These are my links for January 13th through February 4th:

Auckland University campus goes smoke-free | Stuff.co.nz:Students and staff at Auckland University can no longer slip outside for a quick puff.
The university has become a smoke-free campus, inside and outside, and smoking has been banned, even in areas once designated as smoking areas.
BBC News – Hi-tech [...]

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The 2009 list is out from Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies.
As always this makes a great read.
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009
View more documents from Jane Hart.
As Derek Wenmoth has commented, the lack of the main proprietary LMSs in the list is notable.
The top 10 tools are

Twitter
Delicious
YouTube
Google Reader
Google Docs
WordPress
SlideShare
Google [...]

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It’s been some while since I administered a Blackboard system, 2002 to be exact, but if this post from Ben Eison is anything to go by things have not changed a deal in the last seven years.

One of the things that frustrated me was Blackboard’s poor support. It wasn’t that the support staff were poor, [...]

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Derek Wenmoth, in a post on the DEANZ blog, led me to this report from the US Department of Education.
A U.S. Department of Education analysis of  research studies undertaken between 1996 and 2008 concludes that:

Blended Learning is the most effective mode of education;
Online Learning is more effective than face-to-face;
Face-to-face learning alone is the least effective [...]

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By comparison with other times I’ve travelled through Singapore, the airport was empty this week. And the Auckland to Singapore flight was only about a third full.
If people aren’t travelling in general due to the economic turn down and the latest flu threat, then students probably aren’t keen for international study either. In New Zealand [...]

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This arrived in my inbox tonight:

Impact: Journal of Applied Research in E-learning has been established to address the paucity of research publication avenues with a particular emphasis on e-learning in organisational and workplace settings. It is a fully online journal, and an official publication of the E-learning Network of Australasia (ElNet), Australia’s only national e-learning [...]

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Today I had my very first go in a kayak in calm waters just south of Coromandel. You’ll have to take my word for it but that is me in the photo.
I get sea sick quite easily (even on the Devonport Ferry if the weather is a bit rough) so you can imagine the conditions [...]

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I don’t do plugs for my own work that much (well just a bit), but here is one for a new course I am doing:

Are you looking for ways to use interactive web tools to use in your teaching? But you don’t know where to start? Do you think it will take more time than [...]

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