The Auricle

If you're at all interested in the transformative/disruptive potential of the internet on established businesses and all our lives then yesterday's BBC In Business programme (8 May 2005) is well worth 30 minutes of your time. For those of us involved or interested in educational and learning technologies then IMHO there are big implications embedded […]

Here's another post on the theme of nodes on the internet/intranet becoming the 'filling stations' for a more portable/flexible approach to online and blended learning. Notice how I've managed to drop the 'e' word and added the 'blended' word in there:) Auricle readers not familiar with previous articles may find A 'filling station' model of […]

Picked this one up via the Daily Source Code. A new German kid on the podcast block. Thomas Wanhoff offers an English language version of his weekly science news podcast called ScienceCast.Net. Download article as PDF

Way back in the early days of Auricle I proposed that the humble weblog perhaps offered an alternative, but more appropriate, model for building a VLE. I've revisited this theme several times if for no other reason than to challenge my original thinking. Have I changed my mind? No … if anything, I'm becoming even […]

One of this week's items in the On the Media (22 April 2005) podcast was an interview with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive fame. Brewster's got even bigger plans. If you want to listen in you've got two choices. Either download the whole programme MP3 (21.9 MB) or listen to the streamed item The […]

Last Wednesday (13 April 2005) the not-for-profit LAMS Foundation (managed by Macquarie University) launched the open source version (GPL) of the IMS Learnng Design 'inspired' Learning Activity Management System. LAMS is a visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities; so those with a personal preference for a heavy dose of teacher design in […]

Richard Treves posted a good challenge to my critique of the New Zealand Moodle decision. My response grew beyond what's comfortable for a comment so here it is as a full posting. As I indicated in World's largest deployment of Moodle? (part 1), if we're going to be using VLEs/LMSs then I would rather it […]

I picked this one up via Stephen Downes' OLDaily. The Kiwis are apparently moving over to the open source VLE/LMS Moodle big time. Their Open Polytechnic is leading a consortium project with a budget of NZD 1 million for open source procurement. You might expect me to be cheering this one on but … While […]

The UK's Creative Archive Group have launched their licensing system which will enable the BBC, Channel 4, the Open University, and the British Film Institute (and any other body which joins) to make available some of their resources from their extensive audio and video archives. Great stuff but … The FAQs are probably the most […]

The BBC's podcast pilot with programmes like In Our Time and the Reith Lectures appears to be leading to a broader rollout of this efficient approach to programme distribution. Yesterday's (14 Apr 2005) press release by the BBC states that a further 20 programmes are to be offered for download. Download article as PDF