Levi Stubbs, 1936-2008

Guardian Obituary

Seeing the light?

For whatever reason - CreditCrunch anyone? - Amazon UK announced yesterday that henceforth all orders totalling more than £5.00 would be delivered free (albeit slowly). A good thing. Certainly there was something suspicious about a lot of items coming in at £14.98 when the minimum spend for free delivery was £15.00. Kind of encouraging you to stick that £4.99 CD on at the end. Or is that the mean teuchter or gotta-buy-a-CD reverse psychology. So now the first port of call might not be Play.com.
A not such a good thing. I've probably been guilty in the past of not acknowledging sources. Sometimes the same information comes from so many different blogs, RSS that it's difficult to tell where the info originated. Shame, then, on LearnTech News for not crediting Open Culture for the New Yale Open Courses story which they (he) has posted nearly 8 hours earlier.

Amazon UK
Open Culture
Yale Open Courses

Tech Therapy

Tech Therapy is a regular podcast which features in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the US of A.

Episode 33 is entitled: Libraries vs. IT Departments and precis the podcast so:

Librarians and IT staff might share more similarities than they would like to admit. Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast, Tech Therapy's hosts, talk about the rift between the two groups.

Some caveats. Higher Education. American. One of these guys is a techie (consultant).

Some issues. The gender bit? The young IT guy? Different tasks, different missions?

Some agreement. Neither are faculty (academic) and are therefore (perceived as)second-class citizens.

Have a listen. http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v55/i07/techtherapy/

Holiday in Cambodia?

Not quite! But Jello Biafra had (and has) a point.

Apart from your carbon foot-print, would you really want to holiday here?

Yes? Oh well. No hope.

Image: En construcción by uno cierta mirada (Creative Commons)

Poverty: You Too?

"We were poor but happy"; "'The poor are always with us', Jesus said". "We dare be poor for a' that".
Not much to hang a post on there. Cliche, Christ & Burns.
Anyway, having marched shoulder-to-shoulder with Bono et al in 2005 as we Made Poverty History it was refreshing to see him on the front page of a magazine that wasn't Mojo or Q. The magazine was New Internationalist. Not your usual Bono habitat I would have thought, unless to be seen carrying a copy whilst haranguing G8 (G1) leaders re their hypocrisy. See the Tax Justice issue here. Better still, subscribe.
Anyway, we information professionals (sic) are only the messengers; it's for yous academics to use the information we supply. And if you think that poverty is having to make do with a two-year old iPod or PS2, then there's some stuff here that you should read. Especially you Mr Daily Mail Man.

New Internationalist - http://www.newint.org/
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation - http://www.jrf.org.uk/
Oxfam - http://www.oxfam.org.uk/

...and meanwhile at United Nations, Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development, & sundry business & government leaders pledge $16bn to help eradicate world poverty. That would barely buy you a decent stake in a failed & failing GreedMcBank!

The Deaf Issue | The Guardian

Deafness probably isn't an issue, unless you're deaf or have to deal with deaf students, etc. To be fair, education has not exactly ignored deafness - we are inclusive after all. Evidence? Try the uniformly excellent BRITE site & its associated support guides, especially the Guide To Support For Deaf Students.
From The Guardian G2 today:
A new mood is taking hold of Britain's deaf people. This growing confidence is summed up by deaf comedian John Smith, who bounds across the stage in a superhero's cape and shouts, "Deaf power!" More than 8 million Britons have impaired hearing, ranging from the 6 million older people who are mildly or moderately deaf, to the 700,000 whose deafness is more profound. In this special issue, we explore how it feels to be part of deaf culture today.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/deaf

BBC RAW relaunches in 2009

From the BBC:

Skills for everyday life - Literacy, Numeracy, ICT Skills and Financial Capability

Put January 2009 in your diary for the launch of raw!
Using video content, BBC presenters and interactive activities, the raw website will be the destination of choice for adult basic skills.
Building on the success of its earlier adult literacy campaign, raw is broadening out to include a wide range of skills – numeracy, ICT, workplace skills, literacy and financial capability.
Partners will be able to user-test new upcoming content, share their experience with each other and download FREE marketing and workshop resources, ideal for integrating into existing courses and informal learning.
The site will launch with raw money and raw computers. In the future numeracy, literacy and workplace skills will be added.
Everyday life examples as routes into content for your learners such as setting up home, starting a family or planning for retirement
Easy to use tools for pension planning, budgeting and more.
Jargon buster to understand financial words and phrases.
Top tips from BBC’s Dominic Littlewood and Jasmine Birtles.

