NewsBlast!

NewsBlast! is a new service from the people who bring you all good things informational. God, you don't really deserve us, do you? (Quit whining & get on with it. Ed.)
Anyway, Newsblast! is our very own news aggregator online, gathering together many different news strands from a variety of sources. Here you will find:

• Latest additions to the Intute subject gateways;
• News from the JISC;
• Latest headlines from the BBC, etc.
• Details of the latest developments in education & FE from across the universe.

More will be added in due course. Just think. A team of information gatherers working for you. Just think.

Find Newsblast! here - http://www.pageflakes.com/sgrant.ashx

(Also available in the right-hand menu).

PsychSplash

PsychSplash is a project by Gareth Furber aimed at reviewing the web for Psychologists. The idea grew out of his interest in the web and fascination with how something so huge like the internet could actually make your life easier.
Gareth says "What you will find on PsychSplash is an ongoing commentary of Psychology-relevant websites and applications. I hope to make this an interactive process, hence you will find that you can comment on my articles and make suggestions, express your opinion or just direct me (and others) to sites that you have found useful."
I heartily concur.
http://www.psychsplash.com/
Interested? His Pageflake pages contain a dizzying number of newsfeeds - blogs, news, books & journals. Worth a look.
http://www.pageflakes.com/gareth.furber.ashx#

Source: Intute

For Air Miles millionaires

You'll have to do this at home. Involves a download & install. Bad!
The Schmap Player is a small and easy-to-use piece of freeware. Install it on your Windows PC, select from our growing range of interactive Schmap Guides and then... get Schmapping!
Every Schmap Guide comes with dynamic maps, useful links, playable tours, top picks, plus photos and reviews for hundreds of sights and attractions, hotels, restaurants, bars, parks, theaters, galleries, museums...
There are 10 UK guides at the moment, with more to follow, plus another 46 European destinations & 59 in the Americas.
12 hours later - downloaded this at home with the Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin & New York guides. Truly excellent piece of kit. So there!
http://www.schmap.com/

Economic with the truth

As someone who survived a full term (& a brush with professordom) of Political Economy (the posh term), I've always been a bit suspicious about economists. Alex Salmond, after all, is an economist. However...
EconTalk is an economics podcast hosted by Russ Roberts of the Library for Economics and Liberty. This weekly audio show takes an economic issue and usually discusses it with a researcher in the field. The shows can downloaded, listened to from the website or accessed using a free subscription via an RSS feed. The accompanying website features show notes and recommendations for further reading from economics blogs, academic papers and other websites. Users can access the archive of previous show by subject, featured interviewee or date.
http://www.econtalk.org/

Another site which is worth a look (i.e. materials are freely available) is Econport which is a microeconomics digital library, produced by the Experimantal Economics Center at Georgia State University. It features information on a series of experiments, a handbook of microeconomics with experiments to reinforce learning, a catalogue of annotated microeconomics resources that are available online and a glossary of microeconomics terms.
http://www.econport.org

Source: Intute

Sports Management Report

Sports Management Report is an online full-text journal on sports management. The website includes features, current news, events and jobs in the sports industry. The news section is searchable by keyword. To use the weekly email alert service of Sports Management Report, you are required to register, which is free of charge.
http://www.sportsmanagement.co.uk/

Source: Intute

Dancing on the head of a pin

Interested in the development of Western philosophy? Can't be bothered reading the standard texts? Read on...
Squashed Philosophers is a website offering abridged versions of some classic philosophical texts. Significant works of many well-known philosophers can be found here, and classical and early modern philosophy are particularly well-represented. Also included are some political, psychoanalytic and scientific texts at the margins of philosophy. The abridgement has been carried out by Glyn Hughes (who has performed a similar task for some religious and literary texts).
http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/

Source: Intute

Biting the hand

I wouldn't want you to think that this blog has a wee touch of paranoia about Google (or Microsoft for that matter). Let's just call it acute concern, shall we say? After all, with CCTV round every street corner & the threat of UK ID cards never quite receding, well, we're becoming used to a certain lack of privacy. But I'm not so sure that I want Google, benevolent organisation as it may be, lurking on my hard drive, observing my every move / search / purchase & selling this information on to anyone with the necessary cash.Paranoia? Read the article in today's Guardian G2 supplement by Andrew Brown. http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1859629,00.html
They know all about you. Purty scary, part two.

