EdTechUK

And the winners are...

The Polls over at the inaugural EduBlog Awards are now closed, and the winners in! Skip over to the site for all the runners-up, a great list of accomplished and sub-worthy blogs. Including mine! Thanks again to everyone who nominated or voted for me. Now, if only there was a ceremony so I could wear my new frock… next year we’ll have to do it as a video conference call.

The 2004 winners are:

Best Individual Blog:

Pharyngula

Best overall group blog:

Crooked Timber

Best resource sharing blog:

OLDaily

Best Research Based Blog:

Mathemagenic

Best blogged paper(s):

Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs

Best designed & most beautiful blog:

Blaugustine

Best technology meets pedagogy blog:

Teaching & Developing Online

Best use of weblogs within teaching and learning:

Bee-coming a Webhead

Best Newcomer (2004):

Chasing the Dragon’s Tale

Best Librarian Blog: Library Stuff

Duff new acronym for increasingly normal women tech enthusiasts

If you can get past the patronizing framing (Tif? That was really the best they could come up with? and LBD comparisons??! Do they think all women identify with or can even stand Bridget Jones?) Intel have published the results of the Women, Technology and Lifestyle research they recently commissioned. The sample was US based and research conducted only on line.

Via misbehaving.net

Caterina Fake interview

I've mentioned Flickr a few times before - one of the best resources for people interested in democratic photography, moblogging and/or photo-sharing on the web. Engadet posted an interview with Flickr's fantastically named co-founder Caterina Fake last week and it's worth a minute if you missed it.

Engadget are also currently going head-to-head with Gizmodo for the Best Tech Blog in the 2004 Weblog Awards. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for them - as well as actually voting, and not just because I write for them (very occasionally). I think they've been doing a great job establishing themselves as the most informative and entertaining tech blog over the last 9 months, and they really make an editorial commitment to acknowledging that women are as interested in technology as men. 

The great playlist meme of '04

Only back 5 minutes, and already playing:

1. Gigantic - The Pixies
2. Torn & frayed - The Rolling Stones
3. Pars - Grace Jones
4. Pass the peas - The JBs
5. Ain't got no - I got life - Nina Simone
6. Wear you to the ball - U Roy
7. Theme from Shaft - Isaac Heyes
8. Alladin Sane - David Bowie
9. Universal Tribulation - Gregorary Isaccs
10. Got - Mos Def

The instructions (from D2r c/o: D'Arcy Norman) :

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the “shuffle” command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

More about meme:

Meme - from Wikipedia

"What is a meme?"  from alt.memetics

Meme Central

The Eddies 2004

The 2004 inaugural EduBlog Awards - The Eddies - are now officially open for voting so get over there and practice your active participation skills now! Thanks very much to Lee & Theresa who both nominated this blog in the Best New Comer Category.

James really needs some help with the awards icon - so if you've got any artistic ability please think about supporting the awards by donating a little of your time and skills.

Back to the blog

I've been away for a while - the conference in Manchester & then Paris - and then catching up with the work that accumulated in my absence. There's something daunting about the avalanche of information build-up when you're used to managing it at some speed on a regular basis. And while the 'NewsMistress' role is an important part of my job, it's actually only a small element in the overall scheme of things.

During the last week there have been some exciting developments.

Site Redesigns

Several sites I use frequently have been redesigned: The Radio 6 site, Scran and TechDis are all looking particularly spruce.

Scran is the Scottish- based award winning learning image website with access to quality images, sounds, movies and learning resources - over 300,000 images from museums, galleries and archives. The site is available to FHE through the JISC collections scheme.  The new site, which includes new authoring tools and project templates, is running parallel until the Xmas launch on 23rd December. They’d welcome feedback or suggestions - email tertiary@scran.ac.uk.

TechDis aims to be the UK's leading educational advisory service in the fields of accessibility and inclusion. They aims to enhance provision for disabled students and staff in HFE and specialist education and adult and community learning, through the use of technology. If you don’t already use their site, the redesign gives you the perfect oppertuntity to start.

I also picked up some hard copies of their new resource pack, Inclusive Learning and Teaching: ILT & Disabled Learners, in Macherster last week – very well put together, covers a lot of the issues in a strait forward way and essential reading for teachers, developers, designers and student support staff.

Other New Resource Guides 

JISC: Effective Practice with e-Learning

JISC Legal: Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for e-learning content developers and managers

NLN: Embedding the NLN Materials in the Curriculum  (PDF)

Other Stuff Reported Everywhere but Important Enough to Headline Again Here: 

Microsoft go blogging

Blog: Merriam-Webster online dictionary most looked-up word of the year

Google resurrects Usenet/launches groups