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<title>Archive page 10 | eRambler</title>
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<div class="h1"><a href="../../">eRambler</a></div>
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<p class="archive-warning"><strong><em>Please note:</em></strong> this older content has been <strong>archived</strong> and is no longer fully linked into the site. Please go to the <a href="../../">current home page</a> for up-to-date content.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/bluecloud-project-launch/">bluecloud project launch!</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/bluecloud-project-launch/">Wednesday 4 March 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Academia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bluecloud</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Students</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Twitter</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Sheffield</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">uSpace</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>The time has come to release bluecloud (formerly known as the <a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/">Student Learning Community 2.0</a>) on an unsuspecting public. We’ve created a space for the community on the University’s new uSpace social networking platform and seeded it with a few interesting ideas, but what we’d really love is to get more students in reading, writing, chatting and generally making themselves at home. Any suggestions how to do that?</p>
<p>Because uSpace is still in its pilot phase and CICS would like to keep the numbers down for now, we’ve only officially made an announcement to the postgraduate research student mailing list, but hopefully the news will gradually trickle out. Particularly, if you already know where to access uSpace (it’s available to anyone with a UoS login), feel free to drop by the bluecloud space and see how it’s going. As soon as possible we’ll announce it to undergrads and taught postgrads as well.</p>
<p>The launch is accompanied by a questionnaire on the use of social web tools to get some intelligence on how best to develop the project. The data will also contribute to my second assignment for the University of Sheffield’s <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lets/lt-supp/pche.html">Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education</a>. I’ll make a link to that questionnaire available here in due course. If anyone would like to give us their views, feel free to leave a comment here. You can also now follow bluecloud on Twitter as <a href="http://twitter.com/bluecloud_uos">@bluecloud_uos</a> (and if you like, follow me: <a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">@jezcope</a>).</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-03-04:/blog/bluecloud-project-launch/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/bluecloud-project-launch/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/project-update/">Project update</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/project-update/">Monday 26 January 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Vuvox</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">uSpace</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Sheffield</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conference</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bluecloud</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SLC 2.0</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>It’s been a little while since I posted, so just to keep you interested, here’s a brief summary of what we’ve been up to.</p>
<h2>Learning and Teaching Conference 2009</h2>
<p>Mark and I, introduced by Patrice, presented a showcase session on the project at the university’s annual <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lte/conference">Learning and Teaching Conference</a>. Mark gave an overview of the motivation and inspiration for the project, and then I gave some examples of some of the technologies we’re hoping to get students using. Feedback from the session was very positive. Interestingly, several members of staff seemed quite keen on the project as a way for them to learn more about innovative uses of the web — proof, if ever it was needed, that education is a two-way process! I was impressed with Mark’s use of <a href="http://www.vuvox.com/">Vuvox</a>, a Web 2.0 slide show creator (more on that on <a href="http://nevermindthepedagogy.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/engagement-via-visual-media/">his blog</a>). There’s a <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lte/conference/morley.html">summary of the session with a link to the presentation here</a>, and Mark also wrote a <a href="http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/the-student-learning-community-learning-teaching-conference-sheffield-january-2008/">blog post about the conference</a>.</p>
<h2>uSpace pilots begin</h2>
<p>For the last few months, CICS (the university’s Corporate Information and Computing Services) have been setting up a university-wide social networking platform to support collaboration in learning, teaching, research and administration right across the university. It’s called uSpace and a few pilot projects (of which the SLC is one) began testing it out properly today. I’ve been lucky enough to get to play with it over the last few months and I have to say I’m pretty impressed. It’ll take a while for people to figure out what it’s good at and how to use it, but I can see it becoming a central part of the university’s IT provision. After some months trying to decide on the best way to get the SLC 2.0 project properly started, we’ve chosen to set aside the focus groups for now and concentrate on putting together a proof of concept within the uSpace environment. We’ve picked a fairly abstract-sounding name, “bluecloud”, and started work. Hopefully we’ll get a few interested parties to contribute, and we’ll be sending out a questionnaire to gather opinions from the whole student community soon. Since uSpace is still early in the pilot phase, CICS are trying to keep the server load low, so I won’t publicise the address. For those of you who don’t have access to it yet, I’ll post a more detailed run down here soon. For those of you who do, check out the bluecloud space and let us know what you think, either here or through uSpace itself.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-01-26:/blog/project-update/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/project-update/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/focusing-on-focus-groups/">Focusing on focus groups</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/focusing-on-focus-groups/">Wednesday 29 October 2008</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Focus groups</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Student engagement</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SLC 2.0</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bluecloud</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I’ve <a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/staff-driven-student-owned/">written recently</a> about why it’s important that we find out what students want and get them involved in the SLC project as early as possible. Sadly, none of us already involved in the project were blessed with the ability to read minds. We need more effective ways of engaging students, and our foray into this area will be to run a focus group.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>First and foremost, a focus group is about communication. It will allow us to learn from the students how this project would work for them. It will also be an opportunity for us to get some students excited about the project: maybe they’ll mention it to their friends, paving the way for when it’s finally launched; maybe they’ll even be inspired to get involved themselves.</p>
<p>Now, it’s very easy for us to get carried away with that second part; we’re excited, and when you’re excited about something you just want to pass on the excitement. A useful piece of advice to remember here (one of Stephen R. Covey’s <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/7-Habits-Highly-Effective-People/dp/0684858398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1225292081&amp;sr=8-1">7 Habits</a>) is “seek first to understand, then to be understood”. In other words, the best way to convince people to listen to you is to listen to them first.</p>
<p>Bearing this in mind, I propose to break down the focus group into the following three parts:</p>
<ol>
<li>Brief motivating discussion, leading directly into a discussion of what would make a student learning community effective;</li>
<li>Students getting their hands dirty and playing with some examples of what the SLC might look like;</li>
<li>Back together to share impressions of the examples and how they relate to ideas generated in 1.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Initial discussion</h2>
<p>The introduction should be as minimal as possible: just enough to motivate the discussion without prejudicing it. The point of this initial discussion should be to prompt the participants to ask useful questions in the second, hands-on part. A useful tool here might be to split the participants into groups and ask each group to write, on a large piece of paper, a list of ways they feel the web could help to support their learning and university life in general. This could lead on to a list of questions which it’s useful to ask about these ideas to decide how useful they are. The end result would then be usable directly by the participants to aid in part 2.</p>
<h2>Hands-on examples</h2>
<p>Having generated their lists of questions, the participants will be suitably armed to investigate the examples we’ve provided. I’ve already set up three different examples: one on an installation of <a href="http://elgg.org/">Elgg</a>, an open-source social networking platform; one on the university’s test installation of <a href="http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/clearspace">Clearspace</a>, a commercial collaboration, platform; and one on the free wiki site <a href="http://www.wetpaint.com/">Wetpaint</a>. I’ll be asking other members of the project to contribute to these examples between now and then, and if you’d like to have a look round or add something, leave me a comment below and I’ll get back to you.</p>
<h2>Final discussion</h2>
<p>The final part of the focus group will be to bring the participants back together for a discussion on what the different groups thought was important and how they found the examples. It might be helpful at this point for a facilitator to put suggestions from the floor up on a flip chart for the participants to argue over.</p>
