Universities and the Web

A great new project from Oxford, Wall of 100 Faces is a videowall with 100 short videos introducing a range of students at the university. It’s taken eight months to put together and there’s an interesting video on the wall with producer Hannah Madsen describing the background and processes (no direct link to individual videos unfortunately, Hannah’s video is the last, in the bottom right hand corner).

A growing number of US universities and the University of Sunderland are already using Google Apps for Education to deliver email, instant messaging, calendars and document collaboration.

Next Thursday, 25 June 2009, Google are delivering a free live Google Apps for Education webinar (10am PDT which I think is 6pm British Summer Time)

There’s a lot of excitement about the iphone finally getting cut and paste and the ability to do such mobile basics as picture messaging and contact sending/receiving, but it’s great to see iTunesU getting a much higher profile on the latest version of the operating system.

For the first time you can now access iTunesU directly through the phone, with Warwick University the first option on the homepage when I tried it. Expect to see usage rise over the next few months, although with such limited screen estate, it’s going to be more important than ever to build good relations with Apple and get those high profile feature spots.

Robin Goad at Hitwise published a a blogpost this month on the ‘top 100 student websites in the UK‘. Robin goes into more detail on the methodology in his post, but it’s an interesting list with only one recognisably student-centric website – scholar.google.co.uk.

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

JISC Digital points to a great collection of public domain videos made available through the Prelinger Archive. The archive covers ‘ephemeral’ films – advertising, educational, industrial and amateur. There’s over 2000 films, so next time you need to illustrate content on management and General Motors, the private life of a female cat or the magic of transatlantic travel, this is a great place to start.

A short interview from The Chronicle of Hired Education with Adam Smith of Google Book Search.

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.”

Stanford University project with academics answering questions through video posts to the Stanford Facebook page rather than the (underused) physical open office hours.

• news story on Stanford website

Hailed by TechCrunchUK as a Last.FM for Research, Mendeley provides organisation and collaboration software for researchers. 

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.