Becta have been complaining to the Office of Fair Trading about Microsoft.
The BBC reports that:
The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices. The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.
Becta is advising schools not to move to Microsoft’s subscription licensing model. They are also advising schools to look at open source solutions as well.
There was an interesting article in yesterday’s (Tuesday’s) Guardian about how un-e-enabled a lot of FE colleges are in the UK.
While not unimpressed with these statistics, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) puts a different slant on the overall state of ICT in FE. By its reckoning, barely a quarter of colleges are “e-enabled”, to use the quango’s unlovely jargon. A further quarter, by contrast, are either not convinced about the need to sharpen up their ICT or are late-comers to it.
So where would you put your college?
Are you working in an e-enabled college?
This blog is not really new, I did blog about e-learning when I worked at the WCC, but I have reached a milestone with this blog, my 200th post (this one). The blog has also had over 4000 visits. Thanks for visiting and here’s to the next two hundred posts.
The BBC have come to a deal with The Cloud wifi service to offer BBC Online free at The Cloud’s thousands of wifi hotspots.
This means that if you are at a wireless hotspot you don’t need to pay anything to access the BBC News website for example. You can also download TV programmes (via iPlayer) as well.
I do wonder if there is potential in this kind of relationship between educational institutions and wifi hotspot providers. Could we see college websites and vles available for free at local wifi hotspots. Something I am certainly thinking about.
I see the BBC have a report on what Oaklands College are doing with eMentors.
A college is harnessing the power of students’ technical knowledge to teach their lecturers a thing or two about information technology. The college has appointed 35 “eMentors” to help staff with everything from laptops to interactive whiteboards. The scheme works on the premise that students are more technically adept.
Quite an interesting and innovative approach to getting staff to get familiar with the technology.
The BBC are reporting that students are using content “lifted” from the web for their online UCAS forms.
Sixth form students are being warned not to cheat on their university application forms by copying material from the internet.
The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service has written to every UK school saying doing so could affect students’ chances of winning a place.
Ucas is to use plagiarism detection technology to scrutinise the half a million forms seeking entry in 2008.
Maybe it’s time to move away from a written statement on a form for applications.
The web may have made it easier, but when I filled in an UCAS form (some time ago now) I know people who were given extra guidance and help filling it in over and beyond what you would expect and that was never considered “cheating”.
Copying and pasting is cheating, there is no doubt, using the web to help fill in the form is fine, but who tells the sixth former filling in the form what is okay and what isn’t?
You’ve heard of Second Life (which I don’t get) now there is MetaPlace!
The BBC is reporting on this new development in virtual worlds (which isn’t quite ready yet).
A free tool that allows anyone to create a virtual world has been launched. Users of Metaplace, as it is known, can build 3D online worlds for PCs or even a mobile phone without any knowledge of complex computer languages.
Read rest of article on BBC News.
Apple have announced that they are launching the iPhone in the UK. It will go on sale on November 9th on the O2 network.
“We picked the best one, the most popular carrier, it’s O2. We’ve since lowered the price of the US phone of the 8GB phone, in the UK the price of the iPhone is £269 including VAT.”
That’s a lot of money for a phone, be interesting to see what the data costs will be?
As I write it’s about five minutes before the Apple event at the Apple Store in London gets underway.
Generally it is accepted that this will be the launch of the iPhone in Europe.
It will be interesting to see if it is a 3G version or whether the fact that O2 have been upgrading their network to EDGE will mean that the UK iPhone will still be EDGE only.
Not long to wait now…
According to a report by Sheffield University the UK exported £28bn worth of learning in 2003-04.
That’s a lot of learning…