Catherine Howell looks at a report by OSS watch into the use of Open Source Software by UK FE/HE institutions. The report itself was looking at all OS use, though Catherine has concentrated on the CMS/VLE/LMS aspects of the report. Institutional Policies and actual practice do vary, according to Policies, 7% of FE establishments make…
Blogging IT and EDucation
Screen Resolution and Page Layout
Jakob Nielsen’s in his alertbox looks at the current statistics for screen resolution and recommends that designers should optimise for a 1024 screen, while still ensuring that it works at lower and higher settings. He points out that while 60% of users have a screen set at 1024, not all users (especially as the resolution…
How can I tell if I'll be any good as a programmer?
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…
WordPress and iframes (and Firefox?)
I’ve had a few posts recently that have seemingly mangled my blog. From what I can tell, it seems to be things that have iframes. This morning a student emailed me to say that he’d wanted to comment on a post, but wasn’t able to. I checked a random post and was able to comment,…
Blogs and ePortfolios and Assessment
Barbara’s thinking Out Loud about blogs & ePortfolios. Here at Portsmouth we’ve been talking about blogs & ePortfolios; I’m hoping to have Elgg set up for the start of next academic year, and to test it with some students, primarily for blogging, but, as all the groups that I’ll be working with will have to…
How to Make Your AJAX Applications Accessible – 40 Tutorials and Articles
Max Kiesler has a useful list of articles about Ajax & Accessibility….
Web 2.0 Services.
I’ve been using ikeepbookmarks for some time now, to organise bookmarks & I find it very useful. However, I know that del.ici.ous is much more heavily used; so was Googling to see if I could find any reviews of the two. In part, I was hoping to find evidence to support my decision not to…
Environment Teaching and Learning Day
Slides – (s5) How I got here: </p> <p>Map created using <a xhref=”http://www.quikmaps.com” mce_href=”http://www.quikmaps.com”>Quikmaps</a></p>…
Women don't blog … oh yes we do!
On my way to Blog.ac.uk at the start of the month, I was reading the Guardian & came across Men used to go fishing when they wanted to get away from ‘the wife’ and swap smutty jokes. Now they take up blogging. Talking to some of the other delegates, they expressed surprise, one commenting that…
More on PLEs
I’ve already mentioned my thoughts on the use of Google as a way of creating a PLE. A post of Joan’s on the Social Learning site points to Graham’s position paper on PLEs – which is well worth reading. He’s got a list of tools that could be combined to make a PLE (given the…