Daily Archives: January 26, 2010

Open University goes over to Google Apps

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Just noticed this announcement.

Open University students will have greater opportunities to collaborate and communicate with each other thanks to a new agreement between the OU and Google.

The University will be deploying Google Apps for Education to run alongside other learning systems, with services that include: email, instant messaging, contact management, calendar, space for shared documents, and online document creation. There is the potential for more services to be added in the future.

These additional services are being provided to students to enable them to network and collaborate more effectively with each other. The default email provision for students will be with Google, but existing preferred email options will be maintained.

The OU (disclosure: where I have my day job, though I’m on sabbatical at the moment) is a very big and influential outfit in these areas. This is quite a coup for Google. (And I had absolutely nothing to do with it.)

Photographers protest against police stop and search

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From the Guardian.

Thousands of photographers have staged a mass protest against the ‘malicious’ use of anti-terrorism laws to stop them taking pictures in public places.

Trafalgar Square in central London was lit up by flash bulbs as part of the demonstration against photographers being unfairly targeted by police after taking photos. They are usually questioned under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which allows officers to stop and search without the need for ‘suspicion’ within designated areas in the UK.

More than 2,000 professional and amateur photographers took part in the protest organised by the group I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist!, many carrying placards bearing its name.

Onlookers were handed stop and search cards by organisers outlining their rights.

Freelance photographer and Guardian contributor Marc Vallee, who helped organise the protest with appeals on Twitter and Facebook, said he was “delighted” by the turnout.

“It’s quite obvious that professional photographers across the country are being searched because they are photographers not because they are suspicious,” he said.

“It’s a common-law right to take pictures in public places and we are here to show that.”

So is this it?

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From VentureBeat.

We’ll know for sure tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the New York Times thinks that old media are seeing the device as a time machine that will enable them to unravel the nightmare of the Web:

With the widely anticipated introduction of a tablet computer at an event here on Wednesday morning, Apple may be giving the media industry a kind of time machine — a chance to undo mistakes of the past.

Almost all media companies have run aground in the Internet Age as they gave away their print and video content on the Web and watched paying customers drift away as a result.

People who have seen the tablet say Apple will market it not just as a way to read news, books and other material, but also a way for companies to charge for all that content. By marrying its famously slick software and slender designs with the iTunes payment system, Apple could help create a way for media companies to alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era.

This opportunity, however, comes with a sizable catch: Steven P. Jobs.