Yesterday I received an email from Ning’s CEO Jason Rosenthal announcing the “exciting new developments in Ning” (which include the phasing out of free Ning) which will be rolled out in July. The mid-range price plan Ning-plus at $19.95 per month works out cheaper than the current offerings. The equivalent of the current Free Ning (Ning mini) will now cost $2.95 per month, is limited to 150 members and no groups, but will allow you to have no or your own advertising.

Tomorrow’s finally election election day (an event that seems to have been coming since May 2009) and we know that whoever gets into power will have some very difficult decisions to make. None of the three parties have really told us were the money’s going to come from or the cuts are going to be made, but here are my predictions: There will be a hung parliament … I’m hoping that it will be lib-lab ruling coalition, but fear a lib-con one.

… I’ve been mostly developing a new version of my project allocation tool in Drupal (permissions, CCK and views,.. oh my!); re-launching the annual research project selection round in Blackboard; and re-launching Social Engineering as a self-hosted Elgg site. In the meantime, last-year’s research projects have been winding down (submission deadline was yesterday and vivas are in two-weeks), and we’ve been winding up to asking colleagues for the 500 or so new projects we are going to need for 2010-2011.

Today, I’ve mostly been playing with Cloudworks (cloudworks.ac.uk). There’s a nice introductory slidecast from Gráinne Conole on slideshare.

While doing some research (i.e. Google search) on Drupal for social networking in education, I was intrigued to find out that the educational social network cloudworks.ac.uk was originally developed using Drupal. See Gráinne Conole and Juliette Culver, “Cloudworks: Social networking for learning design“, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2009, 25(5), 763-782. If Drupal was good enough for JISC and the OU …

Today I presented a “Lunch and Learn Session” to colleagues at our Staff Development Unit. Here are the slides which are hosted at Google Docs. [googleapps domain=“docs” dir=“present/embed” query=“id=ajggj8h93vqb_20130gsvxt3fw” width=“410” height=“342” /] The creation of a Ning network was a highlight of the session, and unfortunately that bit is not present here, but the *intro* and *outro* may nevertheless be of some interest. There is also a [SlideShare version](http://www.slideshare.net/cpjobling/a-beginners-guide-to-social-engineering) which includes some extra video which I may get around to narrating and including a screencast demo of Ning site creation.

The Digital Economy Bill was pushed through parliament last night despite the attempts of MPs on the Labour and Liberal Democrat benches to force it to be delayed for proper scrutiny until after the next election. It’s apparently not a big issue in the electoral coverage and at the time of posting there had only been four reactions in the *blogs* of mainstream media: - Charles Arthur, Guardian Technology Editor, [live blogged the whole debate](http://www.

April fool’s jokes rounded up in the News Blog at The Guardian: I confess that I didn’t spot the “Was Shakespeare French” hoax — if indeed it was a hoax — on today’s Today Program!

Stone the crows Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling It’s April first but this is no joke. I spotted this dead crow in the front area of a house in Alexandra Terrace, Brynmill. What killed it I wonder?

Just posted my last post and I noticed that I’d typed it’s when I meant its. This is a common error that I pick up my students on all the time, but it’s one that I make myself quite frequently. [Its](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its) is the possessive adjective form of the pronoun *it* used in the post in question as “YouTube has changed **its** user interface”. [It’s](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/it's) is a contraction of *it is* as used in “*First impressions*: **it’s** [that is YouTube’s new interface *is*] certainly much less cluttered”.

Visited YouTube today to rate Stephen Fry’s “unboxing my iPad” video (thanks to Digital Inspiration for the link) and noticed that YouTube has changed its user interface. If you visit the site, “Take the Quick Tour” (highlighted middle right) will show you what’s new. First impressions: It’s certainly much less cluttered. Do I like it? Time will tell.

Recently I’ve been catching up with the the excellent new blog/podcast The Changelog which covers what’s fresh and new in open source Listening to [episode 0.0.8](http://thechangelog.com/post/334287138/episode-0-0-8-marshall-culpepper-from-appcelerator-titan) (you have to be a geek to appreciate the episode numbering!), I became aware of an interesting new application development platform called [Appcellerator Titanium](http://www.appcelerator.com/). Inspired by products like Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight, Titanium leverages the open source WebKit web-browser engine (used in Safari, Chrome, iPhone and Android) to create a software development kit (SDK) that allows the development of native desktop and mobile networked applications (or apps).