Welcome to my ‘new look’ ‘What I’ve starred …’ posts. Small change in strategy moving to a monthly posting rather than weekly. I’m also going to spend more time annotating these links to help you decide what to click through to. If you can’t wait until the end of the month all these they get pushed to my Google Reader Shared Items and Twitter account. I’m interested to hear if prefer this or the old format … or something different.
So without further ado: Here’s some posts which have caught my attention this month:
- Could Librarians Be Influential Friends? And Who Owns Your Search Persona? – October 27, 2010 – Great post by Tony Hirst exploring the idea of curated searches. The basic premise is that search engines are increasing returning personalised results based on things like your web search history, social profile etc. Tony speculates a personalised search of an academic librarian could be shared to help students and staff with academic research.
- Collborate on Gemini – October 27, 2010 – Post by Kevin Brace at Aston University pulling out some highlights from an online session on Blackboard’s roadmap for merging the Horizon Wimba & Elluminate webinar platforms into the new Gemini platform
- Partners shake up LMS market with Moodle Distribution for Corporate Enterprises – (Totara) – October 27, 2010 – Highlighted to me by Kevin Brace, this is a press release announcing a joint venture by Kineo, Catalyst IT and Flexible Learning Network to “develop and distribute a version of the Moodle Learning Management System for the corporate sector”
- Paper: Learning and Teaching in Universities Scotland’s public affairs strategy – October 25, 2010 – Seems everyone in the public sector is keen to evidence impact. This paper outlines Universities Scotland’s public affairs strategy. Here is an interesting exert:
“Learning and teaching and skills development is obviously central to the university mission. However, Universities Scotland officers feel that there has not been sufficient focus given to teaching as part of Universities Scotland’s campaigning strategy of late and we would like to address that. This is important, not least in anticipation of impending funding cuts (where cuts to the number of funded places and/or the level of teaching resource is possible). There are also a number of important policy agendas that will directly impact on learning and teaching within universities over the next couple of years. Key amongst these is the skills agenda from which universities are largely absent to the benefit of colleges as this agenda has grown in economic significance. Curriculum for Excellence will become key for universities as it has now been implemented at secondary schools and will produce a different kind of learner that will be applying to and entering higher education. The college sector has also been pursuing an aggressive campaign that they can deliver more HE more cheaply than universities.”
- Best Web Analytics Tools: Quantitative, Qualitative, Life Saving! by Avinash Kaushik – October 26, 2010 – From Rachel Harris “Great overview of Web(site) Analytics & different tools by level of analysis, Occam’s Razor” – even if you think you know about web analytics this post is worth a read because there is potential a lot more you could be doing
- Government invests £200m in technology centres to drive growth in the UK’s most high-tech industries – October 25, 2010 – Phil Leggetter highlighted “No mention of Software or IT. Why does the government always think manufacturing? Small rant here http://bit.ly/9WGAvh”
- AudioFeeds Alerts Deliver Social Media Updates with Soothing 3D Sounds (mainly because Glasgow Uni research) – October 25, 2010
- Apple Adds Special Education Section to the App Store – October 25, 2010 – As Steve Lee pointed out “a lot of highly useful special education apps won’t make it onto the Apple App Store due to tight control” Steve’s tweet
- iTunes U: an Institutional Perspective – October 25, 2010 – guest post by Jeremy Speller on UK Web Focus on UCL’s use of iTunesU
- Googlios – resources/information on using Google tools as a free ePortfolio – October 25, 2010
- Amazon to allow book lending on the Kindle (from Good Gear Guide) via @benelwell – October 25, 2010
- Morrisons to pay tuition fees for students on university course it funds – October 25, 2010
- Hamster Free Video Converter Is a Dead Simple Drag and Drop Video Conversion Tool [Video] – October 19, 2010
- Declan Fleming’s observations of University of Bath’s institutional lecture capture service Panopto (includes ref to other papers in this area) via @nrparmar – October 20, 2010
- Copyright Guidelines for Lecture Recording – ALT Open Access Repository – October 19, 2010 – "Sample copyright guidelines to give to staff wishing to use their Institution’s lecture recording facilities" via @A_L_T – [I initially had a problem getting a copy of this but the ALT team and their web host resolved this very quickly]
- Netskills: News: BCE skills evaluation tool launches – October 19, 2010 – “An online self-evaluation tool, set to help universities and colleges identify development needs and point users towards relevant resources”
- Msn – student who don’t use it or use it all the time do best in module marks. – October 19, 2010 – Summary of “M. Rutter (2009). `Messenger in The Barn: networking in a learning environment’. ALT-J: Research in Learning Technology 17(1):33-47.” by Alex Spiers @alextronic
- Say what
you will about edtech, at least it’s an ethos… « bavatuesdays – October 19, 2010 - Tell us more about your online courses, says JISC study : JISC – October 19, 2010 –“highlights the need for universities and colleges to improve information available to students about online courses. According to the report, institutions could do more to show students the breadth of online courses available, and accessibility could be improved by structuring the information to mirror the searching methods of potential students.”
- OpenStudy Teams Up With MIT OpenCourseWare to Help OCW Users Study Together – October 18, 2010 – And last month “RT @hamacleod Recession leads MIT to consider paywallhttp://tinyurl.com/355mvl7 #ukoer”