<h2>What can we take away?</h2>
<p>The main point of the exercise will be information gathering, and by the end of the focus group we’ll potentially have three valuable sets of artifacts:</p>
<ol>
<li>The lists of ideas and questions from the first part;</li>
<li>Any content added to the examples sites by participants;</li>
<li>The ideas and conclusions agreed by the group as dictated to the facilitator with the flipchart.</li>
</ol>
<p>Hopefully, we’ll also have at least one or two people who are interested in getting involved further, or who know people who know people who might be interested. If we’ve done our job right, we will have earned the right to pass on some of our enthusiasm! The next step will be to look at what we’ve got, and I’ll write more here about that as soon as I can.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>If you’ve got any thoughts on the focus group plan or disagree with what I’ve said, I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment on this article. Thanks!</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2008-10-29:/blog/focusing-on-focus-groups/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/focusing-on-focus-groups/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/staff-driven-student-owned/">Staff driven, student owned</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/staff-driven-student-owned/">Monday 6 October 2008</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Students</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SLC 2.0</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bluecloud</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>So, we’ve got this great concept for a grassroots community of students sharing advice and resources to improve their learning. The big question that needs to be answered is this: “How do we make this thing float?” We can feed it all the resources and great ideas we like, but if the students don’t take to it in the long run it’s not worth doing.<!--more--></p>
<h1>Staff driven</h1>
<p>At least initially, the project is staff driven. This is a fact; it’s already, inescapably true because the project has been conceived by members of staff. The reason we’ve initiated this project is in three parts:</p>
<ol>
<li>We really want our students to be the best they can be;</li>
<li>We're excited about the possibilities for learning presented by new technology;</li>
<li>We're concerned that it's relatively difficult to find out what tools are available to improve learning.</li>
</ol>
<p>We are able to see the need for a project like this because as teaching and support staff (I include in this category postgraduate students with teaching duties, like myself) we are well placed to see overall trends in student learning behaviour. Having spent some time in the academic environment, we tend to have a grasp of the differences between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ learning behaviour (though we may often be bewildered as to how to encourage the good).</p>
<p>But in spite of all this, it’s not our place to tell students how to learn. The best we can do is support and encouraging them in discovering how learning works for them.</p>
<h1>Student owned</h1>
<p>Now, we may have an interest in student learning, but it’s abstract. Students have an interest in their own learning, and theirs is immediate, concrete and very personal. In addition to this, they have several attributes which can be used to great advantage:</p>
<ul>
<li>They have a grip on technology that most of the current generation of lecturers and professors can only dream of;</li>
<li>They're incredibly creative, especially when they understand that their contribution is valuable;</li>
<li>They want (like most of us) to make like as comfortable as possible.</li>
</ul>
<p>This last point is a double-edged sword. If you can convince someone that doing something will ultimately make their lives better, it will be much easier to persuade them to actually do it. On the other hand, if we hand down an artifact from on high, it will likely be accepted at face value, used as-is for a while and ultimately end in stagnation; it is easy to believe that ‘the university’ is an authority on learning and there is no point in questioning its judgements on the subject.</p>
<h1>Solution</h1>
<p>The solution to this dilemma seems to be thus:</p>
<ol>
<li>Involve students in the planning and decision-making process as early as possible;</li>
<li>Form a core group of students to carry the project forward:
<ul>
<li>Drawn from as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible, to encourage 'cross-pollination';</li>
<li>Preferably as excited about learning and technology as we are!;</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>CICS/LeTS act as consultants to this core student group:
<ul>
<li>Providing expert advice where appropriate;</li>
<li>Supporting/maintaining infrastructure where requested;</li>
<li>Providing access to resources which would otherwise be unavailable.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>
<p>In this way, the university can provide a comforting background feeling of continuity while maintaining a respectful distance and allowing the students to go wild and create something amazing.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2008-10-06:/blog/staff-driven-student-owned/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/staff-driven-student-owned/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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</div>
</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/social-networking-poll/">Social networking poll</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/social-networking-poll/">Wednesday 10 September 2008</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Students</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Sheffield</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bluecloud</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<div style="text-align:left;padding:3px">
<a title="photo sharing" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jezcope/2845538425/"><img style="border:solid 2px #000000" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3281/2845538425_42f347a86c.jpg" alt=""></a>
<span style="font-size:.8em;margin-top:0"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jezcope/2845538425/">Social networking poll</a>, originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jezcope/">Jez Cope</a>.</span>
</div>
<p>I was busy pulling together some links for my last post when I came across this beauty. I think this says it all about the prevalence of Facebook in the current student community!</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2008-09-10:/blog/social-networking-poll/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/social-networking-poll/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-ii/">Introduction to SLC 2.0: Part II</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-ii/">Wednesday 10 September 2008</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Academia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SeeChange</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bluecloud</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>In hindsight, my <a title="Part I" href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/">previous post</a> on the subject of SLC 2.0 seems rather vague. It’s definitely a worthwhile description of the motivation behind the project (or at least my motivation) but it doesn’t really describe what we’re actually doing. I’ll seek to remedy that a little with this, part II of my introduction to SLC 2.0.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>To start us off, here are a couple of quotes which sum up the ethos of the project. First, one from the original SLC 2.0 project proposal (emphasis mine):</p>
<blockquote>This project aims to develop <strong>partnerships between <a title="Corporate Information and Computing Services" href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/cics/">CICS</a>, students
and departments</strong> to encourage the <strong>use of Web 2.0 tools</strong> in
<strong>student learning and research</strong>.</blockquote>
<p>Second, one from the Theory of Change document put together at the very start of the project:</p>
<blockquote>Students creating a sustainable way of sharing tools, processes and
ideas, and knowedge on how to best use and adapt them for their
learning and research.</blockquote>
<p>I think between them, these summarise what we’re about pretty succinctly. Recent student feedback suggests that students are genuinely surprised that we don’t support this. The reasons that we’re not currently doing this are quite clear:</p>
<ol>
<li>It spans departmental boundaries, so no individual department sees it as a priority;</li>
<li>There is no central support for this type of personal development, either from the University or the Students' Union (other than the Careers Service, which is tightly focussed on the job application process).</li>
</ol>
<p>Bearing in mind that, as in any large institution, there is a great deal of inertia in this state of affairs, the most effective approach will therefore be a grassroots one.</p>
<h1>Involving students</h1>
<p>We believe that we are most likely to be successful if the project is run both by students and for students. For this reason, we will be involving students heavily in the planning process, and aiming to pass overall control of the project to the student body as soon as possible. The role of CICS and LeTS will be to provide support and advice where requested.</p>
<p>We will be running focus groups in the upcoming (Autumn 2008) term, to find out:</p>
<ol>
<li>What students <em>want</em> from the SLC;</li>
<li>What students are already doing which can be adopted by the SLC; and</li>
<li>What support students are prepared to give to the SLC.</li>
</ol>
<p>At the same time, we will be recruiting student volunteers to fulfil roles in the project as they become necessary. In particular, we’ll probably need a network of ambassadors to represent the project to the students and the university, most likely on a departmental basis. The existing student course representatives may be a useful starting point.</p>
<p>There are also several groups of students who will be worth involving, both because they have appropriate insight and expertise, and because they have an interest in the outcome. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Students' Union</li>
<li>CILASS Student Ambassador Network</li>
<li>PGRC/Progress</li>
<li>Departmental societies (particularly Computer Science, Education)</li>
