Universities and the Web

JISC digital media online surgeries

Billy — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:59:28 +0000

I’m hoping to attend JISC Digital Media’s two day training course Video Production 1: Lectures and Interviews in March, so it’s great to see them making available high quality training materials through their Vimeo online surgeries.

I’ve embedded the latest below on microphone technique and placement.

#6 Online surgery – Microphone technique and placement from JISC Digital Media on Vimeo.

Navigate using j and k on keyboard

Billy — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:07:34 +0000

Ever since I first used bloglines I’ve been trying to use j and k shortcut keys to navigate blogs and websites. I’d love to see browsers implement it as a way of moving between headers in page content (are there accessibility issues with this?). Thanks to this article on new wordpress plugins, I’ve been able to add the functionality to the index and archive pages of this blog using the Prev-Next Keyboard Navigation plugin. Try it out.

Youtube adds auto captions

Billy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:22:03 +0000

As a disciple of the ‘all audio and video must have a transcription’ religion, I’ve spent countless hours over the last few years using the excellent, free, NCH Express Scribe to manually transcribe everything. It’s great to hear that YouTube are today adding (for select partners at first) auto captioning (including translations) using their excellent voice recognition capabilities.

Educause 09 and Lawrence Lessig

Billy — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:04:15 +0000

Videos from Educause 09 sessions are starting to be made available (you’ll need Silverlight installed, can’t install it from behind the firewall at work myself…), including Point/Counterpoint: Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai and Looking Back, Looking Forward: Trying to Use 48 Years in Academic IT to Predict Our IT Future.

Lawrence Lessig delivered the keynote It Is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right, I’ve embedded it below and linked to the mp3 file.

Download mp3

JISC Legal update website, produce video

Billy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:20:45 +0000

Everyone in the higher education sector should produce a video like this when they update their website. I’ve been learning video editing techniques in the last few weeks and I can only look on with awe at JISC’s use of transitions.

Google Wave invites for .ac.uk email addresses

Billy — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:53:39 +0000

If you’ve got a .ac.uk email address and you’d like a Google Wave invite, send me an email at billy@universitiesandtheweb.com. I’ll update this post when the batch I’ve got have gone.

New UCL homepage

Billy — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:08:17 +0000

More info on the UCL Web Services Blog

Boston University campus on Google Earth

Billy — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:51:50 +0000

Video showing Boston University campus buildings on Google Earth. Don’t know if it’s just too early for me but I couldn’t work out how to bring the buildings up for myself on Google Earth.

A year of Itunes U at UCL

Billy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:59:25 +0000

Some thoughts on a year of Itunes U at UCL from Jeremy Speller, with interesting reflections on the workload involved (they’re now hiring an itunes specialist) and interaction with moodle.

Directions to campus code snippet

Billy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:30:40 +0000

Another (potentially*) really handy bit of code from Google, this allows you to embed a form in your contact us/directions information allowing users to get directions from google maps to your specified location. My example below gives directions from any address to Southampton University:

You can specify a multiple choice for end locations.

*Unfortunately, I’d choose against using this at the moment as it seems to have problems with uk postcodes, I can’t imagine this remaining an issue for long.