Month September 2010

Learn WordPress.com

WordPress is a great bit of software, and by far the easiest way to get up and running with it is to use the usually free hosted version at WordPress.com. It’s even easier to get started than ever, with Learn…

Phones, phones, phones

To probably misquote Stephen Fry: “Was there ever a smartphone that I didn’t buy?” As I posted a little while ago, I’m pretty happy with the Nexus One. Android is a nice, feature rich, open operating system, and the hardware…

YouChoose

In what looks like a pretty interesting collaboration between what was the LGA Group and YouGov, YouChoose is an online budget simulator that: encourages members of the public to consider where council budget cuts should fall, where efficiencies might be…

Technology, learning and knowledge

I had a good time up in Scotland last week, and enjoyed putting together and delivering my talk at the Learning Pool event we ran – which saw a great turnout. My discussion focused on the use of technology in…

Getting crowdsourcing right

Steph has a great post about crowdsourcing in government: It’s human nature to want to work on your own projects, rather than those imposed upon you. It’s human nature to want to earn recognition, intellectual satisfaction and a good living…

Back to school

I’ve just registered to do some proper studying – for the first time since I left university in 2001. It’s through the Open University, and the qualification is a BSc (Honours) Technology. I’m entirely self taught when it comes to…

The dynamic learning environment

Here’s a nice little video we have produced to help people understand the benefits of the Learning Pool learning management system – what we call the DLE. It’s a cloud-based implementation of the open source Moodle platform, with some added…

My setup

One of my favourite bits of technology porn is Shawn Blanc’s series on sweet Mac setups. It basically just gives dorks like me an opportunity to drool over other people’s kit. But there’s another purpose to this, which is that…

Sharing and flexibility

Nice post from BIS’ Neil Williams on deciding up on a commenting system for the department’s website. Go read the whole thing, but he summarises: So what have we learned? People blogging about what they are up to is dead…

Careers 2.0

Two strangely related things happened last week. The second one was Dominic Campbell‘s post, “Exciting times” in which he describes the progress he has made over the last few years, and how odd – and amazing – the whole thing…