This is how one school in America is using iPods and podcasts to assist with classroom learning and homework.

What is interesting is the way that the teachers used collaborative 'cascade' learning to teach each other and then expand the learning experience by having pupils create their own content.

The US Library of Congress is starting to use social media tools YouTube and iTunes to allow even more people access to archive materials.

An interesting analysis of some of the practical issues the US authorities are facing implementing Govt 2.0.

I heard this morning on BBC radio 4 that part of the reason for slow case hearings in the UK Court system is weak IT and document management processes. The example given was where one part of the court system keyed in documents online and scanned them for another part of the organisation to have to re-key all the data. That is the way it has been done for over 20 years! When I started in IT back in the early 1980s I actually worked on a Magistrates Court system. Established practices and 'silos' of operations and departments caused us all sorts of challenges in developing and deploying a unified system.

To implement change in any organisation is hard. Into something like local and cetral Government with well established and embedded processes is hard.

According to an item in AdWeek the US consumption of podcasts will contine to grow until almost 1/5th of internet users will be listening on a monthly basis. The boost is being attributed to mainstream media organisations producing content.

What a number of podcasters have noticed in the UK is that the use of podcasts is increasing internally on the intranet as organisations use it for management communication, training and a form of 'event record management'.

In our latest podcast we interviewed the Leader of Barnet Council (and prospective Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Finchley and Golders Green) - Mike Freer about his experiences of using Social Media.

Mike blogs and twitters and has been using social media tools for over 2 years. He talks about their earlier experiences.

He strongly believes in the use of the 'authentic voice' rather than having 'ghost' posts and tweets and accepting there will always be 'negative' people and if you get upset by digital 'heckling' you should not be in politics.

All very refreshing and down-to-earth for a politician!  

As it says on its website - FutureGov helps Governments exploit "...the huge potential of information and technology in driving improvement in the public sector, (so enabling them)...to get closer to its customers and deliver services that better meet the needs of the people it serves..."

FutureGov has been doing great work in the UK and is now taking the discussion to the Europe via an EU event on March 16th. The event will look at Public Services 2.0

We recently spoke to Founder and Director, Dominic Campbell about this event and his hopes for it. Listen at the Parity podcast website.

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The Parity podcast web site goes live!

Recent research shows that 1/3rd of kids have a mobile phone by an average age of 8.

That level of adoption together with increased use of social media fill feed through to the need for more sophisticated, personalised, mobile based communications in the future. Marketing people as well as local/central Government should take note.

The US Government has been using a variety of social media networking tools to ensure the message about the recent Salmonella outbreak in peanut butter is communicated widely.

"....Officials with Health and Human Services Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said social media helped them spread the word that peanut butter recall. The agencies used widgets, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, mobile alerts and online videos to warn the public that peanut butter manufactured by Peanut Corp. of America for institutional use and for additives in other products such as snacks may be tainted with salmonella. Eight people died and 500 were sickened by the infected peanut butter...."

Until now the US Government has not been able officially to use YouTube as part of any social media campaign. Reports state that an agreement is now close.

The active use of YouTube and other video 'narrowcast' sites provide a powerful extra tool for public information and advice.

The US Government is using social media pro-actively to engage with citizens following the recent Salmonella scare.

With increasing usage by people of social networking it becomes a very useful tool to get messages into the public domain.

Media can now track local or other geographic specific twitterers using a new application called twitterlocal.