<li>Other relevant societies (e.g. Free Software)</li>
</ul>
<h1>Likely directions</h1>
<p>Although we have yet to begin polling the students, we’ve already started coming up with ideas for how to proceed with the project. Here are some of them.</p>
<h2>Online home for the community</h2>
<p>This will provide a central point of contact for students; it will be a place to share and discuss tools, processes and ideas for students actively contributing to the project, and a work of reference for many others. Discussion forums and a wiki of some description will be required for this. Some social networking features may also be useful.</p>
<h2>Student-led seminars</h2>
<p>A lunchtime seminar series (with free cake) will help to further disseminate the ideas being developed by the project. It will also give participants a chance to discuss, challenge and improve these ideas in an informal, face-to-face setting.</p>
<h2>Raising awareness</h2>
<p>There are a wide range of ways in which the community can be publicised to the student body. These may include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Taster sessions (e.g. <a title="Students' Union Give It A Go" href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/union/activities-and-sport/give-it-a-go.php">Give It A Go</a>)</li>
<li>Union stall</li>
<li>Intro week booklet</li>
<li>Posters around campus</li>
<li>Leaflets in strategic places (e.g. libraries)</li>
<li>Word-of-mouth/viral marketing</li>
<li><a title="Sheffield Graduate Award" href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/thesheffieldgraduateaward/">Sheffield Graduate Award</a></li>
</ul>
<p><em>So, that’s what the SLC 2.0 project is all about, and what we’re doing so far. What do you think? Share your opinion in the comments section below, and subscribe to the <a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/feed/">RSS feed</a> for updates as they come.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2008-09-10:/blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-ii/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-ii/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/">Introduction to SLC 2.0: Part I</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/">Wednesday 3 September 2008</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Academia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Goals</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SeeChange</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Students</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bluecloud</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I’ve recently become involved in a new project, under the University of Sheffield’s <a title="SeeChange 2008" href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/seechange/">SeeChange</a> initiative, going by the name of “Student Learning Community 2.0”. What’s this all about? Well, it’s to do with using social networking and other Web 2.0 ideas to support student learning at the university, but that sounds more fuzzily defined to me every time I read it. It’s quite a blue-skies project, so I guess a certain amount of fuzziness is to be expected, but I think it will be helpful in the coming months to have some more concrete aims. I’ll be using the rest of this post to try and clarify the project goals, or at least how they look here at the outset of the project.<br>
<!--more--></p>
<h1>What's in a name?</h1>
<p>First and foremost, we wish to benefit our <em>students</em>. With any project involving new teaching methods, and particularly those involving new technology, it is easy to get excited about the techniques, but less easy to see how they are relevant to the learners. If this project is to be successful, we must have a positive impact on students.</p>
<p>Second, it focuses on student <em>learning</em>. Children learn “how to learn” from a very early age, and it is a sad fact that the current school system fosters learning behaviours which are far from optimal. Learning “ability” has a direct impact not only on academic achievement but on life generally; it is therefore in the University’s best interests to ensure that its students are the best learners possible, despite the poor training they may have received previously.</p>
<p>Third, we aim to do that by fostering a <em>community</em>. Encouraging students to collaborate in learning has two major benefits:</p>
<ol>
<li>It will leverage peer pressure, increasing the impact of the project;</li>
<li>It will avoid re-inventing the wheel by many independent students, increasing the efficiency of the project.</li>
</ol>
<p>Finally, there is an expectation that <em>Web 2.0</em> will play a role. The focus of most of the new technologies which come under the heading “Web 2.0” has been on social networking in various forms. There are now web-based communities with memberships ranging in size from a handful to over 100 million (source: <a title="Facebook | Statistics" href="http://www.new.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics=">Facebook statistics</a>), and many young people use such social networking sites daily. We therefore anticipate that this will be a key factor in developing the student learning community.</p>
<h1>Pictures of success</h1>
<p>So, how can we say whether the project has been a success? For me, I think the key aim will be an improvement in student learning behaviour, particularly an increase in deep learning and a more collaborative approach to learning. In addition to this, I think the project has potential to do some or all of the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Improve quality of life for students and graduates;</li>
<li>Provide students with new skills;</li>
<li>Make students more employable;</li>
<li>Encourage trust (in all directions) between students, staff and the university;</li>
<li>Make teaching a more enjoyable occupation; and, of course,</li>
<li>Make the university more attractive to potential students.</li>
</ul>
<p>These are, naturally, difficult to measure objectively. However, I feel that by keeping these aims in mind it will not just be possible for the project to succeed; it will be impossible for it to fail. Call me idealistic if you like — I’ve got a good feeling about this.</p>
<p><em>That’s all for now. In my next post on this subject, I’ll start to address the following:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><em>How might we go about this?</em></li>
<li><em>Where are we now?</em></li>
</ul>
<p><em>I’ll also be elaborating on the issues I’ve touched on in this first post soon. Until then, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2008-09-03:/blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/welcome/">Welcome!</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/welcome/">Wednesday 3 September 2008</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Admin</span></li>
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<p>Welcome to my shiny new* blog! I’ve decided it’s about time I gave the world the benefit of my fascinating and wise opinions. In an attempt to place realistic limits on myself, I shall in particular be writing on the subjects of:</p>
<ul>
<li>My <a title="My university webpage" href="http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~jeremy/">research</a>
</li>
<li>Teaching and learning in higher education</li>
<li>Productivity in academia</li>
<li>The use of the internet in all of the above</li>
</ul>
<p>I hope you find what I have to say interesting enough to follow me on a regular basis; if you’d like to do so, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed and/or bookmarking this site. Feedback in the form of comments on blog entries is positively encouraged.</p>
<p>Enjoy…</p>
<p><em>* Well, not quite that new — I first registered it over a year ago but never got around to writing anything until now.
</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2008-09-03:/blog/welcome/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/welcome/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/from-doi-to-open-access/">Resolving DOIs with green OA copies</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/from-doi-to-open-access/">Thursday 7 March 2013</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">DOI</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open access</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open scholarship</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">OAI-PMH</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Programming</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Ruby</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Sinatra</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Things I made</span></li>
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<p>The other week I was at a <a href="http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2013/02/27/ckan-for-rdm-workshop/">gathering of developers, librarians and researchers with an interest in institutional data repositories</a>. Amongst other things, we spent some time brainstorming the requirements for such a repository, but there was one minor-sounding one that caught my imagination.</p>
<p>It boiled down to this question: given only the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier">DOI</a> for a published article (or other artefact), how do you find an open access copy archived in an institutional repository? Some (rather cursory) Googling didn’t come up with an obvious solution, so I thought “How hard can it be to implement?”.</p>
<p>All that’s required is a database mapping DOIs onto URLs, and a spot of glue to make it accessible over the web. The data that you need is freely available in machine-readable format from most repositories via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archives_Initiative_Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesting">OAI-PMH</a>, so you can fill up the database using that as a data source.</p>
<p>So, without further ado here it is:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://doi2oa.erambler.co.uk">Open Access DOI resolver</a></li>
</ul>
<p>A few caveats:</p>
<ol>
<li>I don’t get much chance to write code at work at the moment, so this was an opportunity to exercise under-used brain muscles and learn some new stuff. It could probably be done better (and the <a href="http://github.com/jezcope/doi2oa">source code</a> is on github, so feel free to fork it and add improvements). It’s written in <a href="http://ruby-lang.org/">Ruby</a> using the awesome <a href="http://sinatrarb.com/">Sinatra</a> web framework.</li>
<li>It’s currently hosted on <a href="http://heroku.com/">Heroku</a>’s free starter-level service, so there’s very little capacity. It therefore only includes DOI’s from the University of Bath’s <a href="http://opus.bath.ac.uk">Opus</a> repository, and the database is full.</li>
