Fortnightly Mailing

Educause RSS feed aggregator

[4 January 2010] Sadly the Educause link below no longer functions.

Educause has this well implemented aggregation of RSS feeds, for a wide range of education-related topics. Useful if you want to show what RSS is to someone who is unfamiliar with RSS as a medium, and how feed aggregation works.

BrowserCam - test how web content looks on different combinations of browser and operating system

Updated 15/12/2013

I wrote about BrowserCam in the 31/5/2004 Fortnightly Mailing and included some sampe screen-grabs. Since then the service, which enables you to submit web content for testing across a large number of browser/operating system/platform combinations, has been extended, and the BrowserCam site redesigned. Good enough to deserve being recommended a second time. Unfortunately, BrowserCam ceased to run in February 2013. A possible alternative would be CrossBrowserTesting, though I have not tried it.

Quick Online Tips

Quick Online Tips has  "Technology News, Smart Blogging Tips, Essential Computer Software, and Web Services”. Access the most popular of these, 6 of which are described as being regularly updated.

The anatomy of an (unreserved) apology

It is sometimes dangerous to comment on a fast-moving situation, in this case the long-running UK higher education pay dispute. But the first 8 or 10 minutes of this transcript from the 24/5/2006 UK Parliamentary Education and Skills Committee [danger - link may have broken] is worth listening to. In it you hear Geoffrey Copland and Jocelyn Prudence, respectively Chair and Chief Executive of the Universities and College Employers' Association, taken angrily to task by Committee Chair Barry Sheerman MP, and apologising unreservedly and nervously for issuing a press release which falsely claimed that the Education and Skills Committee had called for the unions to ballot their members on the employers' most recent pay offer. It had done no such thing.

Snow goggles for dogs

I took this picture outside the Breche de Roland hut above Gedre in the French Pyrenees in August 1979. The alsation was owned by the hut-warden. I somehow prefer the dog's gear to these, which have had "new invention" press coverage lately:

Martin Dougiamas speaking in Sheffield on 27/7/2006

The South Yorkshire E-learning Special Interest Group has arranged for Martin Dougiamas (the man behind Moodle), and Jason Cole (Product Development Manager from the Moodle-using Open University) to present their plans for the future development of Moodle in front of an audience and expert panel (Adam Cooper, Tribal Education, Ian Dolphin, University of Hull, Stuart Sim, Sun Microsystems) at a free afternoon seminar at Sheffield's Royal Victoria Hotel. Probably worth travelling for.  27/7/2006 - full report from the meeting.

Link to report from meeting added 31/7/2006.

Free on-line training for pension fund trustees

Not sure who these sinister looking people are, but the UK Pension Regulator's decision to publish a freely available online course for pension fund trustees is an ambitious and interesting one which you could imagine being extended to, for example, charity trustees or company directors.

The first of its kind, the Trustee toolkit is a free, practical and interactive online training programme designed to improve trustees’ knowledge and understanding, and help them meet statutory requirements.

The course, implemented in Flash, and, from the look of it, pretty big and complicated, has been developed by Epic plc, and when you enrol on it you can opt to be sent a completion certificate signed by the Pensions Regulator.

Press release from the Pensions Regulator. Login page for the Trustee toolkit.

Google's China problem (and China's Google problem)

Thorough and informative 23/4/2006 article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson about Google and its role and development in China. The introductory paragraph reads:

For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese university about how young Chinese should compete with the rest of the world, scalpers sold tickets for $60 apiece. At another, an audience of 8,000 showed up; students sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word. It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China's high-tech youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon and is fluent in both English and Mandarin. Before joining Google last year, he worked for Apple in California and then for Microsoft in China; he set up Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research-and-development lab in Beijing.

Here is a printer-friendly rendering of the article, which, depending on your printer and browser set-up, will fill about 12 pages if as I did you decide to print it before you read it. In a related vein, you may also be interested in The party, the people and the power of cyber-talk, from the 27/4/2006 edition of the Economist.

Disabled people and ICT: Draft Charter

Disabled people and ICT is a UK project funded by the Alliance for Digital Inclusion, an industry body of members (including Microsoft, BT, AOL, and CISCO) "committed to the Digital Inclusion agenda". Part of the project is to create a charter, to be presented to Government and industry, that outlines a strategy for inclusion, with recommendations for action. The charter, on which comments are sought, will be launched on 15 May 2006 at a Parliamentary reception.

Disabled people and ICT will be providing an online list of experts that understand the challenges faced by disabled people and wants to hear from professionals working on issues relevant to disabled people and ICT.

Scottish pupils to sit public exams online

According to the BBC, school pupils in Scotland will sit exams online for the first time. Using systems provided by the Bradford company BTL, 120 pupils and students in schools and colleges across Scotland will sit a public multiple choice exam in biotechnology, described by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) as a "significant milestone" in modernising exams.  (Thanks to reader Che Osborne, for this, who works for BTL.)