Nothing particularly interesting

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...

So, BIS (the Department for Business Innovation and Skills) published a really quite extraordinary report on Higher Education in Further Education last month.  You can read it by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.  It has taken me a while to digest this report, and frankly I could fill a thousand blogs with responses to its various parts - but I will be disciplined and save my rants for future moments when I have nothing better to do. The first thing to note is that report is quite spectacularly balanced.  I have spent the last ten years teaching Higher Education in Further Education Colleges, and see myself as specifically embedded into this environment.  I have no skills or qualifications to teach Further Education, and I have no particular interest iin switching to a University environment because frankly I am (to quote Todd Snyder) happy to be here at all .  Over the last ten years there has been many things about HE in FE that has infuriated me...

What makes this picture good?  Certainly it demonstrates an exceptional imitation of perspective, people, and architecture – and this was exactly what the artist Canaletto was trying to achieve.  Canaletto used a pin-hole camera when drafting his work to ensure as close an imitation of reality as he could achieve.  What makes this painting good, is that it is close to reality.  Caneletto was motivated by a desire to imitate reality.  Not the idealised reality of artists before him, who painted their rich patrons to look far more handsome or beautiful that they really were.  No, he wanted to paint reality .  Warts and all.  He used a pin-hole camera to help him make sure he was not ‘airbrushing’ out the bits of reality that didn’t suit him.  He wanted his art to be as much like a photographic record as possible. But then, what about these paintings?  What makes them good ?   Certainly we cannot say of them, as we di...

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...

One of the most common questions I get from students comes just after they submit their essays.  The question is 'how soon do we get our results'?  Indeed, I remember on one occasion a student who had submitted his work on a Friday made a formal complaint on the following Monday that he hadn't heard anything back yet. Although I do try to explain to students what has to happen before they can have their results sent to them, there still seems to be a frequent bemusement about why it has to take so long.  So: since we have our Assessment Boards today, I thought I would explain a little about what we get up to after you have handed in your essays. Marking In the past, there would normally be a week or so of grace after the submission date, while the administration office sorted out all the various scripts and logged them before distributing them to the markers. Now though, as everything is submitted electronically, it is logged and backed up seconds after submissi...

 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     ...