and Flickr’s downtime colouring in game:

A list of the best (and worst) web 2.0 error messages can be found in Royal Pingdom’s post 24 fun and inspiring web 2.0 error pages, unsurprisngly Google and Microsoft don’t fare particularly well.

The University of Auckland has produced a handsome (if more than a little bit in debt to the Matrix) online tutorial that uses a graphic novel style narrative, about a student researching a project, to guide the user through the library’s services. It incorporates interactive tutorials on the library’s catalogue and a section on help desk FAQ’s.

The University of California offers this tutorial, aimed at students of science, which runs through the scientific method, information literacy, subject based resources, scholarly communication and the peer review process. It also looks good enough to eat.

I’ve been wondering about how a range of services of use to students could be integrated into one package, which would effectively ‘follow’ them around as they browse or chat, as the browser embedded applications in Firefox do, so it’s good to see someone as major as Google taking a stab at this, even if the tools available are largely communication based. I think it would be great to produce an online ‘utility belt’ that would bring together the functions of the library catalogue, Blackboard courses on information literacy, referencing tools and online journal resources/repositories/databases. I don’t know how possible it would be and, as Yahoo Pipes left me totally bewildered, I’m really not the person to be taking a stab at building it, but I think it would be great if someone doing research or writing a submission could use their utility belt to search for a resource, access it, find out how and why to reference it and then use a something like Refworks to cite it, maybe saving the particular chapter or article to Delicious on the way, all through the same application.

CALL believes our education system should provide:

1. equality of access to high quality education for all learners (regardless of: class, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, asylum status or employment status), including a statutory right to learning in the workplace
2. universal access to basic skills, ESOL and ICT courses and a first level three qualification regardless of age
3. learner, teacher and community  involvement in all levels of decision-making about their learning wherever it takes place
4. learning for personal wellbeing and development and the maintenance of local authority adult education
5. a path out of poverty and disadvantage including widening participation in higher education and the provision of a second chance later in life
6. a stable, motivated and rewarded workforce of professional practitioners.

It’s in part a move against the government’s employer led training initiatives and, alongside redressing the slide in adult education places, aims to re-engage with the views of employees and trade unions as influences on the provision of life long learning.

JISC invited institutions “to transform how they deliver and support learning across a curriculum area through the effective use of technology, in response to a particular challenge faced by the discipline(s), department(s) or institution(s) involved“, the challenge in the DCE’s case being the Government’s withdrawal of funding for students studying for a qualification lower than one they already hold. There’s an interesting interplay of policy here, JISC’s Collaborative Research project being prompted by the  Leitch Review of Skills and the World Class Skills implementation plan, which place further emphasis on employer-targeted learning, while the DCE faces a withdrawal of funding for ‘lower’ courses, more than likely undertaken by people re-training or studying for pleasure.

While the work produced by the DCE will no doubt be as exciting as ever, the message from the government seems to yet again be that education is training for work, rather than for pleasure or personal enrichment and that once you have set down a path in your education or career, the opportunities to change it are going to be limited. If the government’s intention is to ‘put employers’ needs centre stage in the design and delivery of training‘, then what becomes of the needs of the people undertaking that training?

In some senses this is a bad thing; notions of technology being shared and free aren’t going to appear particularly attractive to investors at the moment. In other ways, the withdrawal of investment and speculation might provide a more focused, long term approach to the development of the web, where short time buzz and grating novelty are replaced by utility and sustainability. With any luck the ‘folk’ element of web 2.0: communities, social media applications, open source programming and the efficacy of communicating, collaborating and evaluating across boundaries, will things that will survive downturns in investment or the death of a couple of major websites.

Assuming that these things do survive, it will probably be sensible to attempt some sort of re-brand when mentioning ‘web 2.0′ as a sort of catch-all for new technologies, as the current media savaging of it, at least in the entrepreneurial/Silicon Valley sense, will in all likelihood turn it into a negative, embarrassing and eventually out of date term along the lines of the ‘Dot.com bust’. ‘Web 3.0′ has already been bandied about as a term, but I think something as low-key as ‘new and useful technologies’ might be a useful descriptor in avenues like information skills training as it sidesteps buzzy and potentially alienating ‘…2.0′ terms. After all, it seems to me that the internet is an organic, evolutionary, shifting kind of space and as such defies attempts to define it in any one way; diving it into ’1.0, 2.0. 3.0′ eras is probably something to do in retrospect and not in the moment.