April 26, 2006
Google Promotes Firefox
I try not to post too many news item relays, but this is something that I think is important (form Battelle - Google (in the US, and only to IE users...) promoting a Firefox download on the Google frontpage:
What's particularly interesting (and I haven't been able to check yet) is the implication that you get the browser with the Google toolbar preinstalled.
I've asked internally why we don't do that with OU useful extensions, e.g. on the Online Apps CD (one reason I was given is that some students can get upset when they install a piece of software that trashes the profile they have set up on previous versions of that software). But I'd have thought we could get round this by setting up an OU user profile, and providing an easy way for students to launch their browser into this profile (can we do that easily with Firefox?)
Also related to this is an issue brought up in one of the Learning and Teaching conf sessions today (and something I've thought about often before) which is (access arguments aside) are we denying our early technology adopting students powerful tools by not developing tools that only run on modern browsers?
When IE7 comes out, and hopefully gets installed onto XP boxes via the automatic updater, there will be significant opportunites for us to pump RSS/Atom fed information to our students. But we won't be able to do this for students running old Microsoft operating systems (we can use FF etc. as well, of course, for a bit more platform independence).
The OU's scale plays to our benefit here - with 180, 000 students, even if only 5% of the 10% who use Firefox make use of a Firefox extension we have provided for them, that's still a population of almost 1000 users who can test the extension for us.
One thing I'd like to see - and maybe this isn't so unlikely.... - is OU labs, a technology playground akin to Google Labs or Microsoft Live Labs (Yahoo! buck the GYM trend by going for Yahoo! Research) - only even more of a sandpit;-)
I did check - http://labs.open.ac.uk/ is still available ;-) - although being a university, I guess that URL could be misconstrued as relating to academic (chemistry, biol;ogy etc.) research labs...
Posted by ajh59 at April 26, 2006 09:31 PM