From an early age, Herodotus' inquiring nature led him to engage in extensive travelling. During his long and perilous journeys he examined, inquired and accumulated a vast amount of well-documented materials complementing them with rich narratives.

Twitter initially started as a micro-blogging service, but quickly developed into a social messaging tool used effectively to quickly communicate messages to a group or several different groups of people.

The demand for high quality educational course materials, methodologies and resources has been growing in China as rapidly as its extraordinary economic development. With a population of well over 1.3 billion, the potential user base for open educational resources presents both an opportunity and a challenge.

Sunday afternoon. Keep checking my watch. Just logged onto Skype to have a discussion about the experience of creating Smarthistory.org, a multi-award winning Open Educational Resource with founders, Drs Steven Zucker and Beth Harris. Dr Steven Zucker is a specialist in 19th and 20th-century art and theory and is Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He has received awards for excellence in teaching and authors essays and articles in prestigious art history journals. With Dr. Beth Harris, he created the FIT digital image library and organized conferences on technologies reshaping the practice of teaching art and art history. Dr Beth Harris was an assistant professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology when she created Smarthistory with Dr. Zucker. She has taught both online and in the classroom and also directed FIT's large distance learning program. She is currently Director of Digital Learning at a museum in New York City. Beth is a Victorian Studies specialist and editor of Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (2005). With  Steven Zucker, she co- authored "The Slide Library: A Posthumous Assessment in the Service of Our Digital Future,” in Teaching Art History with Technology: Case Studies (2008).

Photo courtesy of Grfx_Guru / Flickr

The past couple of months I have been researching user behaviour on websites and more specifically what makes people visit and revisit a site. I have been looking at sites about music, cooking, knitting, pets, legal issues, arts, software development, education, games, kids, infants, parenthood, books, journalism, heritage, history, medicine, gardening, finance…you name it, I have probably looked at it. During this initial research, I was looking to spot patterns in user behaviour through analytics provided by Alexa and Google, including site linking, driving traffic to the site data, site reach, bounce percentage, the time user time spent on the site etc. There is a minority of sites that have no ranking or retain their analytics from public view, so I haven’t been able to assess these sites.

In 2004, WIRED magazine’s November issue featured a CD with Creative Commons licensed music by Beastie Boys, My Morning Jacket, David Byrne, Chuck D and others, music which was also hosted on a new website, called ccMixter.org. ccMixter is a project supported by Creative Commons and more specifically Lucas Gonze, Neeru Paharia and Mike Linksvayer. Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that is dedicated to making it easier for people to share and remix their work with others, providing free licenses and relevant legal tools for the authors creative work and for others to share and remix.

Photo courtesy of hikingartist / Flickr

During the brainstorming session last week I was asked to email the group with a list of websites that effectively communicate their message and have interesting features. You can find the web links below together with some comments. Some sites are more conventional, some more distinct and creative. Check them out!

Photo courtesy of Jeff Kubina / Flickr