Nothing particularly interesting

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:

 First blog of the year.  Although, let's be honest I have been somewhat lacking in blogging commitment over the last few months - something for which I am sure you have been extremely grateful. Of course the stimulus to start up again is - as is so often the case - marking.  When faced with a seemingly insurmountable pile of work, frankly any kind of displacement activity will do. There is another motivation though.  One of the reasons marking work can be such an arduous activity is that a great deal of effort tends to be exerted into finding the best way to provide summative feedback to students.  The feedback on essays has to serve three main functions: 1)   Justifying the grade to students: A grade should never be arbitrary. Often a marker might spend quite a lot of time determining what the most accurate grade is - distinguishing carefully down to the last %. The feedback is, in one sense, a record of that decision-making proc...

For me, the first English module of the course is always the most difficult.  Introductory modules are often given the near-impossible task of providing students with everything they need in order to continue studying the subject at a higher level - but particularly in literature this seems to be an increasingly difficult task. There are two reasons for this.  Firstly, while there are countless Study Skills guides now available for students to use, there is very little in terms of clear guidelines and support for how to do English literature .  In particular, the idea of 'textual analysis' remains on the whole largely undefined.  I have posted about this issue a couple of times already , so won't go into it again here . The other issue relates to what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as ' cultural capital ' or 'habitas'.  This notion relates to the extent to which there are often broad assumptions made about the basic levels of education people have - and I ...

This is my first blog of the new term, and is rather conveniently facilitated by the fact that I forgot to pre-order my books at the British Library, and have a rather pleasant wee wait until the real work begins. In fact, getting back to blogging is something which is long overdue – for no other reason that I have found the process of blogging a necessary form of exercise, and this has made me think quite a lot again about the value of social networks for study purposes. I remember once getting some very good advice from a journalist colleague, who said that I should make sure that I write something everyday. Of course, that is never going to happen – but I can certainly testify that if I let myself go too long without writing anything not only do I struggle more to write when I need to, but even my thinking seems to calcify. It is almost as though the process of writing forces us to solidify thoughts in a way which we might not otherwise do – and until we solidify our thoughts they...

 There are going to be many students venturing out into the first year of their degree very shortly.  For a number of years, I had the pleasure of teaching 'study skills' to these new students - trying to equip them (as best I could) for the challenges which lie ahead. One of the most immediate challenges which I found myself having to address with the issue of confidence.  This may sound rather odd, as for some the image of a fresh undergraduate is of a person filled with a sense of promise and optimism - not one filled with self-doubt and anxiety.  However, many students - particularly those who are older, or studying in a second language - may find themselves having to first convince themselves that a Higher Education environment is one in which they belong .  That their presence is not a mistake.  That they are not about to be 'found out', and sent back to do their GCSE's again. This sense of inadequacy may sometimes stem from certain assumed at...

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 ...

While undergoing one of my annual clear-outs of unused files, I discovered this rather good wee article I wrote with the help of two esteemed colleagues, David Arnaud and Alan Grundy - Lor' bless 'em both... The easiest way to understand anything new is to see it in terms of something we already know. Imagine, for example, seeing a zebra for the first time. Perhaps the first thing that would occur to you is that you had just encountered a very strange looking horse! In the same way, someone coming new to the academic world of Higher Education can find it is useful to have something to compare it with – something we are already familiar with. Since everyone knows what is involved in playing a game, this seems to be a useful place to start.

Graham Gooch: A good opener I have often emphasised to my students the importance of a really good opening sentence. Beginning a piece of writing with a short, snappy opening line can grab attention. Beginning a piece of writing with a snappy opening that is at the same time provocative is even better. You not only grab attention, but you create questions in the mind of the reader that they will want to find out answers to. Don’t believe me? Well, think about the opening lines of some of the most famous novels ever written.  Think about how they provoke questions, stimulate curiosity and arouse interest in what the rest of the story will say:

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...

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...

Perhaps because of the contradictions I have already mentioned in an earlier blog , it is a little difficult to find any clear advice for students on how to do close reading.  There are plenty of textbooks which introduce students to generic forms, and to the kinds of interpretive questions they can use with texts - but few which explain the steps which a student might take to ask the most basic questions of the texts form. There are some excellent blogs and websites ( see here for a good example - and Dr. Allan Johnson has some terrific stuff which you can access here) , but for what its worth, here is my suggestion of the steps which you might take in close reading and analysis.  This is really just a few thoughts, and I would greatly appreciate any comments or additions you might suggest - in particular about stages 1-4, which are lacking in detail. 1)     First Impressions :  Read the text, underlining or highlighting any words and phrases that ...

For a long time, close reading seems to have had a somewhat contradictory role in English education.  It is still something which is explicitly referred to by the QAA subject benchmark statements for English (the generic descriptors which define what an English degree should broadly contain), which means that it is something which students are expressely expected to be able to demonstrate in their writing.  Students will be told they need to do it, and downgraded if they don't - but at the same time there has been something of a reticence to explain close reading as anything more than an archaic remnant of New Critical practices which were effectively killed off by structuralism and the more political modes of critical practice which emerged toward the end of the twentieth century. The value of close reading Perhaps part of this reticence is born of the fact that it is sometimes difficult to explain the relevance of close reading in an age of transfe...

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     ...