More than likely a publicity stunt, but implication that PDAs are only for work stuff.
Obviously I will now need to delete all the learning stuff from mine, as well as the podcasts, the music, the videos, disable the GPS, etc, etc…
Category Archives: news
YES DEAR, I’M ON THE PLANE
BBC reports on the first “officially allowed” mobile phone call from a commercial airliner.
Dubai-based airline Emirates has become the first commercial airline to allow passengers to make mobile phone calls during flights.
Emirates said the first permitted mobile phone call was made on a flight between Dubai and Casablanca.
The aircraft, an Airbus A340, is fitted with a system which stops mobiles from interfering with a plane’s electronics.
Internet cheating, harder to catch!
BBC News reports on how students are using new ways to cheat which are more difficult to detect:
Universities warn that students who cheat by commissioning essays from other students are proving harder to catch than other types of plagiarism.
Students are using websites to outsource their essays – inviting other students to put forward their most competitive bids for the work.
What this means is that this work is original and new and can not be easily identified by staff or specialist plagarism software such as Turnitin.
Robert Clarke, a lecturer at Birmingham City University, has identified 4,000 sales on a small number of websites.
Unlike other copied work, he says it is hard for plagiarism software to detect.
“The difficulty is that it is original work – it’s just not the original work of the student handing in the assignment,” says Mr Clarke, principal lecturer in the Department of Computing.
There are no easy solutions to this, though we may need to start re-thinking how we assess students, if traditional models of assessment can be easily circumvented using these auction sites.
University open day held in Second Life
BBC reports on how Liverpool University is holding an open day in the virtual world of Second Life.
BA Media students at Liverpool Hope University have set up a virtual campus on the imaginary world website as part of a six-month project.
Virtual students will be on campus on Thursday to interact with prospective students from across the globe.
For someone who doesn’t get Second Life, I actually do get this!
LSC to be scrapped…
The Government is going to scrap the LSC in plans announced in a White Paper.
The government’s £10.4bn skills agency, the Learning and Skills Council, is to be closed down – with most of the funds to be transferred to local authorities.
The plans have been announced by the government in a White Paper setting out the funding mechanism for the raising of the school leaving age to 18.Local authorities will now be responsible for commissioning courses and training for older teenagers.
Read the full story on the BBC News website.
Microsoft licenses Flash Lite and Adobe Reader LE for Windows Mobile Devices
Adobe announced today that:
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced that Microsoft has licensed Adobe® Flash® Lite™ software, Adobe’s award-winning Flash Player runtime specifically designed for mobile devices, to enable web browsing of Flash Player compatible content within the Internet Explorer Mobile browser in future versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile phones. Microsoft has also licensed Adobe Reader® LE software for viewing Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents including email attachments and web content. Both Adobe products will be made available to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide, who license Windows Mobile software.
Read the full press release here.
RSC SW Forum
20,000 visits
Two months ago on January 8th I passed the 10,000 visit milestone from when I started the blog back in June 2007.
Now just a short two months later I have passed the 20,000 visit milestone.
Thanks to everyone who has visited and hopefully enjoyed reading my ramblings on e-learning and ILT.
Here’s to the next 10,000 visits.
Moodle 1.9 Released
Today sees the release of Moodle 1.9.
Our latest release fresh from over 5 months of community beta testing and improvements. This release is like a “gold reference” version, but usually the daily build above will be even better. Moodle 1.9 not only has lots of requested new features but some very large performance improvements over Moodle 1.8. We recommend all sites upgrade to 1.9 as soon as practical, especially if you are seeing poor performance in some areas.
Thanks Gary.
Microsoft targets the mobile web
BBC reports on how Microsoft has signed a deal with Nokia to put Silverlight on Nokia phones.
Microsoft has launched a bid to capture a segment of the growing market for rich web content on mobile phones.
The software firm has signed a deal with handset manufacturer Nokia to bring its Silverlight platform to millions of mobile phones.
Silverlight is seen as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash, which is already used by popular websites such as YouTube.
The software will first be available on Nokia’s high end smart phones running a Symbian operating system.
Read more.