CIT used to have an e-Portfolio service that did not have a high take up rate. There are several reasons for this that I can think of: It was provided under the build it and they will come model. I believe not enough was done to convince students and teaching staff about the benefits of building e-Portfolios. Consequently, no one was willing to integrate this into their course, as part of reflective learning. Keeping an e-Portfolio was seen as extra work, which neither students nor staff were keen on. Perhaps the software itself was not very conducive to building e-Portfolios. One key area with users seem to be that the e-Portfolio should have a customisable design and layout (at least on its public face). Our system was not flexible in that aspect. In fact, in the latter years, the option to publish the e-Portfolio was taken away entirely. The e-Portfolio service was a walled garden. It wasn’t easy to bring in digital artefacts, which may have resided on other public services, nor was it easy to repurpose that information into useful formats – personal reference, actual resume, showcase of work. No one figured how students would access the e-Portfolios after they graduated as it was all based on our single sign-on system.

Etherpad is currently being used in Libya, Egypt and various other places of conflict to rewrite constitutions and policies. Etherpad Lite’s “portableness” and simplicity to deploy make it a perfect choice for these types of environments where it is not an option to rely on third party services to ensure internet connectivity/data privacy/protection.

If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard the news, Amazon debuted its $200 7-inch tablet, the Kindle Fire, this week. Make no mistake: It’s no iPad. There’s no front-facing or rear-facing camera, and it’s only got 8 GB of storage. But it’s not meant to be an iPad. It’s a completely different kind of tablet, designed for the pure consumer. That is, it’s designed for consumptive behavior: reading, listening to music, watching video content. The lack of local storage isn’t an issue, either; it’s meant to take advantage of the cloud with services like Amazon’s $80 yearly Prime service, as well as Amazon Cloud Drive. And the smaller form factor makes it extra portable, easy to whip out on the bus or the subway (much like a Kindle).

This is the story of a person whose joke project became more successful than the one on which he lavished love and intellect, the climate that caused that to happen and how ultimately he decided to learn from it instead of becoming upset.

According to a FAQ on Picasa's support site, the photo-sharing service provides up to 1 GB of free storage for photos and videos to its users. But since Google+ actively encourages storing and sharing photos - its Android app even offers an "instant upload" option - there may have been some concern about storage limits among Picasa users. As it turns out, there's nothing to worry about. If you're signed up for Google+, photos up to 2048x2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes long won't count towards this free storage limit. And Google will automatically resize photos for you when you upload them to Google+, so they stay under the free size limit. That means only photos uploaded directly to Picasa Web Albums over the 2048x2048 size will count towards the 1 GB of free storage, explains Google. And when that limit is reached, photos will be automatically resized. Meanwhile, for non-Google+ users, there are slightly stricter rules: photos up to 800x800 and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards free storage. Again, when the 1 GB limit is reached, larger photos will be resized down. Simply put, this means that whether you're on Google+ or not, Picasa offers unlimited free storage for photos and videos (under 15 minutes). The difference is that Google+ users can upload higher resolution photos to Plus/Picasa without being penalized.