A draft of a new British Standard had been released for public comment.  The code of practice, entitled 'Building accessible experiences for disabled people', applies to all public and private sector organisations who provide accessible web content to users. It also advises on legal duties in relation to web accessibility.  The guidance is of particular interest to staff at FE and HE institutions responsible for building accessible web content for disabled students. For more details please refer to:
http://www.out-law.com/page-9632

The International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) in conjunction with Slice of Life and the Group for Research in Pathology Education and the Team-Based Learning Collaborative is now accepting abstracts for its 2009 meeting.  The conference will take place in Leiden, The Netherlands from June 29 - July 3, 2009 and includes several sessions on e-learning.

The Polish Minister of Health in collaboration with the eViP project has organized the first International Conference on Virtual Patients to take place in Krakow, Poland June 5-6, 2009. Virtual patients are computer simulations of real-life clinical scenarios for the purpose of education in medicine, nursing or dentistry. The aim of the conference is to promote usage of virtual patients in medical curricula. Conference proceeding will be published in a special issue of the Bio-Algorithms and Med-Systems Journal entirely devoted to the topic of virtual patients. Abstracts may be submitted by 31 December 2008. For more information, visit: http://icvp09.cm-uj.krakow.pl/

MERLOT has launched a portal on Developing and Delivering Online and Hybrid Courses.  The portal is designed to facilitate strategic planning related to online course design and delivery, development of best practices, and location of existing courses that can be reused or adapted.  The Portal is accessible at http://onlinecourses.merlot.org/ and includes case studies of institutional initiatives, faculty development resources, online courses, links to outside resources, and a showcase that highlights courses integrating publisher resources with MERLOT resources. Content on the site is available under a Creative Commons License and MERLOT Acceptable Use Policy designed to promote use by faculty and students of higher education. MERLOT is the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, a searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education online learning materials. For more information, visit: http://www.merlot.org/

From JISC Legal: The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that companies must provide additional contact details on their websites such as a telephone number and or a web form that is responded to within 60 minutes.  This information should be provided over and above postal and email addresses and is aimed at protecting consumers by making it easier for them to communicate directly with companies. As well as updating FE and HE staff and students on current legislation this story may also be of interest to them when acting in their capacity as consumers.  More on this news story and access to the ruling can be found here:
http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=9545

The Open Handset Alliance has released Android, a free and open source platform for mobile devices. The Open Handset Alliance (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/ ) is a group of over 30 technology and mobile companies interested in accelerating innovation in mobile computing. The alliance includes Google, T Mobile, Intel, and many others. Developers may upload Android applications to the Android Market (http://www.android.com/market/). The release of Android has significance to educators seeking to develop e-learning for mobile devices as applications developed for this open platform would be capable of running on several different mobile devices implementing the platform.

This free online tutorial has been made available by the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI - www.tasi.ac.uk) and Intute (www.intute.ac.uk) in the UK.

 The tutorial is designed to assist staff and students in locating images for use in both teaching and learning. The emphasis is on finding copyright-cleared images which are available free; facilitating quick, hassle-free access to a vast range of online photographs and other visual resources. The tutorial is available from http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/imagesearching/

Webicina is a recently launched, online service that aims to help medical professionals and patients enter the web 2.0 era. After registration you get access to a range of short e-courses to help you get to grips with some Web 2.0 technologies which may be of use in healthcare.

Courses currently on offer include:

• What is Second Life?
• Inside the medical blogosphere
• How to keep yourself up-to-date?
• How to give a remarkable slideshow?

There is also a forum where you can discuss how to change the way medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered with web 2.0 tools. http://www.webicina.com/

A revised version of the guidance "How Licensing Intellectual Property Can Help Your Business" has been published by the UK Intellectual Property Office. This document, which will be of interest to all FE and HE institutions, contains a checklist of the most common issues which should be considered before entering into any licence agreement. It is intended to assist the parties to identify any major issues early in their negotiations. Further detail here - http://www.ipo.gov.uk/licensingbooklet.pdf.

Researchers have developed a new free software that could tackle laptop thefts and track stolen laptops. The software allows legitimate users to access the location of the laptop as the software sends the location information to a central database which can then be accessed using a cryptographic key. Institutions and other organisations that consider themselves vulnerable to data theft through stolen laptops might find the use of the software a risk management technique. More on this newstory can be accessed at http://infotech.indiatimes.com/Personal_Tech/How_to_find_your_stolen_laptop/articleshow via JISC Legal.