Students often ask about using Wikipedia for research – or, rather, some use it exclusively & then get upset when we ask for other sources. Others are too scared to use it! I often point out that it can be a legitimate source – especially if it is research about wikipedia. There’s a lot of…
Blogging IT and EDucation
Coping with outage.
Those of you who have read my blog for some time may remember that I had to move location at one point, due to an unexpected outage. That was a faculty based server – rather than a University provided one. We’ve also had incidents when significant sections of the University system go down, either for…
JISC Next Generations Technologies in Practice – Day 2
I’m now back in Portsmouth, but am determined to write this before I forget & it ends up in the rather large “draft” set I have. So, we started off with Gwen van der Velden discussing what she, as a Directory of Learning & Teaching Enhancement looks for in a project proposal. Mostly, it made…
JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice – Day 1.
I’m just sitting in my room, listening to the Sounds of the Bazaar broadcasting from the JISC ngtip09 conference. It’s been a useful, if somewhat tiring day. There were a number of things that struck me, in particular the concept of “Critical friends”. This was in particular relationship to funded projects; though I can see…
Data Visualization Tools
I’ve seen a number of data visualisation tools recently – there’s ManyEyes (Tony Hirst has done some fun things with the HEFCE funding data); I’ve also mentioned Gapminder (powered by Trendalyzer – now owned by Google) on more than one occasion. Adam Ostrow, at Mashable, lists 16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools. He wrote the post…
SlideSix
I’ve not had a chance to look at SlideSix yet, but the review at FreeTech4teachers & what I can see so far, it looks as if it could be a good rival to SlideRocket – which I rather like. (I’m also hoping to test out Prezi at some point in the not too distant future!)…
What sort of blogger are you?
I’ve just been pointed to Typealyzer from Vicki Davies’ blog. She’s a “Mechanic”; I’m a Guardian, apparently. And the way my brain works is: I’m devoid of feelings, apparently….
The slow death of handwriting
The BBC takes a look at te slow death of handwriting. Some points I fully agree with – I can’t read 15th Century writing either (yet like to think *my* writing is clear; no doubt they thought it too, though) Yes, I do find I don’t handwrite nearly as much as I used to, though…
Computer Hardware in Plain English
Yet another great video from CommonCraft. Recently, they’ve started to cover a whole range of material; outside the computer based ideas. While they’re informative and interesting, I wish that they’d make it easier to sort the show into a “computer” (preferably including those commissioned for different companies) sublist & “other” sublist. But, keep up the…
Reflecting on blogging.
I’ve recently read two posts – one from Su White and one from AJ Cann – both of which I agree with. Su was discussing the difficulties of getting students to reflect (at a course level) while AJ Cann was thinking about students blogging at unit level. In many ways, I agree with them; so…