Nothing particularly interesting

Satire on corporate monopolies in 19th-century America, targeting a railway owner who once famously said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." At my University we are currently discussing how to provide support for software that can help students and staff manage their references and sources.  There are of course many different options available on the market - some free, and some not.  During discussions I have made no secret of my preference for Zotero - which I believe offers the most intuitive and comprehensive functionality.  To this end, I have done some showcases of Zotero for various academics - which appear to illicit one of three responses from them: Oh, brave new world that has such software in it!  I had no idea - and I want it now! We already use it.  Have been for years.  So why are you telling us about it now? But don't we already have Mendeley in our official software catalogue? I fully expected ...

It was interesting, but not entirely surprising to read Phil Hill's blog on e-Literate suggesting a dramatic slow-down in the take-up of Moodle in HE Institutions.  Not surprising because there seems to be a myth about Moodle that has always flickered in dark corners and is fanned into flame by for-profit LMS providers at the nearest opportunity. This myth is that Moodle looks rubbish. Other LMS providers set up a course content page filled with as many html5 gadgets as they can imagine, and compare it to the most basic topic-format Moodle page.  "There we are!" they declare, "Look how rubbish Moodle looks compared to our system!  And in the modern world where students are using tablets and mobile phones more and more, isn't it important that your University LMS looks smart and contemporary?" And so Universities look at these other LMS systems and think: 'Ooo, it has this, or it has that!  Our Moodle doesn't have them!'  Which in turn ...

I have just discovered a rather nice wee shortcut for searching Google Scholar.  You can set it up in the Chrome browser by going to the 'Settings' option from the menu button in the top right of the toobar:

Rather shockingly the other week, a former colleague asked expectedly where all my research was?  When faced with an incredulous expression, he explained that since I no longer appeared to be blogging, he simply assumed I was spending all my time researching. So, in order to avoid similar scurrilous accusations I have dug around the Apps folder and dusted off the 'ole 'Blogger' button. One of the schemes that has been keeping me busy has been my plan to develop a magazine that can publish student work, and provide a resource that helps under- and post-graduates remain engaged with their course and with their institution.  This has been something I have wanted to do for some time, but having some experience of journalism I was very tentative to start something that I knew I would not have the time to continue. This is a real issue, I expect, for most of us. It is great when we have ideas and schemes which we really think would benefit the students - but the reali...

Following on from my blog about online marking , one reader raised the point about eye strain.  Of course eye strain can be a real problem if you are spending a lot of time working off a computer screen, and there are a number of practical steps you can take to reduce the problems this may create - For example, taking regular breaks and ensuring proper lighting.  Some sources suggest that the best kind of lighting for using a computer is about half the brightness of that which you find in most offices , and this would explain a lot about why so many people in bright offices are continually rubbing their eyes. Another factor may be the brightness of your computer screen itself, and although I have absolutely no medical knowledge about this whatsoever (really, none at all) one discovery which has definitely made a huge difference to me is a computer program which changes the colour 'temperature' of the screen gradually according to the time of day.  In the mornings, the ...

Recently I have discovered what I hope will be the solution to my wish that student can book tutorials with me online, and for those tutorial bookings to be available for me to check wherever I am. One of the problems of being an academic tutor, is that the amount of time you have for students is always infinitely less than the amount of time students would like from you. I do not say this as a complaint.  Indeed, one of my biggest frustrations is failing to meet with students who could really benefit from some tutorial time, or from going through a draft essay with someone before submission.  The trouble is, when it gets nearer to submission time the demand for tutorials often outweighs the time I have to provide them, and this causes several problems:

It is hard not to feel a little paranoid that Google have not, quite simply, got it in for me.

Since I had a very good response to my previous post about creating dynamic reading lists in a VLE course page, I thought it might be worth following up with another little thing which I have just been working on: Image-mapped menus.  An image map, in case you don't know, is a picture in which there are certain areas which act as 'hotspots', and can take you to different links.  It can be a rather neat way of just making your own course stand out a little, and of making it perhaps even a little more fun to use for students who may well be getting bored of standardised and often rather dull templates. There are some specialist tools, which do this job very well - but they are not always the easiest to work out.  More recently, I have starting using a free online resource called image-maps.com - which frankly makes the whole thing as simple as it can get.

This, then is my experiment with reading lists this semester.  It has been driven in part by the extent to which referencing management tool Zotero has become so deeply embedded in my own way of working, and in part by the tentative initial evidence which suggests that the quality of referencing and consistency of criticality in students work can tangibly benefit by using it. To begin with, I have created a group in Zotero called Newham University Centre.  I could, of course, create a separate group for each module I am teaching, but since this is a first-time experiment it seemed simpler to try a generic approach to begin with: This group will now appear in my folder structure online, in my standalone version, or in my browser extension.  From here, I can now drag accross my folders with reading lists - or create my reading lists directly into the group library folders: To manage the group members, I need to go to the Zotero website.  Clicking on the 'G...

The other night, and in view of the fact that my students were facing an imminent submission deadline, I tweeted a number of hints and tips for polishing up essay drafts prior to submission. In all honest most of those suggestions were nothing more than the standard liturgy of procedures which any Stella Cottrell reader would doubtless be familiar with. The one exception was my suggestion that if a students first language was not English, and they were struggling to express an idea clearly, that they could try writing in their first language and then running it through Google Translate. There were some incredulous responses, which quickly made me realise that adding such a tip was probably unwise. Not because such a suggestion might not benefit students in such a position but because the use of such resources really needs to be accompanied by some sort of explanation. Like a government health warning on a packet of cigarettes. First of all, after a fair number of years tea...

