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.

If you’re one of the bloggers that love to blog but never seem to find the time to do it properly (it all sounds so familiar!), then the Semantic Web may have a treat for you. The Evri semantic web service claims to be able to help bloggers follow trends and developments and deliver curated content to their readers:

The idea is to put into play more elements of its technology, such as its notion of collections that lets users follow entities around topics they’re interested in, so that bloggers can become better curators for their sites. They then get better, that is, at pinpointing streams around their specialty and letting information about that flow to their base.

Of course, as the article claims, curated content is not supposed to be a replacement for original content produced by the blogger. Instead, it can be used more like starting material, on top of which the blogger will add an editorial layer. Sweet!

This will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the semantic web and other emerging web and internet technologies, and ensure that government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader. And we will invite universities and private sector web developers and companies to join this collaborative project.

Good news indeed, in light of the recent developments in the Linked Data initiative in the UK.

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!).

Like many other internet users of my age, my very first web page was hosted on GeoCities. Half-coded in HTML and half in Frontpage, with lots of GIFs and different colours, my page was not very different from the rest of the GeoCities world!

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for your eyes!), I haven’t kept any of the early versions of my GeoCities page. I only managed to retrieve the last version, which is not too dreadful! Here’s what the home page used to look like:

Note: The monkey was “evolving” into a human sitting in front of a PC, through a home-made GIF

Goodbye GeoCities! We sure had a lot of fun together!