</ol>
<p>Go try it out and let me know what you think. If it’s useful, I’ll look into how I can make it more robust and resolve more DOIs.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2013-03-07:/blog/from-doi-to-open-access/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/from-doi-to-open-access/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/gtd-things-vs-omnifocus/">Task management: Things vs. OmniFocus</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/gtd-things-vs-omnifocus/">Monday 11 February 2013</a>
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<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">GTD</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">OmniFocus</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Things</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Task management</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Productivity</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Mac</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Apps</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reviews</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>It’s taken a while for me to realise it, but I’m a bit of a list-maker. Some years ago I read David Allen’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done">Getting Things Done</a> (often abbreviated as GTD) and found some useful tips that have had a big impact in how I manage my tasks and my time.</p>
<p>There are <em>heaps</em> of apps to help you Get your Things Done, but I generally seem to oscillate between two: Omni Group’s <a href="http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/">OmniFocus</a> and Cultured Code’s <a href="http://culturedcode.com/things/">Things</a>. The choice between the two is closely balanced in my head, and I seem to end up switching every 12-18 months. Until recently, Things’ lightning-fast cloud sync had be, but now OmniFocus has tempted me back with its general feature-richness.</p>
<p>Some key factors for me:</p>
<ul>
<li>One system for everything:
<ul>
<li>One system that syncs across computers and mobile devices, so I always have it with me;</li>
<li>One system for work stuff and personal stuff, because sometimes I need phone my bank while at work and sometimes the solution to a work problem comes to me while watching TV;</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Multiple ways of structuring and viewing tasks:
<ul>
<li>When I need to check that I’ve captured all my tasks, I need to view them by project to see what’s missing;</li>
<li>When I need to actually do things, I need to see my tasks by context, i.e. what equipment/location is required to do them.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="aside-switching-is-not-inefficient">Aside: switching is not inefficient</h2>
<p>You might think that it’s a waste of time laboriously transferring all my projects and tasks from one system to another, but it’s really not. This only happens once every 12-18 months, and it’s a great way to do a full audit of everything I want to achieve, spot what’s missing and cull the dead wood.</p>
<p>Even if you have one task management system that works for you, I suggest you try occasionally printing the whole lot off (on real dead trees) and re-entering the important stuff. Because it takes more effort, it makes you more ruthless in what stuff you allow onto your todo list and sharpens your focus on what’s important.</p>
<h2 id="omnifocus-vs-things">OmniFocus vs. Things</h2>
<p>OmniFocus’ strength is it’s flexibility. Each task has not only a title and a checkbox, but a project, a context, a start date, a due date, an expected amount of effort and, if that’s not enough, a freeform note field. It has a rich, hierarchical structure for projects and tasks, and the ability to create customised views of the system or “perspectives”.</p>
<p>Things, on the other hand, strives for simplicity. It lacks much of the complexity of OmniFocus and replaces it with tags. Tags can be hierarchical, which is handy, and because you can assign more than one to a task, you can actually use them to replicate a number of OmniFocus’ detail fields.</p>
<h2 id="things-is-pretty-good">Things is pretty good…</h2>
<p>That simplicity means that there’s very little effort involved in using Things — just throw in your tasks and get started. You can assign one or more tags to each task and then filter on those, and that allows you replicate quite a lot of what OmniFocus allows.</p>
<p>The other area where Things beats OmniFocus is in synchronisation. Every time you make a change in Things it’s synced up to the cloud, and updating another app takes moments. There’s no need to manually initiate a sync, so everything is always available everywhere.</p>
<h2 id="but-omnifocus-is-winning">…but OmniFocus is winning</h2>
<p>Sooner or later, though, the lack of expressiveness in Things gets to me. OmniFocus panders to my desire for structure: I can have tasks from any project (or any part of a project) appear one at a time or all at once. That all takes a little more time to set up (though it soon becomes second nature), but it means when I actually want to get on with work I see only the tasks I need to see and no more.</p>
<p>OmniFocus’ perspectives are another example of where the extra power is useful. It’s trivial to set up one-click views that only show a certain set of projects (such as work stuff) or a particular set of tasks (such as things I can do offline), or even just group tasks differently (such as by due date or age).</p>
<p>Finally, the iPad app for OmniFocus has a killer feature: Review mode. This makes it trivial for me to sit down at the end of each week with a cup of tea and go through the entire system, finishing off loose ends and capturing next actions. This is central to the GTD way, and is the part of my routine that guarantees everything is in order and nothing gets missed.</p>
<p>Of course there are plenty of situations where you don’t need all of this complexity, and that’s fine too. It doesn’t force you into using all of the features to have a functioning system: you only have to use what you need for the current situation.</p>
<h2 id="what-about-you">What about you?</h2>
<p>So there you have it. I’d be interested in finding out how you use OmniFocus or Things, or if you have your own preferred system. There are even people who implement <a href="http://www.diyplanner.com/templates/official/hpda">GTD using a biro, a binder clip and a stack of 6x4” index cards</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2013-02-11:/blog/gtd-things-vs-omnifocus/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/gtd-things-vs-omnifocus/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/twitter-favourites-daily-email/">Twitter favourites by daily email</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/twitter-favourites-daily-email/">Sunday 27 January 2013</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Twitter</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Email</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">GTD</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Productivity</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tech recipe</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I quite often favourite tweets that I want to come back and refer to. Unfortunately, I rarely actually get round to going back over my favourite tweets, so I wanted a way to get them into an inbox that I check regularly (á la <a href="http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Getting_Things_Done">Getting Things Done</a>).</p>
<p>I finally got round to figuring this out the other day, so here’s my recipe:</p>
<ol>
<li>You can get an RSS feed of your favourites using a URL of the form <a href="https://api.twitter.com/1/favorites.rss?screen_name=jezcope"><code class="highlighter-rouge">https://api.twitter.com/1/favorites.rss?screen_name=jezcope</code></a>, though obviously you should replace “jezcope” with your own Twitter handle.
<ul>
<li><a href="https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/4759">Source: Twitter developers forum</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Once you’ve checked that’s working, copy it and feed it to a daily email digest generator. I’m currently trying <a href="http://blogtrottr.com/">blogtrottr</a> which seems to be working well and gives you the option of checking at a range of frequencies from 1 to 24 hours.
<ul>
<li>There’s also a <a href="http://www.feedmyinbox.com/">list of RSS to email options on the old Feed My Inbox site</a>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>
<p>That’s it — pretty simple huh? You’ll probably get an email containing all of your favourites to start, and then future emails will contain just the latest favourites.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2013-01-27:/blog/twitter-favourites-daily-email/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/twitter-favourites-daily-email/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/uobsocial-blogging/">Links for #UoBSocial blogging session</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/uobsocial-blogging/">Wednesday 23 January 2013</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogging</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Researcher development</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Here are a few links to things that I mentioned (and maybe a few that I didn’t) in today’s briefing session for University of Bath researchers. Please feel free to leave your own suggestions, or links to your own blog, in the comments at the bottom.</p>
<h2 id="reading-blogs">Reading blogs</h2>
<p>Once you start following more than two or three blogs, you might find it easier to use a piece of software called a “feed reader” or “news aggregator” (or other similar terms) to do the hard work and collect all the new posts in one place. Here are a few options:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<del><a href="http://reader.google.com/">Google Reader</a> — web based</del> <em>discontinued — see below</em>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.feeddemon.com/">FeedDemon</a> — Windows (optional sync with Google Reader)</li>
<li>
<a href="http://reederapp.com/">Reeder</a> — Mac, iOS (Google Reader account required)</li>
<li>
<a href="http://feedly.com/">Feedly</a> — Browser plugin, iOS, Android (Google Reader account required)</li>
<li>All major web browsers now have some sort of feed reader built in too</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/">Technorati</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/blogsearch">Google Blog Search</a> are good ways to find something to read.</p>
