Writing in the Guardian, Julie Ferry has looked at the increasing number of students who are choosing to study and travel at the same time. The article looks at 3 people who have successufully combined their studies and travel. With a number of companies offering paid sabaticals to try to avoid redundancy and an increasing number of training grants on offer could we see more people escaping the british winter to travel and study online overseas?

Liverpool University already offers an online MBA and there are many other online courses on offer. E-learning and learning technologies allow learning and academic institutions to offer online courses and open up their courses to a whole new audience.

Norfolk County Council has already implemented an e-learning programme that lets children who are not able to get to a school to sit their exams at home. The programme allowed nearly 100 children to sit their GCSE’s in 2007.

The technology and programmes have fantastic potential to help a wide range of organisations from hospitals, schools and colleges to businesses.

I’ve recently read a number of articles about the iphone, google phone and other pda’s which are apparently going to change the way that we think about out internet usage. These super fast devices are going to let us browse on the move, check email, get GPS positions and a whole host of other applications. Whilst reading the articles I thought back to my first mobile phone purchase: the size, the cost and the weight of the thing! Just when did mobile phones become so widely adopted in our society?

In 1993 I had access to a shared mobile (more of a breeze block than a mobile device) which was used mainly for incoming calls. It was pretty impractical and the thought of carrying it around let alone using it to check emails seemed a tad ridiculous. 5 years later I had my own mobile phone along with most of my friends. Along came flashing aerials, text messages, address books, using it overseas; it all became common place without anyone realising it.

When will I look back and think about how obvious it is to use my mobile phone to provide a gps of my position, which then pings me traffic news, food options, relevant shops and loads of other information via some kind of information burner. I can imagine a scenario where I am overseas trying to book some train tickets but need somehelp. My position is sent to my personal web profile, I’m then sent a series of learning packs to help me, a short podcast, time information, cultural information, perhaps a translation to show the assistant….or my profile generates a personal bar code which I pass over the ticket machine. My online ticket account is debited and the train ticket uploaded to my pda.