And, turn the page, and we've got Tom Vanderbilt on Dubya's James Bond fantasy. http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1859632,00.html Except that it's not fantasy. Is this Bush's secret bunker? Oh that the Smoking Gunmen should have lived to see this. And perhaps they did...

Source: The Guardian

Blend that learning

The Moving Image Gateway (MIG) is a new service that collects together websites that relate to moving images and sound and their use in higher and further education. The sites are classified by academic discipline, some forty subjects from Agriculture to Women's Studies, collected within the four main categories of Arts & Humanities, Bio-Medical, Social Sciences and Science & Technology.
Each site has been evaluated and described. Sites are highlighted which have video or audio streaming. There are some 600 sites on the MIG database at present, and it continues to grow at the rate of ten per month.
http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/gateway/index.html

Source: Internet Resources Newsletter

WetPaint

What they say:
Wetpaint powers websites that tap the power of collaborative thinking. The heart of the Wetpaint advantage is its ability to allow anyone — especially those without technical skill — to create and contribute to websites written for and by those who share a passion or interest. To do this, Wetpaint combines the best aspects of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks so anyone can click and type on the web.
Blogs make online publishing easy — but blogs are monologues. And forums are great for question and answers, but they're too hard to search. And wikis allow the reader to become the writer, editor and fact-checker, but they're just too darn hard to use for the average person. Wetpaint is different. With Wetpaint, anyone with a passion can create an entirely new website and invite others to help them build it. And it's easy — adding to a Wetpaint site is as simple as click and type.

Looks interesting.
Go on. Give it a try.
Sorry I forgot.

http://www.wetpaint.com/

Source: Internet Resources Newsletter

Light up your (science) teaching

"iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science. It is designed to quickly and accurately connect users with the educational resources they need. These resources range in type from highly granular objects such as individual images and video clips to entire courses. Resources in iLumina are cataloged in the MARC and NSDL metadata formats, which capture both technical and education-specific information about each resource. iLumina contains thousands of educational resources and several virtual collections. Please feel free to contribute your own resources to iLumina by following the contribute link in the header."

http://www.ilumina-dlib.org/

Source: Internet Resources Newsletter

DisabledGo - enabling information

Launched to mark the European Year of Disabled People, DisabledGo is an ambitious Internet service which will transform the daily choices available to millions of disabled people, their families and friends. Founded by wheelchair user Gregory Burke and supported by Marks & Spencer and leading local authorities, this innovative service is opening up towns and cities across the UK.
"DisabledGo was founded to empower disabled people to judge for themselves which venues are suitable for their own individual needs. It's about putting the control where it should have always been - with disabled people themselves." - Gregory Burke

http://www.disabledgo.info/

Source: Internet Resources Newsletter

CompWisdom

If you are interested in topics related to computing, programming and the Internet, then CompWisdom is a good choice for you. Their database has thousands of relevant sites stored, and is continuously expanding.
Their search engine is also very fast compared to other search engines, you will find what you are looking for quickly and easily. But being fast is not everything. They also provide you with meaningful results, without filling your screen with unrelated sites or spam. The results you get contain real sentences, not just sites that contain keywords without any relevance. This means that you can often gain a great deal of factual information on a topic without ever having to leave the search page! When users do select a page, they can have much more confidence that the page deals directly and informatively with their topic.

http://www.compwisdom.com/

Source: Internet Resources Newsletter

Artpromote

Explore thousands of art galleries, museums and artists sites from around the world. Browse by subject, medium, movement, nationality and more.
Artpromote is a searchable directory divided into over 200 categories of visual art, music, and literature, and lists thousands of contemporary artists, galleries, and art resources.

http://www.artpromote.com/

Source: Internet Resources Newsletter

Want to make Scotland a sectarian-free zone?

