Put people first

Remember when the Masters of the Universe made poverty history? (That's not as in making poverty a thing of the past, but as in achieving a high (low) never reached before). Well, here we go again...

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'

Free mp3 of the first track of the new Dylan album, Together Through Life, available at http://www.bobdylan.com/ available until 5.00 a.m. tomorrow (Tuesday). Time zone? Who knows.

The music? Think 50s Chess. Think Ry Cooder.

Yeah, the full CD is probably available on Rapidshare or some other site somewhere, but this is kosher and some of us will buy the album anyway.
It's like Brownsville Girl:

Well, I'm standin' in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck,
Yeah, but you know it's not the one that I had in mind.
He's got a new one out now, I don't even know what it's about
But I'll see him in anything so I'll stand in line.


Lousy cover though...

Kidnapped

Everyone seems to have discovered Wordle all of a sudden. The Guardian Media section has a Wordle graphic of the Press Complaints Commission on its front page (sadly not available online).
So, with no apologies, I give you the first chapter of Kidnapped by RLS wordled.

Attribution: Kidnappled by RLL , http://www.wordle.net/ under a Creative Commons licence.

Passing the time on Planet Earth.

Using Moodle...properly

We all, well, we all in FE, use Moodle don't we? For what? Loading up endless lecture notes. Which kinda misses the point. You can do an awful lot more and this book will show you how. You can even embed it in your Moodle courses. Now isn't that clever?!

Open publication - Free publishing - More book

The second edtion of the O'Reilly book "Using Moodle" by Jason Cole and Helen Foster. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License.

The Apprentice?

Just remember as you tune into this reality show (as in entertainment) what Sir (as in Sir Fred Goodwin) Alan Sugar had to say about us fools in F.E. Colleges are, according to Sir Alan "where dummkopfs come to learn where to make mistakes".

Dummkopfs perhaps, given the amount of money which FE has spent on his seriously-crap Viglen PCs.

Full BBC story here.

Suggested alternative viewing - Only Fools and Horses on Gold. Same business ethics but funnier...

Image: Alan Sugar's Car by Nick Treby at Flickr (CC Licence)

Free stock photographs

We keep getting asked for sources of photographs to be used in educational materials - Moodle, worksheets, etc. (The lazy option is of course to use Google Image search and sod the consequences).
Thus I'm putting together a package for my academic colleagues which will hopefully return them to the straight and narrow. So we might as well share them with you, dear reader.
All of the sites mentioned here offer varying collections of royalty-free, copyright-free, Creative Commons, public domain, etc. images. Generally, all that is required is an attribution which, after all, is common courtesy.
I'll have to admit that the site that I use most is Flickr and the easiest way to find Creative Commons photographs there is to use FlickrCC which is a Flickr CC search engine written by Peter Shanks. A very good place to start.
Anyway, these sites might just keep the Intellectual Property Police off your case:

• stock.xchng
• Open Stock Photography
• Geek Philosopher
• NASA Image eXchange (NIX)
• FreePixels
• Studio 25
• Image*After
• Everystockphoto (search engine)
• openphoto.net

And if that's not enough, Intute produced an tutorial, Internet for Image Searching. Send them back to class!

And lest we forget, the above image is Class Room by cobrasoft via stock.xchang used under licence.

Managing the complexities of the digital economy...

This advert for an IT company appeals, not because I like cats (and I do) but because unfortunately it's what we have to deal with (metaphorically) on a daily basis. Here, puss puss. Nice techie / technophobe (delete as in/appropriate)...

Source: Joe Wilson

Google Maps - Street View UK

Google has at last launched the Street View "version" of Google Maps in the UK.
Potential educational uses? Well, how about Glasgow Street Sculpture? Or, better still, a virtual pub-crawl? Why not start here - we usually did.
The Scottish bits are limited to Glasgow and Edinburgh at present - having seen the Google-mobile in Inverness & Forres on last year's return to civilisation I suspect (hope) that this coverage will grow.
You'll know when Street View is available when the wee man in the Maps navigation bar turns yellow. Drag him onto the map and a blue grid of the views available becomes visible. It's all pretty straight-forward after that. Except for turning the corners.

http://maps.google.com/

Source: Download Squad

BBC allows video embedding

Sadly this does not mean that you can embed anything from the BBC iPlayer or, indeed from the BBC website on your blog or website. And the number of videos which allow this are, thus far, thin on the ground and restricted to the Technology section. Which is fair enough really.
There are restrictions too on where you can embed the material. Again this is reasonable. Full terms and conditions can be found here with full details of the embeddable player here.
I have to say that I like this although coverage needs to be wider & the URLs persistent. Time will tell.

Thanks to Andy Dickinson (http://www.andydickinson.net/) for this one.

Lost in the cloud...

Delicious getting a wee bit out of hand.



Still. Looks good.

Image courtesy the good people at http://www.wordle.net/

Watchmen : The Motion Comic

Have only watched the first episode of this but, but, I don't know. A grower maybe. The educational possibilities are endless (he blustered). ESOL anyone?

Available for $9.95 per episode or for £7.99 inclusive of postage at Play.com. You choose...

World Book Day 2009

Forgot all about this. Excuse = it's a public library deal. Excuse = Up to eyes in OpenAthens LA 2.0.

"Anyway, by way of recompense, here's a downloadable e-book (i.e. pdf) of Sean Williams' The Crooked Letter.

"For those who aren't familiar with it, The Crooked Letter is kinda urban New Weird on a massive scale. It's been compared to China Mieville, Philip Pullman, Ursula K Le Guin, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, yada yada, and it won both the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards the year it was released".

http://ladnews.livejournal.com/112580.html

So, it's the 2002 logo...

It was 25 years ago today...

The start of the Miners' Strike.

If you're too young to remember, and you're never to young to find out, try the Justice for Mineworkers Campaign website - http://www.justiceformineworkers.org.uk/