BBC Topics

BBC have just unveiled a new project, BBC Topics, to gather content from across the BBC, showing you the most relevant content they have to offer on a range of specific topics. They've just a small sample of topics to begin with, but will be adding many more soon. Topics include cancer, climate change, inflation; countries include Russia, and Personalities include David Cameron and Nigella Lawson...

Death of Live Search Academic and Live Search Books

So Microsoft have pulled the plug on their Live Search Academic and Live Search Books programmes. The content as exists will remain in the generic Microsoft Live Search, but the two separate search facilities will be no more. Set up to rival Google's digitisation projects and Google Scholar, the hope was that the content would lure more users to go to Live Search. This did not happen, and there was found to be no sustainable business case for continuation, which means that Google has moved into an even stronger position with its Scholar and Book Search.

Universities with channels on i-Tunes

University College London have begun a channel which will feature lectures, interviews via i-Tunes. This follows the example of Open University's channel. Maybe this free educational provision will attract a new type of student and encourage them to take the paying courses.

Guides to Second Life

If you want some quick fire information about Second Life and what it is, you should try the new Educause guide Seven Things You should know about Second Life.

More from LOEX 2008

Came across a LOEXCollaborate 2008 Learning Wiki, using PBWiki which may be of interest. There are some examples of student class wikis. I liked the interactive annotation session where attendees to the session were given first-hand experience of how to create an annotation for a scholarly article using the CRAP test (currency, reliability, authority, purpose/point of view) : I'll have to use those acronyms for my evaluation teaching...

I am not dead!

It's been 4 weeks or so since I lasted posted....thanks to some contributions from Sheila Webber, you may not even have noticed! Back from vacation in Austria I've been getting over the shock of 320 e-mails on return plus a heavy teaching load last week, taking part in a seminar in Bradford and refereeing contributions for the Online Conference in December ....look forward to posting again later in the week. Austria was great -recommend it for cycling, walking, eating, drinking....

User created content

Gerry McKiernan just alerted us to a book that has a free pdf version:
Vickery, G. and Wunsch-Vincent, S. (2007) Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking. Paris: OECD. ISBN: 978926403746. The free version is at http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9307031E.PDF
This was originally prepared for the OECD in December 2006.