Universities and the Web » news

Open University reaches 20 million through iTunesU

Billy — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:03:26 +0000

Congratulations to The Open University who are the first university, worldwide, to reach the landmark of 20 milliondownloads from iTunesU.

The Open University are documenting their involvement with iTunesU online at http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/itunesu/.

National Archives release images under no known copyright restrictions

Billy — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:15:19 +0000

I’ve mentioned Flickr’s Commons before as a great source of historical photography for online publication, but it does tend towards US organisations/interests. So it’s great to see today that the UK National Archives are adding images to the Commons under no known copyright restrictions.

Not just photos either. There’s a set of historical documents, another includes seals and artifacts.

Youtube adds auto captions

Billy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:22:03 +0000

As a disciple of the ‘all audio and video must have a transcription’ religion, I’ve spent countless hours over the last few years using the excellent, free, NCH Express Scribe to manually transcribe everything. It’s great to hear that YouTube are today adding (for select partners at first) auto captioning (including translations) using their excellent voice recognition capabilities.

Hero.ac.uk to close tomorrow

Billy — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:43:07 +0000

Means little to me, but it might mean something to you:
“NEWCASTLE-BASED web publishing company HERO Ltd. has today announced the closure of the Higher Education and Research Opportunities in the UK (HERO) website (www.hero.ac.uk).

The HERO site will be withdrawn on 4th June 2009 with information from the current HERO site used by stakeholders to improve their own sites and services going forward.

This means that as an existing HEI or FEC Contact, Editor or Author on the HERO Content Management System (CMS) you will no longer be able to edit information for your institution via the HERO CMS from 3rd June 2009. User accounts and institutional data will be purged following the closure of the HERO site.

We would like to take this opportunity of thanking staff at universities and colleges for taking the time to update this well-used and appreciated resource over the past eight years.”

Amazon Web Services in Education

Billy — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:07:02 +0000

Amazon are opening up their highly-rated web services by offering $100 per student grants in their new Amazon Web Services in Education. I can’t find any reference about availability outside the US, but with Oxford listed among the testimonials I presume its available to the UK.