Then this is your chance to help.
Sectarianism has no place in a modern multi-faith, multi-cultural Scotland. People should not be held back by bigotry and prejudice and we need to tackle the sectarian attitudes which have held Scotland back for too long.
The Scottish Executive is looking for a slogan which gives a clear, concise and strong anti-sectarian message and is running a competition to find one. So if you think that you, or anyone you know, is up to the challenge of writing a powerful anti-sectarian slogan then we want to hear your ideas by 23 October 2006. Anyone between the ages of 5-22 can enter.

Further details can be found here.

Search Medica

Search Medica is a UK-based (there's a novelty!) search engine which is aimed firmly at practising doctors (GPs). With it you can search GP approved sites; all of the NHS; or just the internet in general.
SearchMedica has been set up using expertise from Pulse, the GPs’ best-read weekly paper, with major input from growing numbers of GPs daily. SearchMedica search results are independent and ranked according to relevance for GPs.

www.searchmedica.co.uk

Source: Phil Bradley's Weblog

Modern Times

Awesome.
Not Blood on the Tracks. Not Blonde on Blonde. Not Highway 61 Revisited.
Modern Times sure sounds old (on brief acquaintance).
Buy now.
Some pensioners still cut it, that's a fact.

An after-thought. Nice new site - http://www.bobdylanwiki.com/

Following on...

In the interest of fair play, some information for Jambo & Teddy Bear people.
AC Sparta Praha
Official site City guide Language
Molde FK
Official site City guide Language

Followers of Gretna should check out Dingwall. Nice in the autumn, they tell me.

Back to the days of Shock & Awe

Meaning what?
Try Wikipedia. Shock and awe.
Image courtesy of & © Overdue Media, Title lyric from Neil Young. Thanks people.

We'll follow the Celtic...

Anyone considering following the fortunes of Celtic in the group stages of the Champions' (sic) League might find the following information useful:

Manchester United
Official Site (English) | City Guide | Language

Sport Lisboa e Benfica
Official Site (English) | City Guide | Language

FC Copenhagen
Official site (English) | City Guide | Language

Having escaped from Inverness with a barely-deserved point I hesitate to say Good luck! But I shall.

PictureCloud - Both sides now

PictureCloud lets you create a 360° presentation of your photos. First you should take some 20 to 30 photos around any object or a landscape. Then you should upload these photos to the PictureCloud website by dragging them from Windows Explorer to the Java applet (which looks like a blue cloud). The photos will be joined into a 360° tour that shows the objects from all directions. The result is stored on the site itself, but you can also download it and upload it to your own website. Everything is done online - no software to install. And it's free although you'll have to register.
http://www.picturecloud.com

Source: Tips & Advice Internet v.10 i.14

Straight from the...

Horse's Mouth is a mentoring service which will launch sometime in October.
Let them tell their tale:

We're using the power of intelligent search technology and the phenomenal reach of the internet to create a new kind of network. Not just a social network but a 'pro-social network', where everyone gives and gains and where the wisdom we have locked up in our own life stories and life experiences can be shared. Use it for support for inspiration and for new challenges. Or use it to reflect on your own life and to give something back - to share the wisdom you've gained from any experience you've been through. It's all free and confidential, secure & flexible, with no payments or catches.

Motto: Someone needs what you know, Someone knows what you need

http://www.horsesmouth.co.uk/

14 hours to save the earth...

Google Earth is a nice piece of kit but, unfortunately for college purposes, it is not installed on all (any?) machines & anyway the streaming was blocked the last time that I looked.
Step forward Flash Earth (http://www.flashearth.com). It uses the Google mapping technology but uses the Flash plug-in which should be installed on all PCs.
Use the Live Local option for really clear aerial photography (?) images. Unless you're looking near some "sensitive" sites which could be bombed by the...

