The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) has started a list of government web sites that fail to meet accessibility standards. (found via Craig Thomler’s eGov AU blog)
At Australian universities, indigenous student enrolments have increased markedly in the last 10 years.
Andrew Norton points to flaws in the THES ranking of universities — is ANU really a better university than Stanford?
MIT’s Open CourseWare initiative reached a milestone recently: two subjects, physics and linear algebra, have each attracted more than a million visits to their web pages.
New Zealand’s national broadcaster, TVNZ, launched its on-demand broadband service 18 months ago. The online service now outpaces conventional TV viewing, with 30,000 hours of programs watched online each month.
Judah Phillips suggests some ways to build your skills in the emerging professional field of web analytics.
The US Association of Research Libraries has produced a free resource kit for designing technology-enhanced classroom and library spaces.
It’s a not-always-obvious truth that “Publishers provide many useful services, but they do not provide peer review. It is the peers themselves who do that essential work.” Paul Courant follows this idea to its logical conclusion: “Given that publication in the literal sense (making public) is now easy and cheap in the technical sense, it seems almost certain that informal review will grow relative to formal review.”
How much does intellectual property theft cost the law-abiding nation? The US Customs and Border Patrol office says 750,000 jobs are lost because of IP piracy, and other government agencies claim up to US$250 billion is lost to the US economy each year. In fact, says Julian Sanchez, “Try to follow the thread of citations to their source, and you encounter a fractal tangle of recursive reference that resembles nothing so much as the children’s game known, in less-PC times, as “Chinese whispers’ …”.
UK universities are handing out a new booklet telling chancellors what’s expected of them — and with good reason. “The traditional role of university chancellors, who count Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill among them, is to act as cheerleaders by promoting their institutions far and wide. And while some chancellors in Europe still wield power, their UK counterparts are unpaid figureheads, who give their time and experience for free. Universities are increasingly picking chancellors with celebrity caché to boost their profiles.” The booklet, Beyond Ceremony, is available online (PDF 1.7 Mb).
Tags: THES, learning spaces, eGov, ranking of universities, architecture, hreoc