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The [Swansea Learning Lab](http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk) had planned that tomorrow there would be a “lunch and learn” [E-Learning Showcase](http://swansea-learninglab.blogspot.com/2007/10/e-learning-showcase-come-and-find-out.html) at which I was going to present the “Blackboard Quest”. Unfortunately, due to lack of interest, this session has been postponed. However, as I already had the slides ready, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and share what I was going to say anyway and test-drive a nifty new Web 2....

Harvard College Extension School’s “Introduction to Computer Science” is running again. This course, run by David J. Malan, is an excellent example of the use of multimedia for distance learning. The 12 week programme (which recommenced on 17th September) is designed for adult learners and distance learning and goes from bits and bytes through algorithms, programming and the web. David invites the world to follow along by making audio and video recordings of his lectures, his notes and additional golden nuggets of content that are provided by his teaching assistants, all available through an RSS feed....

After reading OpenLearn Unit Content Feeds via OPML and Click On Series 2 by Tony Hirst (both of which use Grazr: “Easy feed grazing and sharing”), I was today inspired to create a del.icio.us bookmarks and RSS feed aggregator for one of my courses which starts in a week and a half. Here’s a report on my experiences! First-off I should say that Grazr is a web tool that takes either an RSS feed or an OPML file and, through the magic of Javascript, creates a dynamic feed viewer that can be embedded into any web page....

And Common Craft tells you why it matters! On on Tuesday 18th September, Google [announced](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html) the arrival of a new collaborative presentation tool which they call simply *presentation *. Annew member of the [Google Docs suite](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html) (which already includes a collaborative Word Processor and a Spreadsheet application), *presentation* provides a web-based tool for creating and developing presentations. It’s not as capable as PowerPoint, but probably passes the 80-20 rule. Plus it’s collaborative (you can share presentation development duties with others) and web publishable....

I have just created my first [DokuWiki](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki) plugin (in fact it’s my first PHP program!). It provides a way to mark-up Command Line Interface (CLI) transcripts, such as UNIX shell sessions, etc for user documentation. I’m using it to format a [UNIX tutorial](http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=eg-253:unixtut) for my students, but it could be used for other things. For some examples see: [test:cli](http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/dokuwiki/test:cli). For the plugin itself see [plugin:cli](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/plugin:cli) at the DokuWiki [plugins repository](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:plugins)....