The European Award for Languages

Congratulations to the NDLR Modern Languages' Community of Practice, which has won a European Award for Languages 2008 for its blog as a Language Community Building Medium. For more information see the entry on the blog, or contact Michelle Tooher or Paul Gormley, both members of the Learning Technologies Team here at CELT.

A second award went to the Italia in Diretta project run by Laura McLoughlin in the Italian Department at NUI Galway. This encourages students to run a website and blog to promote the Italian language aimed at school children.

intro to second life in education

Educause's latest "7 things you should know..." leaflet is about Second Life and its educational potential. It's available here.

Collection of free educational media

The Openculture blog has an expanding listing of open access university course materials and is a handy way of finding some examples rather than being over-reliant on one provider, such as iTunes, for example.

Live Conference Presentations from Princeton

The NMC (New Media Consortium) annual conference is under way in Princeton with over 600 participants. As you might hope for such a technology organisation, the keynote presentations are being made available as live streams. The events (in Princeton time!) are as below and you can access them here.

• Opening Plenary Keynote Presentation: “Technology and the Global Commons” Diana Oblinger, President, EDUCAUSE
  Thursday June 12, 8:30am-9:45am EDT
• Noontime Plenary Presentation: “Motion and Emotion, Multi-media Storytelling on the Web” Bill Frakes, Sports Illustrated
  Thursday June 12, 12:00pm-12:45pm EDT
• Keynote Presentation: “New Frontiers in Nanotechnology” Wole Soboyejo, Princeton University
  Friday June 13, 12:00pm-12:45pm EDT
• Center of Excellence Awards and Five Minutes of Fame, NMC
  Friday June 13, 2:45pm-5:00pm EDt
• Closing Plenary Keynote Presentation: “What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media” Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Saturday June 14, 10:15am-11:45am EDT
• Note that we are also hoping to have Henry Jenkins' session also streamed into Second Life on Princeton's SL version of the actual venue, Alexander Hall

Trinity College Dublin on iTunes U

As reported today in the Education Guardian and on the BBC website, TCD is now on iTunes U, giving access to audio and video materials, at http://itunes.tcd.ie
At the moment there are some promotional materials and public lectures from distinguished visitors. There are also some recorded lectures in immunology, computer science and education. Together with UCL and the Open University, this marks the first time that European universities have featured on iTunes U.

For more information, see the press release Trinity College Dublin Launches iTunes U Site.