<h3 id="update-2-april-2014">Update (2 April 2014)</h3>
<p>As a few people are coming back here after today’s social media conversation, I’d better mention that <a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.co.uk/">Google Reader closed its doors on 1 July 2013</a>, but the other options mentioned above are still good. A couple of other, relatively new, options are:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://theoldreader.com/">The Old Reader</a></li>
<li><a href="https://feedbin.com/">Feedbin</a></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="ways-to-blog">Ways to blog</h2>
<h3 id="hosted">Hosted</h3>
<p>The simplest way to start a blog is to use a service (free or paid-for) which handles everything for you. Here are some examples:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://wordpress.com/">WordPress.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/">University of Bath blogs</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blogger.com/">Blogger</a></li>
<li><a href="http://typepad.com/">Typepad</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="self-hosted">Self-hosted</h3>
<p>If you’re a bit more technical and/or demanding, you may prefer to host your own blog on a server. Here are some examples of software that will help:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a></li>
<li><a href="http://movabletype.org/">Movable Type</a></li>
<li><a href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="other-tips">Other tips</h2>
<ul>
<li>Create an <a href="../../about/">about page</a> to explain who you are</li>
<li>Use <a href="https://ifttt.com/">ifttt (“if that then this”)</a> to push blog posts out to other social media</li>
<li>And always remember: <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Don%27t_feed_the_Troll">don’t feed the trolls!</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
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<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/altc2012-part-3/">#altc2012 Part 3: Pilots and changes</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2012-part-3/">Saturday 6 October 2012</a>
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<p><em>Finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: day 3 of ALT-C 2012!</em></p>
<p>First up, Professor Mark Stubbs (Head of Learning and Research Technologies at Manchester Metropolitan University) gave an interesting talk on the MMU curriculum redesign. This isn’t my primary interest, but there were some useful nuggets in there about change management. The key lessons they learned from a complete redesign of the undergraduate curriculum in a very short time were:</p>
<ol>
<li>Engage people; and</li>
<li>Keep it simple.</li>
</ol>
<p>I particularly liked how they revamped the forms for approving new modules to keep them short, focused and aligned with the desired outcomes of the project (rather than gathering huge amounts of spurious info and getting loads of irrelevant people to sign off). This approach has important lessons for us at Bath as we introduce Data Management Planning to our researchers.</p>
<p>Next up was JISC Head of Innovation <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/contactus/staff/sarahporter">Sarah Porter</a>, talking about the ongoing reshaping of JISC in the wake of the <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/hefcereview.aspx">HEFCE review</a>.</p>
<p>My second session of the day was James Clay’s “<a href="http://elearningstuff.net/2012/02/29/alt-c-2012-pilot-mentality/">Pilot mentality</a>” symposium. This was based on James’s observation that although “pilot” usually implies something that will be tried out then reported on and scaled up, there seem to be a lot of so-called “pilots” which end up being one-offs. More worryingly, we see the same “pilots” being run across the sector.</p>
<p>I actually ended up writing a whole lot about this session here originally, without feeling like I’d done the topic justice, so I’ve scooped all of that out into its own post, to appear in the near future.</p>
<p>So, onto the final session of the conference, entitled “TEL<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> Research: Who needs it?” from the London Knowledge Lab’s <a href="http://elearningstuff.net/2012/02/29/alt-c-2012-pilot-mentality/">Richard Noss</a>. My reaction to this was mixed, I have to say, but overall there some good points.</p>
<p>80 years after the invention of the printing press, it was still only being used to print the bible, and we’ve been using computers in education for fewer than 50 years, so I agree that we probably don’t have a clue what ed. tech. will eventually end up looking like. We’re very good at using new technology to reproduce existing practices and processes, but it takes a while to realise its true potential.</p>
<p>He also wheeled out the old argument that you have to understand how a technology works to use it effectively. Agreed, his examples of senior managers in investment banks failing to understand basic statistics is compelling, but I don’t think it’s fully generalisable. After all, people have been making pretty good bread and cheese for centuries without understanding microbiology.</p>
<p>Understanding a technology means we can be <em>more</em> effective (and more subtle) about its use, but I don’t think complete understanding is a requirement for some level of effectiveness: part of being human is being very good at getting by.</p>
<p>I did like his comments about studying extremes of human behaviour to learn about the norm: I find in my work, sometimes, that I’m drawn to techies and luddites!</p>
<p>Anyway, it was quite a thought provoking conference again, the more so because I’m more focused on research technology at the moment and attending helped me cross-fertilise a bit. I’m not sure if I’ll be going again next year: <a href="http://digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk/">Digital Research</a> is looking very interesting and tends to clash, so we’ll see.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>For those not involved in this area, <em>TEL</em> is the acronym for technology-enhanced learning. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/cfhe12-mooc/">#cfhe12: another attempt at MOOCing</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/cfhe12-mooc/">Friday 5 October 2012</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">CFHE12</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">MOOC</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Admin</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-content">
<p>It’s October, which means the autumn TV season has started, which means that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strictly_come_dancing">Strictly Come Dancing</a> is back on for another year, which means it’s time for a flurry of blog posts as I leave my wonderful other half to shout at the TV on weekend evenings.</p>
<p>I’ve decided to have another go at joining in with another <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooc">MOOC</a> to give me some blog fuel, and this time round it’s <a href="http://edfuture.mooc.ca/">Current &amp; Future State of Higher Education 2012</a>.</p>
<p>My last MOOC attempt, <a href="http://openeducation.us/">IOE12</a>, sort of fizzled out (my participation, not the course itself) as I didn’t really have the time to keep it going. Hopefully I’ll do better this time, but if not I’m sure I’ll learn something anyway.</p>
<p>So, hello fellow MOOCers and watch this space!</p>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/altc2012-part-2/">#altc2012 Part 2: Apps &amp; networks</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2012-part-2/">Sunday 16 September 2012</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ALT-C 2012</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Apps</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Digital literacy</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Network analysis</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conferences</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><em>It’s been a little while since ALT-C 2012 now, so I thought I’d better write up the rest of my notes. Here’s day 2 in all it’s glory.</em></p>
<p>My day started off with James Clay’s workshop entitled “A few of my favourite things” — just an opportunity for gadget lovers to share some of their favourite apps (mostly iPad/iPhone, but a few Androids in there too).</p>
<p>There were a lot of popular apps in there, like the ever-present <a href="http://evernote.com/">Evernote</a> and <a href="http://instagram.com/">Instagram</a>, but there were a few interesting ones I hadn’t come across, or was able to see in a new light:</p>
<dl>
<dt><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JotNot!_Scan">JotNot</a></dt>
<dd>Lets you take a photo of a page and semi-automatically straightens it and enhances it so you get a flat, high-contrast version — a scanner in your pocket. Looks like this is abandonware, but instead I discovered <a href="http://www.thegrizzlylabs.com/genius-scan/">Genius Scan</a>, which has many more features.</dd>
<dt><a href="http://tunepal.org/">TunePal</a></dt>
<dd>One for lovers of traditional music: search for info on and dots for a traditional tune by playing a bit of it into your phone.</dd>
</dl>
<p>Next followed an interesting session introducing some tools from projects on the JISC Digital Literacies programme. I particularly liked the digital literacies lens on the <a href="https://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html">SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy</a>. There’s a lot of (perhaps true but not very helpful) talk going round at the moment about “everyone having a different definition of digital literacy”, so it’s good to see a fairly concise high-level view of what we’re actually talking about on that subject.</p>
<p>As a recovering mathematician, I found Natasa Milic-Frayling’s keynote on network analysis fascinating. Her team at Microsoft Research have developed an Excel plugin, <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/nodexl/">NodeXL</a> for analysing networks (and obtaining data from social networks to analyse).</p>
<p>She described some interesting work analysing voting patterns of US senators, and correlating connections in social networks with geographic distribution.</p>
<p>Students introduced to NodeXL were able to get straight into playing with network data, and quickly took on board the basic concepts (various ideas of the importance of a network node) without needing to grasp the underlying maths (such as the various equations for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality">centrality</a>).</p>
