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The Edublog Awards 2009 are open for nomination!

This is our chance to nominate and celebrate

the achievements of edubloggers, twitterers, podcasters, video makers, online communities, wiki hosts and other web based users of educational technology.

My nominations are:

Best individual blog: Gabber (Kevin Brace) – http://kev-brace.blogspot.com/
Best individual tweeter: @psychemedia (Tony Hirst)  – http://twitter.com/psychemedia
Best group blog: Mashable – http://mashable.com/ (I would have nominated RSC NewsFeed, but as one of its writers I don’t think that is allowed)
Best new blog: Don’t Waste Your Time (David Hopkins) – http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/
Best resource sharing blog Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day (Jane Hart) – http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/
Best teacher blog: EdCompBlog (David Muir) – http://edcompblog.blogspot.com/
Best educational use of a social networking service: RSC Access and Inclusion Ning – http://inclusive.ning.com/

You can nominate your own by following the instructions on the EduBlogAwards site

Key dates are:

• Nominations: Close Tuesday 8 December
• Voting: Ends Wednesday 16 December
• Award Ceremony: Friday 18 December

While toiling to polish off the Google Wave 101 post a call went up in the office for contributions to RSC NewsFeed. In no time I had managed to put together 5 posts.

There isn’t really a common thread to pull them together so below is the title and short synopsis:

• Automatic Captions in YouTube – This post relates to Google’s announcement that YouTube will begin to use voice recognition software to automatically add captions to videos, which also back videos a lot more searchable. 
• 50 Educational Apps for the iPod Touch – A link to a great list of educational applications for the iPod Touch (mainly schools focused but there is something for everyone).
• PowerPoint: Embedding YouTube Video – A nice ‘how-to’ by David Hopkins on embedding live YouTube videos in PowerPoint.
• Edinburgh College of Art Launches its ‘Vision’ of Academic Research – Wow! When art colleges produce a publication, they really produce a publication. This 184 page publication is designed to showcase some of Edinburgh College of Art’s best research.
• Hotseat: Any Mobile Will Do – This post highlights the work of Purdue University in developing a micro-in/out-of-class discussion tool which enables lectures to use multiple social networking sites to facilitate discussions.

Enjoy! 

The RSCs in Scotland publish a fortnightly electronic newsletter, RSC NewsFeed, to keep the FE and HE community informed about the latest ICT-related news, events and resources.

Our editor, Hugh Daily, does a stirling job in rallying us all to make contributions. For the edition published however Hugh was away so I made a concerted effort to make sure there was enough ‘in the store’. This resulted in a record breaking 8 post from your truly (my posts are here).      

A couple of these posts are very pertinent to HE so I would like to repost them here:

First I would like to highlight the work of Alistair Young, Senior Software Developer at UHI, who won a prize in JISC MOSAIC Developer Competition.

Alistair’s prize winning iLib, the Course Book Finder perhaps highlights how roles within institutions are becoming increasingly blurred. In my own work as a learning technologist I’m finding more need to understand computer programming and server architecture. This may also be evident in another post from this week highlighting that St George’s University London have won this years JISC Times Higher Education award for their virtual paramedic training in Second Life. Having had an insight into this project it is clear that the team have had to be multi-disciplined and multi-skilled. 

The final post I would like to highlight is on the International University of the People. This is a project which is exploring low-cost higher education achievable by using online communities to support learning. Cost is obviously a big talking point now particularly with the looming New Framework for universities.