The Guardian Technology supplement reports on some work done at Middlesex, attempting to predict how well students are likely to perform in programming. Like other Universities, they’d noted that students typically either did very well, or failed. They have therefore designed a test, to see if they can predict how well students are likely to…
Category: Misc Research
E-portfolios
Stephen Downes has a review of several papers about e-portfolios – concentrating on the student use of them, rather than institutional requirements. It’s something that came up at the PLE meeting that I went to – can a portfolio / PLE be truly “personal” if it’s institutionally provide? The links to Helen Barrat’s ideas about…
Google Notebook
Google Notebook… It’s Google’s latest idea. Like many of their other ideas, they’ve taken something that already exists (in this case, Firefox’s QuickNote extension – and many others for example). They’ve then improved it; at least, I think that they have; others aren’t so sure. The advantages as far as I can see it are…
Windows Live Academic
Windows Live Academic Home Page. Yet another “Google got there first, so we’d better catch up” idea from MS. This time it’s the ability to search academic texts. How it will compare to Google Scholar and/ or existing services such as Emerald etc., remains to be seen….
The Physics of Friendship
The Physics of Friendship Rather neat! They’ve taken the theories of particle movement in Physics, and applied it to Social Networks. Note: There are sponsored ads on the page, which are both irritating & not relevant. After a collision, a particle moves in a different direction with an updated velocity, just as how an individuals…
My Space – Cheat Sheet for parents.
Wired News: gives some suggestions for parents whose children are using MySpace. MySpace is a blogging site, more like MSN Spaces than blogger, and it’s very much the domain of teenagers. Dana Boyd recently published a paper on data from my space, and Wired refer back to it….
Innovate – February/March 2006 Volume 2, Issue 3
Innovate – February/March 2006 Volume 2, Issue 3 Several useful looking articles… IM for CollaborativeLearning (it seems to be focussing on ESL, but that was only on a very quick skim read) Using Games to promote Girls interest in Technology – which I’ve not even skim read yet, but sounds interesting – especially as many…
Resistance is useful: Thoughts concerning how to respectfully move teaching and learning online
Christopher D. Sessums looks at the challenges to moving more learning & teaching online. I’ll start with something from his conclusion: educators are presented with a number of challenges in getting students to adopt skills and demonstrate intellectual and practical dexterity of many complex concepts To get to this point, he’d looked at various aspects,…
Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations
Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations. I’ve found several blog references to this conference, in particular from Lilia’s Mathemagenic Blog. I’m not sure how many papers there are, but there are quite a few. I’ve looked at several abstracts so far, but unfortunately it seems that it’s just an abstract, only delegates get access to the…
Group for User Interface Research
Berkeley’s GUIR has some interesting looking projects. I’ve used DENIMin the past, though not without some problems. Those who are observant, will notice that DENIM is actually based at Washington, not Berkeley. Other projects at GUIR that look promising are LiveNotes, Multiview – as do several others. The projects pages for both DuB (at Washington)…