Ian Radcliffe :: Feeds

edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: Free downloadable TV for education - it doesn't expire http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/services/bob.html

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

Links for 2009-05-22 [del.icio.us]

Apple iPhone apps, from Channel 4 - Telegraph
Another program, called “You Booze You Lose”, by Digital Goldfish, secured support even before 4iP set up the dedicated £100,000 app fund that it used to support AudioBoo. Planned for launch in two months, it is a series of games that teaches users what alcohol is doing to their body, using the iPhone’s motion sensors to make learning such frightening information feel fun. Balance tests and mental gym-like questions will be part of the appeal. Tom Loosemore, 4iP’s director, is hoping three more apps of this ilk will be generated from the fund, and describes them as “the beginning of a very different form of media”.
OffiSync - Enabling Collaboration
Bring Google's Search, collaboration, storage and much more right into your Office application.

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

edinburghmsc: via @speedysnail: d edinburghmsc RT @Glinner @TweetReport 50 Useful Twitter Tools for Writers and Researchers: http://is.gd/v8B8

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

Links for 2009-05-21 [del.icio.us]

Twitter / Matthew Somerville: Can't find bathroom light. ...
After a good reveal of some 4iP projects in London: "Can't find bathroom light. Don't want to wake house trying random switches. Will navigate by light of phone. (ps great evening)"

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Links for 2009-05-20 [del.icio.us]

I’ve Said Too Much » Messing about with local information
* Wonderful as they are, there’s something rather unnourishing about outside.in and Everyblock. And I think that’s because they’re just not very good at tracking emerging narratives, which is something local newspapers do rather well. Narratives are where aggregation fails, I reckon. * There just aren’t enough UK bloggers with local viewpoints to create a rich aggregated experience. There’s maybe two dozen really good local blogs in South East London. There’s probably that many in four blocks in Brooklyn. Americans talk more, work harder and are just more intense. * There’s something a bit sleazy about “direct aggregation” - by which I mean pulling in a blogger’s full-text feed into your site, and then slapping some ads on it. I think we need to be honest about that. So any aggregation which isn’t sleazy involves some kind of quid pro quo. And that’s hard for an aggregation start-up to provide. What I’m saying is that this stuff done ethically and well does….not…..scale.

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Links for 2009-05-19 [del.icio.us]

Telegraph drops to 5th place in Google results for MPs expenses | Online Journalism Blog
From 4iP's Tom Loosemore on the Journos' bemusement at the prominence of TheyWorkForYou: "2004 is the year TheyWorkForYou.com first published details of and league tables for MPs’ expenses, including the infamous Additional Costs Allowance. No journalists followed this up. It’s still the only place you can go to find out how much your own MP has been claiming since 2001/2. So, pretty relevent then."
BBC NEWS | Education | Web children 'living in prisons'
In a survey by Childwise research agency last autumn, 1,800 children were asked how much time they spent either watching television, on the internet or playing on games consoles. The survey suggested the children were spending 2.7 hours a day on average watching television, 1.5 hours on the internet and 1.3 hours on games consoles. A casualty of this amount of screen time had been reading, it suggested. The children questioned were spending just over half an hour a day reading. In particular, older boys were resistant to reading, with 42% of 11 to 16-year-olds saying they never read books for pleasure.

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Links for 2009-05-18 [del.icio.us]

