my recent adoption of a PDA has rattled the bars of my cage a little. Suddenly design elements […]

Many people in the UK won't have heard of The World, but the BBC has been contributing to a bit of interesting terraforming. The World provides international news for the National Public Radio network in the US and is a co-production of the BBC World Service, Public Radio International (PRI) and WGBH Boston. But what […]