Eric Baber's blog

I've been looking for something like this for a few years and Dennis Newson has just sent this my way - thanks Dennis. Diigo is a tool that allows you to highlight sentences on webpages, post sticky notes on them, comment on them in other ways - and all either for yourself or publicly. Very useful if you're reading an article on a site and want to make comments on it for yourself for later reference, or for others if you want to read something as a team. Very handy. A promo video is also available here.

No idea how I missed this one - with any luck it's brand-new which would explain why I've never come across it. This is an excellent website aimed at professionals learning English, i.e. business English learners. It's got articles, podcasts with transcripts, vocabulary and grammar help and more. Very nice.

When writing my last blog post just now I visited the Amazon website only to find information about their new wireless reading device, Kindle. It looks neat and does what the label says: it's a wireless devise which allows you to dip into and buy electronic books from the associated website/service. It holds 200 titles, has an "electronic-paper display [which] provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper", doesn't need a computer to hook up to, and so on. Looks good.

Penguin has announced that it will make available the first chapter of all of its new books in pdf format online. That means you can dip into the beginning of a new book before buying it. Similar really to the Amazon Look Inside feature though a whole chapter is nice.

I clearly haven't been keeping up. I've just been catching up on news only to find that on 22 February, Blackboard won its lawsuit against Desire2Learn over the use of the term Learning Management System. Blackboard has been awarded the outrageous patent of the term, meaning that no other providers of LMSs may use that term, and that many features in existing LMSs will have to be redesigned in order not to infringe the patent. With any luck this move will cause them to lose significant market share; they've already lost face within the educational community. The Boycott Blackboard website has more information.

A while ago the Guardian interviewed me about Voice over IP (VoIP) for language teaching; the resulting article has just been published.

This came to me via http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/facebook-new-study-hall-for-wired.html .

In summary, a first-year student at Ryerson University is being charged with 147 counts of academic misconduct for running a Facebook study group for one of his engineering courses. At the university, study groups are encouraged to discuss the course content. When the administrators got wind of the virtual study group, though, they slammed him with one count of academic misconduct and, get this, a further 146 for each fellow student who had signed up for it. The student, Chris Avenir, derived no financial or other benefit from setting up the group apart from the benefit that he would receive from the same group on a face-to-face basis.

In order to avoid students cheating on assignments (rather than exams), "Each student in the course received slightly different questions to prevent cheating, she said, and she did not see evidence of students doing complete solutions for each other. Instead, she said, they would brainstorm about techniques." Which is what teaching and learning should be all about: enabling learners to develop problem-solving skills, something which is often best done in a collaborative environment.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out as it says a lot about the university's approach to learning.