Luke at Reach Students has done a great job of breaking down the list into 21 websites that students like more than you do.

I’ve got to disagree with the final truth though – ‘You have too much content’. A lot of sites have too much text, unnecessary content, etc, but there’s only the tiniest fraction of potential usable content being put online currently.

Frozen lake, University of Bath [creative commons licensed photo from Michael Grogan]

The Web Services Team at Bath report on use of the university’s twitter stream for informing staff and students on closures and travel news this week.

I hate deleting old content because it doesn’t meet new accessibility requirements/new site design/etc. While sites are still in their relatively early stages, we can often go through a whole site updating content for new templates but it’s obvious that this approach becomes less and less viable all the time as sites expand. 

I’d like to see the BBC’s new approach get widespread adoption, a prominent banner across the top of a page explicitly stating that “we’re no longer updating this page” with a link to further information. 

Seetha Kumar, Controller BBC Online, addresses the new approach – We’re no longer updating this site!

[Via Karine Joly] Alumni Futures have published a free creative-commons licensed white paper to “inform readers about what Twitter is, and suggest ways it might enhance relationship-building and alumni interaction”. The white paper [2.2MB pdf] is an excellent introduction to the subject [including 'The Down Side of Twittering'],  just as useful for those interested in any aspect of using microblogging for institutional public relations.

Tuesday’s Guardian had a Bridgepoint Education supported supplement University Challenge, with a series of articles on universities and current and future technologies. Front page article, Dawn of the cyberstudent, begins with the information that:

“In a single week, the Open University (OU) records about two million downloads from its presence on iTunes U, a source of higher education podcasts and videos freely available on the web. About 87% of these downloads are from outside the UK. “I’m betting most of them have been downloaded by US students studying at American universities,” says Peter Scott, director of the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute. He predicts that students will soon be mixing their higher education experiences from resources all over the world, choosing to study at Harvard, say, while listening to lectures from Oxford, taking part in discussion groups at the University of Mumbai, and sitting exams somewhere entirely different.”

In the six weeks of my investigation, I was sent 1,000 subjects for possible essays. Most were undergraduate level, but a sizeable minority – around 100 – were personal statements

Students: All my own work? Well, not quite – Tom Whipple, Times Online