When I was starting out in education, I really longed for an exciting range of technological solutions that could engage students from a distance, and encourage online interaction - or what we now refer to as MOOCs. It never seemed to come though, and as the years went by I found myself becoming disillusioned, and later disappointed. My faith in MOOCs as an educational solution wilted. I had believed that online courses could provide a level social playing field for students in a way that no other educational forum could - but when eventually the technology did start to be readily available, it didn’t seem to achieve what it promised. No matter what I did, I could not seem to get students to engage with it. They seemed fixed, rigidly, in a distrust of educational technology, and unwilling to take that leap of faith into the world of discussion forums and online chats. As the years went by, I began to understand why. These students were able to achieve everything tha...

Computers are a distraction. Or at least, they can be. I have already been blogging about some of the ways in which you can make them less distracting - even helpful to maintaining focus. I have just found another one, and this one has reminded more than ever of what it used to be like to sit down with little more than a blank piece of paper and a pen. When I first started using a computer, the problem I found was that it was just too interesting . Rather than working, I would always be tempted to explore Hypercard just a little more, to experiment with small scripts, or switch to the rather nice little chess game which came with the machine. Today computers come with a positive library of distractions which make my old Mac Classic seem about as interesting as Channel 4s round-the-clock broadcast of the Short v. Kasparov chess championship, and I have been sucked into their world of multimedia and gadgetry which is often quite beautiful but has made me forget the prob...

Say what you like about Google (and there are certainly many worrying things we could say about them), the internet giants have rapidly done for statistics what John Travolta did for disco dancing in Saturday Night Fever , or what Samuel L. Jackson did for tartan in The 51st State .  Far from being something reserved for the nerdish and the geekish, Google have used statistics to create massively complex algorithms that enable the internet to understand us, and understand the social worlds in which we live.  They have made statistics cool.  They have used statistics as well, to make huge strides in the field of statistical machine translation.  With NGram Viewer, Google have got together with a number of linguistically and statistically brilliant people and come up with a tool which is equally brilliant. NGram Viewer I am surprised NGram Viewer is not better-known, because it really is a pretty wonderful thing for any student.  It works very simply: just...

I have a couple of crackers here.  In case you did not know, a word cloud is... well, it is a cloud of words.  I know, it sounds a bit silly, but it can actually be rather nice. more importantly though, word clouds are usually organised in such a way that the size of an individual word reflects the frequency with which that word is used.  For example, the following word cloud uses the text of the American Declaration of Independence: The word 'people' is the largest, as it occurs 10 times in the text.  'Free' (bottom middle) is a lot smaller, as it only appears 4 times in the text.  There are two kinds of word could which you can create.  The first - and the most straightforward - is a cloud of words in which the words themselves are randomly put together in order to create a pattern.  One of the best resources for creating these is Wordle. Wordle Wordle is a really simply little website, which offers a neat range of options from th...

 The second of my recommendations for doing cool things for free online.   Image Maps What is it? An image map takes any kind of image and divides it up into different areas, and creates a separate hyperlink for each of those areas.  For example, I used to run a course on using computers for small-scale surveys, and in order to try and add some interest to the Moodle course page I created the following image map - a basic picture of iPhone app icons, each of which had been mapped to course content area.  The effect is that by clicking on an icon you are taken to the content related to that topic: In the past I used Photoshop for this, but to be honest it was rather like using a sledghammer to crack a walnut - especially when this free online Image Map Tool does the same thing so easily and without the need for a hefty financial investment in software.  To use the site, simply upload your image and use the drag tool to select different areas...

I have a tendency to bore people silly with rather over-excited rants about new websites and online tools.  It is not an attractive trait, but occasionally I find someone just as geeky as me who is foolish enough to want to know more, and for you geeks I thought I would compile a list of some of my favourites.  Here is the first of them. Spell with Flickr   What is it? One of my favourite all-time albums is Bruce Cockburn's Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu . Among the many things I love about this album is the cover: A beautiful collage of letters with different images and colours.  Of course, I tried to replicate it - but the many hours I spent wrestling with masks in Photoshop did not seem worth it.  Especially when I discovered this unprepossessing little online tool.  Simply type some words into the box, and the site will extract letters from various Flickr photos and generate your     ...

There are so many books and websites now all clamouring to offer advise on how to study more effectively.  The 'top dog' of study skills guides is Stella Cottrell's The Study Skills Handbook , which is a fantastically comprehensive compendium beautifully laid out and packed with resources, questionnaires and exercises which are genuinely helpful (and not just padding). Of course one of the problems with any books on study skills is that print is a fairly static genre.  This does not make anything in a print text like Cottrell's irrelevant, but the reality is that most students (in fact, most of us anywhere) do most of their work now online: They read online, they research online, they write online, submit their work online and eventually check out their grades online before organising a post-submission party. Online. I have already written about the potential value of using smartphones for study , but actually there is a piece of kit which we use far more intensivel...

The question of operating systems is an awkward one to address, partly because there are many people who do not really know what an operating system is (and it is very difficult to explain), and partly because advice about operating systems is usually given by people who have a strong, passionate and evangelical love for one of them in particular.  In view of this, I should put my cards on the table right now and explain my own personal preference - but instead I will do this at the end, and perhaps you can tell me whether you were able to predict it. What is an operating system? This heading is really to allow those who already know this bit, to move smoothly on to the next section.  In order to explain what an operating system is, I am going to need the help of your imaginations while I construct a wee analogy... Imagine an empty room.  Nothing in it at all.  Bare walls.  Not even a floor - just some rafters which look down on the plumbing pipes belo...