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URL: [http://www.makeitgreat2010.com/](http://www.makeitgreat2010.com/ “http://www.makeitgreat2010.com/”) Office 2010 will be tightly linked with your social networks. Follow this link and login with your Facebook account. It’ll make a promotional video with you as the star and your public Facebook network and photos as the co-stars! Pretty and potentially viral. Seriously, if MS Office 2010 can deliver, it might be a Google Docs killer! Caveat: maybe not so great if mobile access only works on Windows phones....

Thinking Aloud, a long running BBC Radio 4 show, is a weekly discussion of the latest research in social science. It might seem an odd choice for a lecturer in engineering. But since it’s been a Podcast, I’ve been hooked! It may be the host, Prof. Laurie Taylor, who’s erudition and humour is infectious, but it’s more probably the subject matter. When couched in academic language “discussion of the latest research in social science” seems a dull dry subject....

Last week I wrote a blog posting on the Swansea Learning Lab about the new-to-uk Amazon Kindle and a followup in Reflections about textbook availabilty and prices. I’ve actually been a long term subscriber to O’Reilly’s Safari Books online service (http://www.safaribooksonline.com/) , which for $42.99 (about £27) per month (which includes VAT), gives me access to the entire O’Reilly catalogue as well as many offerings from Addison Wesley, John Wiley and other familiar textbook publishers....

I’ve been a long-time admirer of the [Head First](http://www.headfirstlabs.com/index.php) series of books since the dim and distant days of [Head First EJB](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596005719/). I have quite a collection of these books myself and often recommend them to students who want to do some self-directed learning, say to learn [Java](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009205/) or [HTML and CSS](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101978/). Every book starts by explaining the pedagogical principles (developed by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates) behind the books and these principles are [enumerated](http://www....

On the theme of mobile web accessibility (#thereisawebappforthat) I did some more exploration of the BBC’s mobile (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile) web site and discovered that there is a mobile version of iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer which streams video in MP4 format suitable for the iPhone. Thus, I’d have to regrade the BBC’s mobile accessibility to A+ … providing that you enter the site from the root URL. In the spirit of research, and because I teach some of this stuff, I dug a little deeper and discovered that if you visit the BBC with a conventional browser, the pages are returned using the XHTML 1....