Will the recession depreciate Oscar gold? Promises of a leaner, more entertaining Academy Awards ceremony have come to be as reliable as the first robin of Spring, but viewership continues to fall. Each year something new is tried to shake things up, in this case giving the actor Hugh Jackman the hosting duties. This is a role traditionally given to comedians, with the idea that there would be no conflict of interest as they were unlikely to be nominated for any awards. (Long-time host Bob Hope made a joke of this, saying that at his house they referred to the award ceremony as “Passover”; more recently the role has often been given to talk-show hosts such as Jon Stewart or Ellen DeGeneres.) The decision to give the job to Jackman was no doubt made in hopes of luring back female viewers, who have always been the event's core audience.

The Web is full of great online resources for teachers and students, with new material appearing every day. With the arrival of National Media Education Week, teachers may be looking for fresh ideas to bring media education into the classroom. Here’s a quick overview of recently created (or recently discovered) resources that may help:

Media educator John Pungente's series Beyond the Screen, airing on Bravo!, now has its own Web site, where teachers can find resources and tips on integrating the series into their classrooms. Father John Pungente, a longtime media educator and founding Board member of MNet, planned the series as a follow-up to his acclaimed Scanning the Movies. Like its predecessor, Beyond the Screen is intended as a way of teaching viewers to “read” movies. In Beyond the Screen Pungente uses clips from current movies and interviews with cast and crew to shed light on filmmaking techniques, genre, and theme. The Web site offers showtimes and previews of upcoming episodes and links to teachers' guides. (So far the only guide that's been posted is for Speed Racer, but the guide for The Dark Night should be up shortly; upcoming episodes on Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince should be popular as well.)

Summer is officially upon us, and with it comes the usual lineup of blockbuster movies. Along with the usual cast of superheroes, spies and sexagenarian, whip-cracking archaeologists comes a somewhat unusual hero: Wall-E, the nearly mute robot protagonist of the film of the same name.

This is the second in a series of columns looking at the history and future of Web 2.0. In the last instalment of this series we examined the origins of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic and some of the issues around the definition of “user-created content.” Turning from the theoretical to the practical, we'll now take a look at just what is actually out there, and begin to examine some of the ethical and legal implications.