Merry Christmas!

What is a widget? What is a Personal Learning Environment? How can I start building my own Personal Learning Environment? If you’d like to learn the answers to these questions, then visit our new course about Responsive Open Learning Environments. The course is free and also available for download, reuse and republishing.

The ROLE project (Responsive Open Learning Environments) is organising a Widget Enchantment Contest. Build a widget using ROLE technologies, make it available through the ROLE widget store and win a prize worth 500EUR

The contest will run till July 15th and the winner will be announced on July 31st.

UPDATE: The contest has been extended till August 31st.

So the new iPad was finally unveiled this week, giving an end to loads of speculations and high hopes… The device is essentially just a large iPod Touch, lacking basic features someone would expect from a tablet, like multitasking, a usb port, or even a camera. Criticism has been ruthless so far, from mocking the device’s unfortunate name to comparing it with… a stone

In anticipation of the big announcement of the new tablet / e-reader by Apple next week, Jason Bradbury of the Gadget Show wrote a very passionate piece in his blog:

Let me place my neck squarely on the block and predict the most important dimension of the next Wednesday’s launch: it will change publishing, forever.

I’ll just say I hope even half of what Jason believes comes true (and judging from Apple’s history this might just happen!).