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Although I missed the original announcement, I am indebted to Jane Hart who shared the announcement Update on Google Wave (posted by Urs Hölze on the Official Google Blog) of Google’s decision to cease development of Google Wave: We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code....

My University has invested in a license for Learning Objects Campus Pack 4 and I’ve created a new blog in my new Personal Learning Space. I’m calling it Reflections for now and I’ll be using it to record ideas and thoughts on my personal learning and teaching experiences. I’ve changed the permissions to make the blog public with open comments. I can always change this later if it turns out to be a bad idea....

It’s actually a fortnight since the last one but … this week’s Podcast of the Week is The Guardian’s excellent Tech Weekly podcast. Every Wednesday, regular host Aleks Krotoski along with regular contributors Guardian Technology Editor Charles Arthur and Digital Media Reporter Jemima Kiss, discuss the big technology news items of the week. Since the demise of The Guardian’s Thursday Technology supplement, the podcast is the quickest way to keep up to date....

Learning Objects Campus Pack, used to provide for blogs, wikis and podcasts in Swansea University’s VLE, was updated at the same time as Blackboard. If you have one or more Learning Objects blog(s), wiki(s) or podcast(s) in your Blackboard (learning portal) module sites, they will be upgraded the first time you or your students visit them. If you have a large number of these installed in a module site, as I have for some of my modules, you may want to do the upgrade before your course is opened for new enrolments....

Today is the day when Blackboard 9.1 was rolled out at Swansea University as the new Learning Portal. I haven’t logged in to check my courses yet, but I’m sure they’ll be fine. Clive and his team promised to deliver the update on July 30th, and that’s what they’ve done. I know a lot of planing and work has gone into this and it’s been done with minimum fuss and negative impact....