Teach Media NZ

The Virtual Learning Network supports the concept of classrooms without walls, where students and educators have the flexibility to connect with their classes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Where a rich and diverse range of courses, programmes and activities, from Early Childhood through to Tertiary, are offered by New Zealand based educators. This site brokers the connections between teachers and learners; joining clusters, schools, groups and individuals who are learning through online programes and/or using video conferencing for curriculum support. More information ...

BeSTGRID is a Tertiary Education Commission Innovation and Development Fund Project 2006-2008, focused on how to make eResearch (What is eResearch?) work, to create a fully-functional eResearch ecosystem for New Zealand. BeSTGRID will deliver mechanisms, methods and tools that facilitate collaboration on shared information, sharing of computational resources and online visualization of instruments and experiments.

Interactive Whiteboards are transforming the way people learn and collaborate in groups.  Whether in the classroom or in a lecture theater, groups are more productive and learn more effectively when they can share ideas, images, notes etc on a large, touch-enabled surface connected to a computer.

ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers. With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education. With technical barriers, we promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse. With social barriers, we encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions. ccLearn is launching over the summer of 2007 with generous support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, working closely with members of the Foundation’s Open Educational Resources Program. This is an international project, and we will be working with open educational sites and resources from around the world.

Collaboration between distributed users online is widely recognized as one of the key next steps in software development. The products available for collaboration are becoming increasingly light weight, powerful and easy to use. Two companies that we’ve found entering into this market with compelling, but markedly different, products are ConceptShare and Thinkature. Both products let users create shared visual workspaces that can be marked up and chatted in. If you are a visual designer, someone planning events or otherwise looking to stop emailing or faxing visual objects back and forth - one of these two services might be just what you are looking for. Thinkature is simpler, free and available now. ConceptShare is more powerful, subscription based and due to come to market in a few weeks.

Web 2.0 - Understanding the substance behind the buzzwords. As part of a panel debate at Webstock.org.nz. Created by Philip Fierlinger. philip@turntable.com http://turntable.com/blog

Papers and presentations   Folksonomies and tagging: New developments in social bookmarking 430 Kb This paper, presented at the Ark Group Conference, describes a proof of concept to develop community contributions to managing information and resources, using Taxonomy-Directed Folksonomy. Learning architecture: issues in indexing Australian education in a Web 2.0 world 86 Kb This paper, presented at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers Conference, provides an overview of current thinking about learning architectures, and raises questions about how educational institutions are managing learning resources.

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Users of RSS content use programs called feed "readers" or "aggregators": the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to his or her reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user. The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards: Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed," "webfeed," "RSS stream," or "RSS channel".

Today, we must clear the mind of past practices. Web enlightenment has been achieved thanks to the tireless efforts of folk like the W3C, WaSP and the major browser creators. The css Zen Garden invites you to relax and meditate on the important lessons of the masters. Begin to see with clarity. Learn to use the (yet to be) time-honored techniques in new and invigorating fashion. Become one with the web.