BBC NEWS | UK | England | West Yorkshire | Podcast lectures for uni students

It's made the Beeb news! We are considering this approach for some of our own material. But as Stephen Downes points out in his blog, do we want podcasts or just lecture recordings. An important point to consider in all this...optimal length of recording. Audio archiving of lectures is not new - but grabbing short relevant snippets? It wil be interesting to see how all this pans out over time. Hype and hoopla? Or useful medium?

Learning 2.0 Tip of the Week :: Learning 2.0 and Del.icio.us

Here's a great wee podcast that explains del.icio.us and how it is useful in a learning environment. Nice explanation. Only 8 mins long - nice and digestible.

You may be prompted to log in and subscribe - no cost to this.

Learning 2.0: ITunes University

More on podcasting from an educational perspective. But personally, I find this to be a bit of a worrying trend. Firstly, why is Apple doing this? Ostensibly, they are trying to support education - they certainly have a track record with schools as a whole. But is there more to it than that? Maybe it's the cynic in me rising to the surface but I find this to be an attempt to corner a market with the long term view of profiting from educational content.

And after all, what is actually unique about iTunes. Not much really. Some cool esthetic designs, a really easy to use interface - all the kinda stuff that Apple does well. But expensive really, considering that the iPod is just a glorified MP3 player. Now, I'm all in favour of somebody providing a straightforward means of buying tunes legally. But I'm not so much in favour of them trying to foist this same paradigm on educational content flow. Oh sure, it is wide open just now...but will it remain so. And the fact remains that it does promote a non-open, non-standard data format over other perfectly acceptable open standards.

Jon Udell at InfoWeek has also written similarly on this topic. A thoughtful and very insightful author - you can find a reference to his piece earlier in the NOSMeLD blog.

Learning 2.0: Building on Learning Chunks

In a non-medical vein, this ties into what we've been espousing with our PocketSnips model. Small chunks of content that can be pieced together. Not lengthy but interestingly parallel to our position.

Learning 2.0: Contextual Learning

Just a teaser, I'm afraid...unless you want to spend $250 on a report from Forrester Research. Relates to workplace and tacit learning which we've blogged about before. With some of the latest developments in thinking for professional development, this stuff is increasingly relevant.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Collaborative Innovation and The Humble Corporation

An interesting piece with information drawn from the 2006 CEO study. A little dry in places but useful stuff.