Every six to twelve months new activities will be added to areas of the raw website.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/raw/

Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival

Mental health is an issue that almost all of us encounter at some point in our lives.

The Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival runs from the 1st - 19th October (yeah, I know) and seeks to promote positive attitudes towards mental health, mental illness, support and recovery, and to effect significant cultural change amongst opinion-formers and the public through the insights and influences of the creative arts.
Remembered because today is World Mental Health Day. And the various events (cross-Scotland not just Weegieland) look "interesting", especially Music Like A Vitamin this weekend. Music Like A Vitamin? It works, believe me, it works...

http://www.mhfestival.com/
http://www.wellscotland.info/
http://www.samh.org.uk/
http://www.seemescotland.org.uk/
http://www.breathingspacescotland.co.uk/

Grandpa's Soup by Jackie Kay

For National Poetry Day 2008.

Send a postcard to a friend.
Scottish Poetry Library

The Video Republic

Demos has launched a new report, Video Republic, exploring the contours of a new public space enabled by cheap digital technology and broadband access. Production companies and broadcasters no longer hold a monopoly over moving-images - instead, a new theatre of public information has emerged. Spread across the internet, television, festivals and campaigns this emerging Video Republic is a messy, alternative realm of video creation and exchange, dominated by young people. Who inhabits, shapes and regulates the Video Republic and what is its future?
And most pertinently for FE, why are the powers wot be & their gestalt polizei blocking the likes of YouTube when other slightly "higher" institutions (want a list?) have openly embraced the medium & the technologies? Read this please...




Download the report here (pdf).

Demos via The Guardian.

vi.sualize.us - del.icio.us for images

"vi.sualize.us is a social bookmarking website for visual contents — vi.sualize.us (read visualize us) allows you to remember your favorite images around the web, and share them with everyone."

If delicious is for tagging & sharing web-pages, vi.sualize.us is delicious for images. Easiest way to use is with the Firefox extension which installs on the toolbar. Just activate - add image to vi.sualize.us - click on the image you want to "save" & a thumb-nail is saved in your vi.sualize.us account. (Yeah, I forgot, you need to register). Tag the image when you're adding it. And you'll get this:

Why use it? Well, if you're working in education / e-learning & use a lot of Creative Commons images in your materials, it's desirable to acknowledge the source. Necessary even. (If you're using copyrighted images, well, stop reading now, this will be of no interest or concern to you).
Scenario. Find a "nice" image on Flickr, save it locally, upload to website / blog / whatever. Of course, you saved it as 2pussycats_playing.jpg & you can't remember the where, when or from whom. Tag in vi.sualize.us & you don't have that problem. And you can share your bookmarked images with your colleagues. (It's called collaboration).
And it's free. Highly recommended.

On the subject of Creative Commons images in Flickr, the advanced search option does allow searching for images available under the various flavours of the CC licence. Neater option is FlickrCC which again comes highly recommended. Use both & you won't have to bother about the copyright police ever again.

vi.sualize.us - http://vi.sualize.us/
FlickCC - http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/

Doublet barman done good...

Good to see that my erstwhile colleague (a long, long time ago in what seems a different galaxy) and MP for East Renfrewshire has been "elevated" to Secretary of State for Scotland in Gordon Brown's Cabinet reshuffle.
Just don't go forgetting former comrades when we start building the new college in Barrhead...

Jim Murphy's blog
The Doublet on MySpace (what?)