What with HMRC losing personal data, along with others, it doesn’t surprise me that next to be looked at is education.
The BBC is reporting how an IT firm believes that:
Sensitive information on school pupils is being put at risk by staff who take it home with them.
How often are teaching staff in your institution given proper training on how to deal with sensitive data?
This is an issue which doesn’t just affect schools, colleges and universities also have data protection policies, though a policy is only a statement, practice is another matter entirely.
If you take a computer from work home, you have to ask yourself is the data secure?
Despite a lot of scepticism and negative coverage about Amazon’s new digital book reader, the device has sold out according to the BBC.
Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has sold out despite scepticism about whether the device will prove popular. A notice on the Kindle pages on the Amazon web store said “heavy customer demand” for the device meant it would be out of stock until 3 December. Since its launch on 19 November the device has been widely examined but opinions about it are mixed.
Looks like people are interested in this digital book reader. Is this the device for e-books what the iPod was for digital music? We will have to wait and see.
BBC reports that T-Mobile to open up iPhone sales.
T-Mobile is to start allowing German customers to buy Apple’s iPhone without a contract to its network, as it moves to comply with a court injunction.
However this is in Germany only and the iPhone will be twice as expensive as the contract version.
Legislation in the UK allows for locked phones, but you could import iPhones from Germany and then avoid the two year contract making it available for testing and usability.
The BBC is reporting that nine out of ten internet connections are broadband connections.
Almost nine out of 10 UK net users are connecting via broadband services, official figures reveal.
Information gathered by National Statistics (ONS) for September show that 88.4% of Britons are choosing to use broadband rather than dial-up.
This means that delivering e-learning content does not need to rely on the assumption that learners are on dial-up.
With broadband often cheaper than dial-up now, if learners wish to access e-learning from home rather than in college (or in their local library) then more than likely they will be choosing broadband.
I have been using the site for that long now, so it’s nice to see that not only is it still around and still very popular, more importantly, all the stories I was reading and using for learning back in the late 1990s are still available as well. For example this story about Sainsburys from 1999 is still online and the links still work!
Too often on the web sites will rebrand or rename and all their old links die or change or become redundant. At least with the BBC News it is possible to link stories from nearly ten years ago.
news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…