<p>My last session of the day was from Clive Young of University College London, talking about “blended” roles in e-learning. These are typically those people who provide general admin support to lecturers, and are increasingly being expected to managed VLE modules and other online elements of courses on behalf of the lecturers.</p>
<p>At UCL, these teaching administrators with blended roles had self-organised into a support network, as they were getting no targeted support on how to use Moodle from the e-learning team. This was, of course, rectified, and in the end 10% of the staff identified in blended roles went on to achieve <a href="http://www.alt.ac.uk/get-involved/certified-membership">CMALT</a> status.</p>
<p>All interesting stuff, and I’ll be back to post my thoughts on day 3 soon.</p>
</div>
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<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/altc2012-part-1/">#altc2012 Part 1: Bring on the data!</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2012-part-1/">Tuesday 11 September 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ALT-C 2012</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research360</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Data</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Science</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Scientific method</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching practice</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conferences</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-content">
<p>So today was day 1 of ALT-C 2012. Here are a few thoughts from the day.</p>
<p>The conference kicked off with an inspiring keynote from Eric Mazur. Eric is a physicist at Harvard, and when he’s not doing photonics research, he brings the scientific method to bear on his teaching practice.</p>
<p>He gave three examples that were interesting in their own right, but the key takeaway message was this: <strong>data is essential to improving teaching practice</strong>. Rather than coming up with anecdotes that go “well, my students seem to like it when I blah blah blah”, why not set up a simple experiment to actually test what helps those students learn.</p>
<p>After lunch, Cathy and I did a workshop on using research data for teaching, as part of the <a href="http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/research360">Research360 project</a>. I won’t go into too much detail (it did what it said on the tin), other than to say that I felt like it went pretty well — all the attendees got into the exercises and some really productive discussions took place.</p>
<p><a href="http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/27974">Take a look at the session page to see the slides and exercises</a>.</p>
<p>After that, I saw a couple of demonstrations of some cool stuff (<a href="http://blogs.kingston.ac.uk/ltrg/category/nooblab/">NoobLab</a>, <a href="http://curatr.co.uk/">curatr</a>), and caught up with a few of the JISC digital literacy projects.</p>
<p>So far, then, another interesting conference. The catering’s been pretty good too. A lot of carbohydrate, though: lunch was served with cous cous, chips and boiled potatoes (and bread rolls if you wanted) and dinner was equally carbalicious. Perhaps it’ll help me run faster in the morning.</p>
<p>It’s late. I’m wittering. Bye for now!</p>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/altc2012-part-0/">#altc2012 Part 0: preliminaries</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2012-part-0/">Monday 10 September 2012</a>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Well, I’ve arrived in Manchester for ALT-C 2012, registered and checked into my room. Tomorrow Cathy Pink and I will be talking about <a href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/news/get/2012/09/10/exploiting-research-data-for-teaching-at-alt-c-2012/">using research data for teaching</a>.</p>
<p>Leave a comment here or contact me via Twitter if you’d like to meet up — I’m here for the whole conference, and hopefully blogging as I go along.</p>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/oxford-open-science-2012/">Oxford Open Science meeting</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/oxford-open-science-2012/">Monday 10 September 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Openness</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open data</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open science</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research data management</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Presentations</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>On Wednesday 22 August 2012, I gave an invited presentation at the August meeting of Oxford Open Science, hosted at the Oxford e-Research Centre. The theme of the evening was “How do we prepare postgraduate research student for the era of big data?”</p>
<p>There were some interesting presentations around that subject:</p>
<ul>
<li>Juliet Ralph and Oliver Bridle from the <a href="http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley">Bodleian</a> discussed information seeking behaviour amongst students;</li>
<li>
<a href="http://okfn.org/">Open Knowledge Foundation’s</a> Laura Newman told us about the <a href="http://schoolofdata.org/">School of Data</a>, a project to produce learning resources for those working with data;</li>
<li>Anna Collins from <a href="http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/">DSpace Cambridge</a> talked about “long tail in the shadow of big data”.</li>
</ul>
<p>My own presentation discussed some of the work I’ve done providing social media and data management training for PGRs, and the slides can be viewed here:</p>
<iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/14237401" width="427" height="356" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px" allowfullscreen=""> </iframe>
<div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope/technology-training-for-pg-students" title="Technology training for PG students" target="_blank">Technology training for PG students</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope" target="_blank">Jez Cope</a></strong> </div>
<p>As an experiment, the <a href="http://github.com/jezcope/oxford-open-science-2012">LaTeX source of the slides</a> is also available on github. Let me know if they’re any use.</p>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/data-scraping-olympics/">Scraping for gold at the Olympics</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/data-scraping-olympics/">Tuesday 7 August 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Olympics</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">London 2012</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Medals</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open data</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Ruby</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Screen scraping</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Coding</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>What if it wasn’t all about the gold medals? The Olympic medal table is always ranked in order of gold medals first, then silver, then bronze.</p>
<p>That seems reasonable, but if you looked at the table at the end of 6 August, for example, you’d have seen that Germany had an impressive 22 medals, including 5 golds, but ranked one place behind Kazakhstan, who had only 7 medals, but 6 of which were gold.</p>
<p>So I thought it was time to do a few things I’ve wanted to try for a while: scrape some publicly available data, do something interesting with it, and write and deploy a Ruby webapp beyond my desktop.</p>
<h2 id="finding-the-data">Finding the data</h2>
<p>It just so happens that the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/medals/countries">BBC’s medal table</a> is marked up with some nice semantic attributes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Each <code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;tr&gt;</code> tag has two attributes: <code class="highlighter-rouge">data-country-name</code> and <code class="highlighter-rouge">data-country-code</code>;</li>
<li>Each <code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;td&gt;</code> tag uses the class <code class="highlighter-rouge">gold</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">silver</code> or <code class="highlighter-rouge">bronze</code> and contains <em>only</em> the number of medals of that type for that country.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="just-scraping-by">Just scraping by</h2>
<p>I could have just scraped that data from within the webapp, but I wanted a) to have a bit more robustness if the source page changed format or disappeared; and b) to make the data easily available to others.</p>
<p>So I wrote this <a href="https://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/london_2012_medal_table/">London 2012 medal table scraper</a> in <a href="http://scraperwiki.com/">ScraperWiki</a>. ScraperWiki lets you write scrapers in Ruby, Python or PHP using their API and some standard parsing modules to scrape data and store it in an SQLite table. The data is then available as JSON via a REST API, and remains so even if the source page vanishes (it just sends you a notification so you can fix your scraper).</p>
<h2 id="lets-go-camping">Let’s go Camping</h2>
<p>I briefly thought about using <a href="http://rubyonrails.org/">Ruby on Rails</a>, but that’s a pretty heavy solution to a very small problem, so instead I turned to <a href="http://camping.rubyforge.org/">Camping</a>, a “web framework which consistently stays at less than 4kB of code.”</p>
<p>Camping is very <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller">MVC</a>-based, but your whole app can live in a single file, like a simple CGI script.</p>
<h2 id="putting-it-all-together">Putting it all together</h2>
<p>So, <a href="http://altmedals2012.herokuapp.com/">here’s my alternative Olympic medal table app</a>, and <a href="http://github.com/jezcope/altmedals2012">here’s the code on GitHub</a>.</p>
<p>What are the effects? Well, if you sort by total medals, there’s quite a big shake up. Russia with 41 medals (only 7 gold) shoot up from 6th to 3rd place, pushing Britain down to 4th. North Korea, on the other hand, drop down from 8th to 24th.</p>
<p>Using a weighted sum of the medals (with a gold worth 3 points, silver 2 and bronze 1) yields a similar but less dramatic upheaval, with Russia still up and North Korea still down, but GB restored to 3rd place.</p>
