Guardian Viral Video Chart: The hits of 2007

The Guardian Digital Content Blog has posted the top twenty viral videos based on a count of the embedded videos and links on approximately two million blogs. There is the usual mix of celebrity videos and spoofs.
There are two that stick out for me. A video of Women in Art by by Philip Scott Johnson [...]

Winter Solstice

First day of the Xmas holidays. A walk along Mellon Udrigle beach at 3pm on the shortest day of the year. The very high pressure and the cold easterly winds have provided beautiful weather all this week at home.

solstice

Some thoughs on Facebook

Facebook is an interesting social networking site and I use it from time to time to keep up with what my “friends” are up to. I came across a couple of interesting articles that reflects some of the advantages and disadvantages about Facebook. The first article looks at how Facebook can be used as [...]

California school district getting 1,000 Asus Eee PCs

Asus Eee PC . I ordered a few of these three weeks ago so we could evaluate them in Highland. I am still waiting to get my mitts on them. RM cannot guarantee delivery until the middle of January, so I have ordered a couple of the higher spec machines as they have these in [...]

BBC unveils new-look home page

I think the web services delivered by the BBC are excellent and the quality of their web services is very high, even more remarkable when you consider that the technical folk at the BBC are constrained in what they can do as a large part of their services are outsourced . However they come up [...]

Music over IP

One project I am looking forward to in the new year is a project involving the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Central Primary School in Inverness. We will be using Marratech for video conferencing over IP. Marratech is the software used by GLOW for GLOW Meet so it will be interesting to see how the [...]

MIT makes its open courseware available to schools MIT Extends OpenCourseWare to High Schools

Dave Nagel writes in MIT Extends OpenCourseWare to High Schools ]

Five years after the initial pilot of MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, it’s now making its way into secondary education with the launch this week of “Highlights for High School,” which aims to bolster high school STEM education through free and open course materials, from [...]

Virtual Van Gogh in SL

Spotted on the Guardian web site. Building and sculpting in Second Life. This is definitely the “quicktime” version. Created by Robbie Dingo

second life, Van Gogh

Happy birthday SMS: 15 today

Today marks the 15th anniversary since the first commercial short message service (SMS) text was sent. That first message, which read “Merry Christmas,” was sent by Neil Papworth, an engineer at Airwide Solutions, via the Vodafone network to a colleague at the mobile operator who was enjoying the festivities of a staff Christmas party. [From [...]

Literacy. How to read a report carefully!

Like all education authorities Highland takes literacy very seriously and we have our own Literacy Project and our literacy team work closely with schools to develop these skills in children. (These materials are freely available btw from the web site).So it was with interest that I read about the PIRLS Report. This study made a [...]