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The reference to the collaboration with Berners-Lee was mentioned at the recent Online Information Conference. If it comes off as planned and on schedule (a cause for celebration in itself?), this could be a very good illustration of the power of the so-called 'semantic web'.

Web 2.0 Projects Book Deadline Extended. Includes a couple of examples of submissions received so far

A lot of good stuff comes out of Denmark as far as education is concerned, and I think this raises the stakes a bit. In a nutshell, this exam allows students to use the internet to help them answer the questions. The questions are not about finding facts, but validation of search engine results and such like. As Stephen Heppell says, students use computers in their education, and then as soon as they walk through the examination room door they have to leave all that behind and write their answers. I'd go further: research has shown that setting tests which involve a different mode of answering from the mode of learning leads to poorer performance. In other words, if students have covered a course mainly through using technology, they should be required to use the technology for the examination. Similarly with paper-based learning.

Key paragraph and website: "We will make government data accessible through a single access point at www.data.gov.uk, which will go live from January 2010 with over 1,100 central government datasets free for reuse, ranging from lists of schools to traffic volumes on the trunk road network."

Another one of those awful videos, in which people hold up handwritten cards to a background of some horrible dirge. Nevertheless, the ideas on the cards are pretty good, and perfectly complement the ideas in the forthcoming Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book! This video is definitely one to watch, bookmark and share.

This technique has become known as 'Augmented Reality', or AR, and it promises to be one of the great growth areas in technology over the next decade - but perhaps not the reasons the leaders of the field currently envision.  The strength of AR is not what it brings to the big things - the buildings and monuments - but what it brings to the smallest and most common objects in the material world.  At present, AR is flashy, but not at all useful.  It's about to make a transition.  It will no longer be spectacular, but we'll wonder how we lived without it.

Very interesting page, brought to my attention by Catherine Andy. The subject matter is interesting in itself, and if you like it you might wish to vote for it: it has been shortlisted in the Japan Webpage Contest run by the Japan Foundation. This is the link: www.japanwebpagecontest.org.uk/vote What interests me in particular, though, is the use of the different applications to present the information, such as Tagxedo (which I reviewed in Computers in Classrooms) and stickies provided by Crazy Profile (which I hadn'd heard of before). Well worth exploring, and don't forget to vote for it!