<p>Can you think of a different way to sort the medals? <a href="https://github.com/jezcope/altmedals2012/issues/new">Stick a feature request on the GitHub tracker</a>, or fork it and have a go yourself.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2012-08-07:/blog/data-scraping-olympics/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/data-scraping-olympics/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/open-source/">Open Source #ioe12</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/open-source/">Monday 12 March 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Copyright</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Licensing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open source</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">IOE12</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Openness</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><em>This blog post is part of my contribution to the open online course<br>
<a href="http://openeducation.us/">Introduction to Openness in Education</a>.</em></p>
<p>Ok, so the last post was a bit long. Like essay long. I started writing and<br>
then I kept on writing til I’d got it all out. I’m pretty happy with the<br>
content, but it took too long to write and it takes too long to read.</p>
<p>So here’s my pithy(ish) introduction to Open Source.</p>
<p>‘Open’, as you might expect, refers to the free sharing of stuff. The ‘Source’<br>
part refers to <em>source code</em>: the human-readable form in which computer<br>
software is written. So we’re talking about software distributed in<br>
human-modifiable form, not the compiled, click-to-run executable most people<br>
are used to.</p>
<p>There are two key arguments in favour of Open Source: the moral one and the<br>
economic one.</p>
<p>The moral argument goes like this. In the beginning only a few dedicated<br>
hackers had computers. They put their craft first, worked together well and<br>
shared their developments with each other. They were able to learn from and<br>
build on each other’s code, and everyone was happy.</p>
<p>As the computer industry grew, the business types who started up companies to<br>
exploit new developments realised that they could make money by keeping the<br>
source code secret and only releasing the executable code to customers. So they<br>
made non-free software the norm and the world a poorer place for it.</p>
<p>But there are many people who feel this is naive and unrealistic. To convince<br>
them, you also need the economic argument.</p>
<p>Conventional wisdom has it that if you try to build software with a team that’s<br>
too large, you get bogged down in communication between team-members and the<br>
whole enterprise becomes unmanageable.</p>
<p>This is fairly accurate for closed-source software: the nature of commercial<br>
companies is that everything has to be managed in a certain way and everyone<br>
has to be in communication with everyone else.</p>
<p>Mathematicians may recognise this as a complete graph — in which every node in<br>
connected to every other node — and the problem is that the number of links<br>
grows much quicker than the number of people.</p>
<p>Open source projects, like Linux, involve huge numbers of people, so on paper<br>
they shouldn’t work. But on a large open source project, most people contribute<br>
only to a small part of the whole, only communicating with a few others. Only a<br>
small number, by dint of personality type or happenstance, coordinate with many<br>
others to keep the whole thing together.</p>
<p>And because these projects don’t suffer from the communication difficulties,<br>
they can capitalise on the much larger group of minds working on a problem.</p>
<p>Thanks to this effect, hobbyist programmers really can built high quality<br>
software and that’s why OS projects Linux and Apache dominate the modern web<br>
between them.</p>
<p>But why should we use open source software?</p>
<p>As Cory Doctorow points out in his recent talk “The coming war on general<br>
computation”, the computer is fully general: there’s no program that they can’t<br>
in theory run.</p>
<p>That scares a lot of people: it means you can run whatever you like, even<br>
software that (shock horror!) makes it possible to break the law. So should<br>
governments or corporations be restricting what we can run?</p>
<p>Cars can be used to commit crime, but only a police state would try to restrict<br>
where you can drive to, or insist on low-jacking each one. Open source software<br>
is controlled by the community, and so is naturally resistant this type of<br>
centralised control — you may not agree but I think that’s worth defending.</p>
<p>And as Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty<br>
to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2012-03-12:/blog/open-source/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/open-source/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/sharing-flaky-butter-buns/">Sharing and flaky butter buns</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/sharing-flaky-butter-buns/">Sunday 5 February 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Copyright</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Recipes</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Openness</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Sharing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">IOE12</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>You know you’ve made it on the web when you’re asked to take something down.</p>
<h2 id="the-story">The story</h2>
<p>For Christmas I received, amongst other lovely presents, a copy of Dan Lepard’s<br>
book <em>The Handmade Loaf</em>. I really enjoy breadmaking, with all of the processes<br>
and the minor biological miracle that turns flour and water into a cohesive<br>
loaf.</p>
<p>Since then I’ve been trying out at least one, sometimes several, recipes from<br>
the book each weekend. Two weeks ago I made flaky butter buns, posting a photo<br>
of the result (delicious) on Twitter and Google+.</p>
<p>I was asked for the recipe, but as a) I’m fairly conscientious and b) I’ve been<br>
learning a lot about copyright recently this raised a question: is it a breach<br>
of copyright to share someone else’s recipe.</p>
<p>A couple of online conversations and one <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/mar/24/foodanddrink.uk">Guardian<br>
article</a><br>
later, I had my answer: recipes are not protected by copyright under either UK<br>
or US law. A recipe is an idea, not the expression of an idea, and is therefore<br>
not copyrightable.</p>
<p>A recipe may be covered by a patent or trade secret, but for a patent to be<br>
granted it would have to differ significantly from any other previous recipe<br>
and, having been published in a book, it clearly cannot be a trade secret.</p>
<p>So conscience satisfied, I went ahead and posted the <a href="http://posterous.erambler.co.uk/flaky-butter-buns-recipe">recipe for flaky butter<br>
buns</a> on my other blog.</p>
<p>Rather than use Lepard’s own words, which would have infringed copyright, I<br>
wrote it in my own style, which tends to skip over steps — you either need to<br>
have some baking knowledge or take the hint and buy the book. I also raved (as<br>
I have done before) about the book itself, including an Amazon link so that<br>
readers could go ahead and buy it for themselves.</p>
<p>I felt in doing so that I behaved appropriately both legally and morally, and<br>
thought no more about it.</p>
<p>Several days later, I got an email notifying my of a comment on the post (this<br>
rarely happens). As it turns out, this comment was from a member of Lepard’s<br>
team accusing me of infringing his copyright.</p>
<p>Now as I’ve said, I don’t believe that I did infringe copyright (if you’re a<br>
lawyer, I’d love to hear a legal opinion on this), but since I respect Lepard<br>
as a professional and small businessman I chose to respect his wishes (or at<br>
least those of his employee) and remove the recipe anyway.</p>
<h2 id="the-point">The point</h2>
<p>In the end this isn’t a question about the law. It’s about whether sharing (and<br>
letting other people share) your stuff is a good idea or not.</p>
<p>Even the most cursory Google search for recipe titles suggests that, should I<br>
want to, I could recreate the entire collection for free. But one of the<br>
reasons I like this book is that it’s more than a collection of recipes. It’s a<br>
well crafted book <em>about bread</em>. In addition to the recipes it contains both<br>
photographs (by the author) and descriptions of encounters with bakers around<br>
the world.</p>
<p>Yes, you can get most if not all of those recipes for free online and not have<br>
to pay a penny, but anyone who’s going to do that was never going to buy the<br>
book in the first place. In fact you could get the whole experience of the book<br>
for free, <a href="http://nationallibrariesday.org.uk/">just by going down to your local<br>
library</a>.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I like to think that a few of my friends might have been<br>
motivated to buy their own copy of the book on the basis of my recommendation —<br>
word of mouth being the best form of advertising and free to boot.</p>
<p>So now there is no recipe, and no endorsement, and no link to buy the book on<br>
Amazon. I’ll probably think twice before recommending the book in the future<br>
(wait, didn’t I just do that again three paragraphs ago?).</p>
<p>I’d be kidding myself if I thought this will make the slightest difference to<br>
the book’s sales, but you have to wonder: if you have a book to sell, is it<br>
worth paying someone to spend time trawling the internet (which is a pretty big<br>
place) just to ensure your book is the only place the contents can be found?</p>
<p>People will still send recipes by email, or photocopy them, or pass them on by<br>
word of mouth. They will clip them out of the paper, note them down in<br>
notebooks and then post the clippings to loved ones.</p>
<p>This has always happened and always will, and though some instances are covered<br>
by copyright law, it’s completely unenforcible in such cases.</p>
<p>The internet makes this sharing more visible, but it presents an opportunity<br>
too. The classic example is YouTube: increasingly rights owners are taking the<br>
option to place ads around potentially infringing videos rather than blindly<br>
demand takedowns.</p>
<p>By the way, Martin Weller’s made his whole book, <a href="http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml">The Digital<br>
Scholar</a><br>
available online for free, and some mugs (me included) still seem to be paying<br>
for it. Perhaps we’re all just idiots.</p>
<p>All I really want to say is this: if you have a book to sell (or any other<br>
creative work), consider carefully the pros and cons of permitting parts to be<br>
shared freely.</p>
<p>Policing takes time and time is money, and even if the pros and cons balance<br>
out all you’re doing is spending that money to achieve zero result. Perhaps<br>