Victor Keegan: Pundits say that the new need is for hyperlocal information about what is going on around us | Technology | The Guardian
Lots of 4iP products in this article: Recently, I was surprised that there were no appointments at my local eye hospital until 21 October, so I registered this point with patientopinion.org, which then asked me what else was good and bad about the hospital so that, once complaints and bouquets are aggregated, improvements can be made. I was roped in last week to test an embryonic website, thumbprintcity.com, that encourages neighbourliness at street level. I posted a "Walking with Shakespeare" tour of London using SMS, photographs hosted on Flickr and brief recordings using audioboo.fm. The hope is that residents of, say, Acacia Avenue will send texts about the blossoming of a lilac tree, or whatever, which is pinpointed on a map. There are even hopes to enlist police to text about inconsequential things they see on their beat, which could diminish fear of crime while raising their profile.
Scottish Video Game Archive
This site aims to list the contents of the catalogue of games that will be stored (hopefully) at the library of the Paisley campus of the University of the West of Scotland, as well as facillitating discussion about other games to add to the collection.
Twitter / katemonaghan: I *hate* the BBC's e-commi ...
I *hate* the BBC's e-commissioning system. Why is it so clunky and rubbish? Can't they learn something from Channel 4, 4iP etc?
wikiup : games
The Wikiup Games Project is focused on creating a new paradigm for game content development through collaborative authorship.
Visual Search
We liked shoot-and-search application, Plink, too. The start-up offers technology which can accurately find matches of photographed images in a fraction of a second, so if you take a picture of a DVD on your smartphone, Plink will link you to a trailer. Similarly, a photograph of a painting will lead you to a Wikipedia article. Very handy.

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

edinburghmsc: via @anna_jambat: is anyone going to DiGRA 2009?

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

Links for 2009-05-15 [del.icio.us]

RPX: Instant OpenID and Data Portability
Brilliant all-in-one signup for your sites.
Home | 12seconds.tv (beta)
Broadcast vids to Twitter Update your FB Mobile phone update iPhone app Daily challenges
PlanningAlerts.com | Email alerts of planning applications near you

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Links for 2009-05-14 [del.icio.us]

Mobile data dongle stats
* Dongle data usage increased by 4,125% in twelve months * Dongle subscriptions surged by over 504% * Mobile handset data usage increases by 108%
Totnes Pound Project | Transition Town Totnes
Totnes is the UK’s first Transition Initiative, that is, a community in a process of imagining and creating a future that addresses the twin challenges of diminishing oil and gas supplies and climate change, and creates the kind of community that we would all want to be part of. Economic localisation is considered to be a key aspect of the transition process, and local currency systems provide the opportunity to strengthen the local economy whilst preventing money from leaking out.
Prop 8 Maps
Proposition 8 changed the California state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. These are the people who donated in order to pass it. An interesting question of how transparent people are prepared to be.
Bijlmermeer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bijlmermeer neighborhood, which houses thousands of people, was designed as a single project. The buildings have several features that distinguish them from traditional high-rise flats in The Netherlands, like tubular walkways connecting the flats and garages. The flats are separated by large areas of 'green'; fields of grass and trees. Each flat has its own garages where cars can be parked. The Bijlmer was designed with two levels of traffic. Cars drive on the top level, the decks of which fly over the lower level's pedestrian avenues and bicycle paths. This separation of fast and slow moving traffic is beneficial to traffic safety. However, in recent years, the roads are once again being flattened, so pedestrians, cycles and cars travel alongside each other. This is a move to lessen the effects of the 'inhuman' scale of some of the Bijlmer's designs. It is felt a direct line of sight will also improve safety from muggers.

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Links for 2009-05-13 [del.icio.us]

Chris Harrison - SearchClock
Amazing visualisation inspiration: I was curious about how people used the internet. Specifically, I wanted to see how internet behavior changed over the course of a day. Search engines are the gateway to the internet for most people, and so search queries provide insight into what people are doing and thinking.
Create a Wordpress-based Blog Network With Blogs.mu
the problem is, installing, upgrading and maintaining WordPress isn’t really that easy for every end user, and the same goes for WordPress MU. This is where Blogs.mu comes into play; it’s WordPress MU, simplified.
Google Insights for Search
See the search trends in regions around the world, and use it to improve the ideas you're working on
Web 2.0 Guidelines - Central Wiki Service
Edinburgh Uni's wiki which includes their "web 2.0 guidance", but the guidance is on a PDF instead of on the page. Missed opportunity

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Scotland teaching agency LTS launches iTunes U

I'm pleased to see that former colleagues in Learning and Teaching Scotland have managed to get their LTS iTunes U site opened, following our friends at the Open University. Scotland heads out as the first iTunes U provider of professional development material podcasts for those working with 3-18 year olds.

