TELic: A blog about Technology Enhanced Learning

Intute to make a controlled crash landing

I’d heard rumours that Intute, the UK HE resource directory, was losing its funding, and this article confirms the sad loss of this valuable service. The real value of Intute was that it provided a collection of top-quality academic links curated by expert subject librarians, so that searches for specific topics yielded useful results – typically a few relevant web sites. Compare this with a typical Google search, where your results are determined by their (in)famous ranking algorithm, and what you get are links to thousands of web pages – of which you typically scan a few from the first thirty.

Anyhow, JISC has had to pull the plug on their funding and Intute is now in ‘maintenance mode’. I really hope that they are able to continue their excellent ‘Virtual Training Suite‘ discipline-specific tutorials… if not, such work will have to be wastefully replicated in most Universities. If economic recovery is just around the corner, lets hope that funding can be resumed and Intute made airworthy again.

Sorry about the aircraft analogy – I’ve just been to the Battle of Britain 70th anniversary airshow where I was thrilled by the sight and sound of 16 Spitfires weaving around the airfield – and many of these gleaming machines have been restored from wrecks.