"The fifth 'Learn About' fair is taking place on 29th February 2012 in the Jennie Lee Building from 11:30 am - 2:30 pm with some of the fair also available online for remote participation."
I've just been to Martin Weller's talk on the Podstars project at the Open University. This is a pilot project to encourage academics from faculties across the OU to try their hand at producing short videos, slidecasts (slide presentations + audio) or other multimedia. Despite the name Podstars, the aim was not to create celebrities, but instead to lower the bar to multimedia production.
Abstract: Stammering or stuttering is a speech disability that receives little exposure in the media. It affects about one in every hundred children and adults at some point in their lives, and it can have an impact on education, employment, social integration, and the person's mental well-being and self-esteem. The one in a hundred figure equates to 40 to 50 employees of The Open University and possibly 1500-2000 students.
For the past few weeks we have been designing an Application programming interface (API) for Cloudworks, to enable anyone to build their own programs using the Cloudworks data. We have a draft API document that explains the conventions, error handling and each individual call to the API. We would like your feedback on all details of the interface, and we'll work them in to the code as it evolves.
An IET technology coffee morning talk by Wendy Porch and me, on the MALT Wiki project.
ABSTRACT: The generally low incidence of captioning for the deaf and audio description for those with sight impairments on the web is in stark contrast to the progress made in basic web accessibility. The captioning function offered by YouTube is a step in the right direction, though there are clear problems. Audio description is in a worse state.
