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I’ve just read Don Tapscott’s critique of the modern university (The Demise of the University, The Edge) and I’ve decided that I don’t want to be that lecturer who mainly broadcasts his lectures anymore. I know I’ve dabbled with all kinds of technology assisted media over the years: I’ve played with wikis, blogs, podcasts and Blackboard … but always as a source of information that is sent to students. There’s been little or no information exchange, it’s been largely a one-way, rarely a two-way conversation....

As reported in Mashable Google Reader Updates: Share News on Twitter, Facebook, and More is a feature that I’ve wanted in Google Reader for ever! Now you can have a send-to link in your Reader Page and send items you want to share to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, delicious etc. Greeeaaaat!

“Four Office Applications will be on the web” according to to Abel Avram reporting for InfoQ. They will be Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote and they will run inside the Browser. Whether this is a reaction to Google’s Chrome O/S announcement or an extension to the general, slow, development of Windows Live, is unclear. What’s interesting is that they will be free, will use native web browser technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) rather than Silverlight and will presumably compete directly in the space currently occupied by Google and Zoho docs....

Today I installed Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” on my Acer Aspire One netbook. The version is the Netbook Remix version and it looks really nice, as the screenshot above will testify. Hopefully it will be easier to link to the University wireless network than the original Asper Aspire (based on Fedora I think) was. The most difficult part of the installation was getting the image file onto a USB data stick....

http://youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ I’m probably a few days late in bringing this to your attention, here goes anyway! In the Google IO Conference 2009, Google previewed a really interesting new, open-source, open-potocol platform for collaboration called Google Wave ([wave.google.com](http://wave.google.com)). This video recording of the keynote, published on the 28th May on YouTube, is well worth a look. The presentation takes about 90 minutes, but it’s worth watching it all because some of the more interesting possibilities (for example simultaneous translation) come later on in the presentation....