Bit out of date perhaps (still no Renfrew North building) but, hell, if you owned a satellite would you choose an orbit over Paisley on a regular basis?

(Secret Bases? Paranoia? Try http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alan-turnbull/secret.htm)

Source: CILIP Update / Phil Bradley

The burger is dead. Long live the Deathburger!

Coming soon to a deathburger emporium near you...
In the wake of Super Size Me, it looked as if the fast-food giants were embracing healthy eating, with salads appearing on every menu. But that's all over. The big chains in the US are now pushing 'indulgent offerings': huge stacks of meat, oozing with grease - and not a vegetable in sight.

Read the full article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1856005,00.html

Source: Guardian G2

Plagiarism. Wot, me?

Anyone concerned with the increase of plagiarism in education, should check out the new, open-access, academic, peer-reviewed journal Plagiary.
If you're not concerned (& you should be) don't.

http://www.plagiary.org/

Source: DOAJ

Innovate!

The August / September issue of Innovate has just been published. Innovate provides assessments of emerging technologies for educational practice, studies of recent efforts at technology integration, and a commentary that promises to provoke engaging discussion about the role of technology in education.
Topics include:

• the current state of e-book technology;
• video game technology as a tool for online learning;
• managing the elearning process

http://innovateonline.info/index.php

Source: Innovate

Bright Lights film magazine

New edition of Bright Lights (#53) is now available.

One of the most jam-packed issues yet, with pithy commentary on everything from The Garbage Pail Kids Movie to Fassbinder to Rita Hayworth to Michel Gondry. Also here: Charlie Chaplin, Antonioni, Near Dark, Army of Shadows, Korean cinema, It's Always Fair Weather, interviews with Burt Young and Park Chan-wook, Hour of the Wolf, Bad Lieutenant, and plenty of recent films: Mission Impossible III, District B-13, The Devil Wears Prada, Prairie Home Companion, Da Vinci Code, Match Point, and the Pamela Anderson Roast on Comedy Central!

http://brightlightsfilm.com/

Source: Bright Lights

Wikimapia

Having difficulty finding your way to college? Directing visitors here? Try Wikimapia!
Reid Kerr College has just been added to this service.

http://www.wikimapia.org

Source: LibraryCrunch

IT Pro

IT Pro is a new website offering support and assistance for IT projects.
The site is different because it allows the user to participate in the exchange of knowledge, express opinions, write reviews and seek advice from fellow professionals.
IT professionals can find opinion from leading industry figures, video interviews, bloggers, reviews and group tests, advice in plain English covering key technologies and other issues, news and analysis.
A weeky news review podcast covers key topics.

http://www.itpro.co.uk

Source: CILIP MMIT Group

G24

Want your news freshly picked from a reliable source? Try G24.

G24 is a service from the Guardian Unlimited which is continuously updated (hence the 24. Clever, huh?) 10 page pdf downloads cover:

• Top Stories - The latest UK and World news and comment
• World - The day's major international stories, plus news and analysis
• Media - Latest news, comment and media gossip
• Business - Business news and analysis from the City
• Sport - News, views, rumours and sparkling wit

Sorry. No People's Friend.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g24

Easier access?

We have access to assistive technologies in the college, but what about at home. These could help a little.

• Thunder is a screen reader that works with Windows word processors and email (Microsoft Word, Notepad, Outlook Express) and a text-based web browser, WebIE. It costs £159 plus VAT but is free to home users. http://www.screenreader.net/
• TV Raman, a blind employee at Google, has an experimental version of Google that favours search results with simpler page layouts, which are more accessible to the visually impaired. http://labs.google.com/accessible/

Source: Guardian Unlimited Technology

Something nice to say about Bill?

Microsoft has released a beta version of Live Writer, a word-processor that allows users to blog straight to their blog service, e.g. Blogger. Looks useful but it's a download desktop app rather than a Web 2.0 one.
Further details at http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Source: Guardian Technology