The Auricle

Since I embarked on this podcast production and consumption journey I've found I'm now listening to international programming that I would never have conceived of when previously wedded to the usual media suspects, in my case mainly the BBC. A recent addition to my portfolio of listening pleasure is NPR's 'On the Media'. For the […]

Today, using Skype and Audacity, I recorded an interview with John Dale, Head of Development at the University of Warwick's ELab which developed BlogBuilder, part of the growing e-tools portfolio being developed by Warwick. The more I look at what Warwick's been doing the more impressed I become. These people have really got it. They […]

The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (subscription service) report on Implications of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems for Universities: An analysis of Benefits and Risks has just been released (issue 30, April 2005) and it needs to go straight on to the essential reading list. The authors Neil Pollock, University of Edinburgh and James Cornford, University […]

When I first heard this I thought it must be a joke or I had fallen asleep and was in some weird dream, but then I woke up to find we are actually participating in a surrealistic Kafka fable. A JISCMail discussion list on VLEs has really been suspended because it, and others, are apparently […]

Imagine this. I can proudly announce we've negotiated a national license for Blackboard, WebCT, or whatever is your preference. So now I look forward to full integration across the primary, secondary, tertiary and higher education sectors. Couldn't happen? … Oh yes it could. The extract below sets the context for this post. The Connecticut implementation […]

There was an interesting presentation about Confidence Based Marking at the Shock of the Old 2005 conference (Oxford 7 Apr 2005). Tony Gardner-Medwin from University College London illustrated how CBM could be used as part of an approach to Computer Assisted Assessment which moves away from testing just surface learning and which enables CAA to […]

I gave the opening keynote yesterday (7 Apr 2005) at this year's Shock of the Old conference at Oxford University's Said Business School. It was a really good, informative event with the theme of implementing innovation. It had first rate inputs from other speakers from both the higher and further education sectors. Shock of the […]

In November 2004 I posted an Auricle item entitled A 'Filling Station' Model of eLearning supplemented, in the interim, by a few additional items on podcasting etc. Into the fray now comes Sony's Play Station Portable (PSP) with which it hopes to gain back its dominant position in the portable device market, a position so […]

It's got some pretty big names behind it, e.g. Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Drupal, so the open source, all volunteer, Ourmedia initiative certainly merits some serious attention. The Internet Archive's founder, Brewster Kahle, has apparently pledged to preserve any material uploaded so I guess that suggests long term viability. If you want free, and […]

Last week (11-20 March 2005) was the UK's National Science Week. It's, therefore, a bit ironic that, despite its public good/education brief, we find that the BBC can't find the funding to support The Naked Scientists. The Naked Scientists is (or is that was?) a project which, among other activities, produces a weekly live radio […]