It's not been an easy journey. In 2005, on joining LTS to head up their Modern Languages work, I challenged the organisation to get podcasting (audio) the entire Scottish Learning Festival contents, and video as much as possible. Four years on we're still not able to access good quality recordings of everything, despite the costs of doing so being derisory and the long-tail interest being high - just take a look at the figures viewing what might be conceived as obscure education topics on the Slideshare site I created for the event.

We also had a challenge getting more audio and video material out in subsequent years through the now-defunkt Connected Live site, intended to be an evolution of the print magazine with media-rich addition to the limits of the atom presented by the magazine. Arguably, as with all social media projects in the large, it took two years for the culture to change sufficiently for blogging one's experiences to be seen as part and parcel of one's work, not a geeky pass-time. Mike Coulter along with Saint Andrew of Brown and others have continued to develop that culture slowly and successfully over the past year. We now have an education agency with elements that have moved the organisation from its glossy corporate sheen, to a more 'honest', approachable voice.

LTS's involvement with iTunes U is part of that evolution, and signifies a small victory for those of us who had been pushing for some more budget and effort to be spent on bite-sized professional development designed for small mobile screens, at a time when there was no YouTube or video podcast device.

The organisation's biggest challenge is to make sure it does not become the voice of the marketer or a self-referential poster-child for the politics of education, but a place where grassroots honesty and constructive reflection on our teaching and learning practice can be amplified.

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: grants for students. deadline June 18th 2009. http://escalate.ac.uk/grants/student

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

Links for 2009-05-12 [del.icio.us]

IdentityBlog - Digital Identity, Privacy, and the Internet's Missing Identity Layer
My presentation to the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference was a concrete look at how claims-based system design affects developers, and the synergies they will obtain by adopting the model. It argued, in essence, that there is ONE relevant architecture for identity (NOT to be confused with “one single monolithic identity, which is an anathema!) That ONE architecture works in the enterprise, in the cloud and in the home, and works on many loosely-coupled systems designed by many vendors to do many things - in the enterprise and in the cloud.
A glimpse of the future | Resource | guardian.co.uk
When it comes to curriculum enrichment, Ewan McIntosh, digital commissioner for Channel 4's £50m Innovation for the Public Fund (4iP), points to the continuing evolution of social networking, weblogs and microblogs such as Twitter and Jaiku. "It's not meaningless chatter; it's all about what you are doing, what you are learning, what you are learning next," he says. He also suggests that teachers look at what their pupils received for Christmas. "Gaming technology is probably the most tangible example in the classroom. At Musselburgh grammar school, Guitar Hero has been built into a whole new context for learning; when the pupils design their band's world tour, it includes budgets, geography and location, marketing and writing band biographies."

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

edinburghmsc: via @jar: AHRC PhD studentship at UCL and the National Archives - user participation in archive description. http://bit.ly/ZmlD5

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

edinburghmsc: via @jimwolffman: Higher Ed and social media JISC report out today http://tinyurl.com/pnwo2m - via @mrhyde

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: the JISC report 'Higher Education in a Web 2.0 world' is out. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/heweb20rpt ...

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

edinburghmsc: via @jimwolffman: Oops. The Education2020 unconference link should've been this: http://twurl.nl/2nrieh - Apologies all

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

edinburghmsc: via @jimwolffman: Education 2020 unconference - June 12th - Islay, Scotland - http://education2020.wikispaces.com/Unconference 2009

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

Links for 2009-05-11 [del.icio.us]

Games in Schools: Research results released!
European Schoolnet is undertaking a major study sponsored by the Interactive Software Federation of Europe on the use of games in schools in Europe: video games, computer games, online games that run on consoles, computers, handhelds or mobile phones.

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education