BBC News reports that Google is taking over the email systems for some universities, including Trinity College in Dublin. Students will then have an email address affiliated with the university for life. They are hoping to then integrate the Google Apps for Education into everyday life in universities, much as I’ve been trying to do with my students’ coursework.
A while ago Google launched Custom Search, a way to search within in a defined set of websites to find specific results. Using Stephen Downes‘ blogroll, I created one for the edublogosphere. It’s still active, although it hasn’t be updated for a while. That was the problem: you had to keep going back, logging in, and updating your list. Yes, you could add collaborators but it was a bit… well, messy.
Not any more! Google announced yesterday that Custom Search will now work on-the-fly from a piece of code inserted in a web page of your choice. So, I’m thinking a wiki with a list of all the blogs in the edublogosphere continually updated. Perhaps this is the cause to which Chris Craft can donate his excellent (but currently inactive) edublogosphere.com domain name? 🙂
I can imagine this could be very useful for courses that involve a substantial amount of independent work by students: sixth-form colleges, universities and the like. It’s probably less immediately useful to schools, although I should imagine it could be fantastic for groups of like-minded teachers…
There’s an interesting article at BBC News about the potential for power to be transmitted wirelessly using resonant frequency. This could be extraordinarily useful! But, given the recent bad press about wi-fi, how much more of a potential hornet’s-nest is this?