David Davies' Weblog

My institution has just gone live on iTunesU. It’s a good site, and I know a lot of effort has gone into creating the site and its content. For example take a look at Ian Stewart’s Math Challenges. Although I am no doubt biased, Warwick’s is one of the better iTunesU sites out there.
I’m [...]

This is a terrific short video of Johnny Lee’s Nintendo Wii remote controller hacks. The head tracking VR display screen application is particularly amazing and could have some powerful uses in educational games. I know of groups that are using complex technologies to achieve the same effect as this elegantly simple approach. Be sure to [...]

I’ve just discovered Wordle, a web application that creates word clouds from any body of text. Word clouds, like tag clouds, are a collection of individual words whose text size reflects the frequency of occurrence in a given body of text. Wordle has some nice layout tools to help you create beautiful word clouds. It’s [...]

This is interesting.

Firefly allows visitors to a web site to point and chat. Basically a Flash overlay movie with transparent background allows contemporaneous web site visitors to point at content on the site and instant chat with each other. Chat messages are currently anonymous but I expect that will change. Messages are also transient so [...]

You know the thing that puzzles me about services like Twitter and Jaiku et al, sometimes referred to as microblogging applications, is that you have to use a central server or service to create and distribute your Tweets or microbloglets or whatever-you-call-thems only to have them converted to RSS and syndicated. Why not just use [...]