that time would be better spent engaging with your readers in positive ways.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2012-02-05:/blog/sharing-flaky-butter-buns/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/sharing-flaky-butter-buns/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/open-licensing/">Open Licensing #ioe12</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/open-licensing/">Sunday 15 January 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Copyright</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Licensing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Creative Commons</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">IOE12</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Openness</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><a id="post-image" class="alignright" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/biwook/145765624/" title="A copyright will protect you from PIRATES by Ioan Sameli, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/54/145765624_65d3eaf886_m.jpg" width="191" height="240" alt="A copyright will protect you from PIRATES"></a><br>
<em>This blog post is part of my contribution to the open online course<br>
<a href="http://openeducation.us/">Introduction to Openness in Education</a>.</em></p>
<h2 id="copyright">Copyright</h2>
<p>At the heart of the various forms of “open” lies the concept of intellectual<br>
property: who owns it, who can use it and for what.</p>
<p>A physical object, such as the computer I’m writing this blog post on, is in<br>
one place at a time, and its ownership is pretty clear cut: I paid for it and<br>
it’s in my house, and if you took it without my permission we’d call that<br>
theft.</p>
<p>Things get trickier when you start talking about creative works. If I write a<br>
piece of music and you make a copy, I still have the piece of music, but so do<br>
you. I can take a photograph of a painting by Degas, and it stays hanging in<br>
the gallery, but in some sense I have a copy that I can enjoy independently of<br>
the original work.</p>
<p>If this situation goes unchecked, then there’s not a lot of incentive to become<br>
an artist, or a composer, or a writer. Even if you charge for your work there’s<br>
nothing to stop me buying one copy and then selling hundreds, for which you<br>
would see no profit whatsoever.</p>
<p>Under most modern legal systems, the concept of copyright exists to right this<br>
imbalance. It does this by allowing the creator of a work the opportunity to<br>
exploit that work in whatever way they see fit, effectively creating a<br>
monopoly.</p>
<p>As the creator of a work, it’s still possible to grant certain rights to third<br>
parties, and this is done by the granting of licenses. This is the mechanism<br>
which allows you to “sell” rights to a work in exchange for money or some other<br>
consideration.</p>
<h2 id="fair-usefair-dealing">Fair use/fair dealing</h2>
<p>If you were to film an interview in the high street of your town, you might<br>
think that it would be difficult to infringe copyright in any way. If you’re<br>
not infringing copyright, you don’t need to pay anyone for a license. Yet if,<br>
say, a TV set in the background was showing reruns of The Simpsons, then you<br>
could well be in from a visit from lawyers representing the Fox Broadcasting<br>
Company.</p>
<p>Some jurisdictions include a concept of “fair use” (or fair dealing in the UK),<br>
which permits such incidental reuses under a specific set of circumstances.<br>
This can make documentary-making, for example, much easier.</p>
<p>However, many organisations (Fox being a common example) are quite happy to<br>
threaten legal action and demand that you pay tens or hundreds of thousands of<br>
pounds(/dollars/euros/etc.) for a license, even if you may in fact be covered<br>
by fair use rules. They are able to do this because most people are unaware of<br>
their legal rights, or even if they are do not have the money to fight the<br>
ensuing lawsuit.</p>
<p>Even if the law gives you a fair use right to use some work or other, other<br>
organisations to which you might sell your own work may not be so forgiving.<br>
Because of the litigation culture surrounding copyright, a lot of organisations<br>
take a very paranoid approach and insist on rights being cleared and licenses<br>
purchased even if they’re not strictly necessary.</p>
<h2 id="orphaned-works">Orphaned works</h2>
<p>The situation becomes worse when the holder of the rights that must be cleared<br>
cannot be found. This usually happens when no contact details can be found for<br>
the creator of a work, or when those that can be found are out of date. In many<br>
cases, it’s impossible even to know whether the rights holder is still alive,<br>
and works like this are referred to as “orphaned works”.</p>
<p>In the early days of copyright this would not have been a problem: for<br>
copyright to exist it was necessary to the creator to explicitly assert their<br>
rights, and to renew them periodically.</p>
<p>However it is now the case in the US and the UK that copyright automatically<br>
exists for the lifetime of the creator and for 70 years after their death. If<br>
the creator has passed away, their estate still owns the copyright, but may be<br>
impossible to trace until they discover the breach.</p>
<p>For this reason, it is almost impossible to safely use orphaned works — if<br>
you do, you do so at your own risk.</p>
<h2 id="open-licensing">Open licensing</h2>
<p>As you can see, copyright creates incentives to create, but the way it’s<br>
currently implemented can also have a chilling effect on certain types of<br>
creation, especially those that involve mashing up existing content.</p>
<p>There’s not a lot most of us can do about the depredations of Fox and their<br>
ilk, other than lobbying our MPs for a change in the law. But thankfully we can<br>
make it easier for others to make use of our own works.</p>
<p>Open licensing gives creators legal tools to relinquish some or all of their<br>
rights over a piece of work, in the interests of supporting the creativity of<br>
others.</p>
<p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> was set up to provide a set of<br>
open licenses which creators can use to make it very easy to understand what<br>
can and can’t be done with their work.</p>
<p>The key terms which can be applied by the standard Creative Commons licenses<br>
are:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<strong>Attribution</strong>: the creator of the work must be acknowledged in any works<br>
which incorporate it;</li>
<li>
<strong>Share-alike</strong>: the work can only be used if the resulting work is<br>
released under the same license;</li>
<li>
<strong>Non-commercial</strong>: the work may only be used if the user doesn’t profit<br>
financially from doing so;</li>
<li>
<strong>No derivatives</strong>: the work may only be redistributed unchanged from its<br>
original form.</li>
</ul>
<p>By combining these terms, it is possible to specify exactly what rights you<br>
want to retain on each individual work.</p>
<p>In higher education, we often find ourselves needing a photo or video to<br>
illustrate a point in a class or at a conference, or increasingly in a blog<br>
post (like this one). Thanks to Creative Commons, finding content to be used<br>
legally in this way is as easy as doing a <a href="http://search.creativecommons.org/">simple web<br>
search</a> — no more excuses!</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>This was intended to be a short blog post, and it’s already longer than I<br>
intended! There are a whole raft of other important issues, such as the<br>
creeping extension of copyright terms, which I haven’t had space to cover, but<br>
hopefully I’ll come back to those some other time.</p>
<p>For now, I hope you’ve got a good idea of why open licensing is necessary and<br>
how you can apply it to your own creative works. It’s worth noting that this<br>
whole blog is released under a CC license — just scroll to the bottom!</p>
<p><em>In writing this post, I made heavy use of <a href="http://openeducation.us/open-licensing">this open licensing<br>
material</a>, which I encourage you to<br>
take a look at if you want to learn more.</em></p>
<p><em>Photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/biwook/145765624/">Ioan Sameli via<br>
Flickr</a></em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2012-01-15:/blog/open-licensing/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/open-licensing/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/the-research-technologist-research-focus/">The Research Technologist part 2: research focus</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/the-research-technologist-research-focus/">Tuesday 10 January 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research technologist</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Job description</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><em>This is the second part in my exploration of what it means to be a research<br>
technologist. If you haven’t already, check out <a href="../../blog/the-research-technologist-proactivity-innovation/">part 1: proactivity and<br>
innovation</a>.</em></p>
<h2 id="research-focus">Research focus</h2>
<p>There’s another area where the role diverges from the typical member of IT<br>
staff: a focus on the unique needs of researchers. Network infrastructure, file<br>
storage, email are necessary but not sufficient to meet the needs of a modern<br>
researcher.</p>
<p>It’s vitally important to pay close attention to the unique needs of<br>
researchers and to find appropriate tools and techniques to adapt to serve<br>
those needs as well as possible. Research is after all the primary business of<br>
a university, alongside teaching.</p>
<p>So we need to find ways to fulfil the needs not just of an institution’s<br>
researchers, but of a faculty’s researchers, or a department’s or even a single<br>
research group’s.</p>
<p>I actually think that once we start doing this well, there will be a lot more<br>
commonality than there appears to be right now. But first we’ve got to get<br>
there.</p>
<h2 id="serving-the-long-tail">Serving the long tail</h2>
<p>The much abused Pareto Principle holds that in many circumstances 80% of your<br>
profit comes from 20% of the people/products/whatever. But we’re not looking to<br>
profit from our users, we’re looking to serve them. Questions of how to fund<br>
that not withstanding, taking this attitude means you’re ignoring of the<br>
people!</p>
<p>If there’s one thing we’ve learned from successes like eBay, Amazon and many<br>
more, it’s that if we’re smart we can use modern technology to efficiently<br>
provide large numbers of niche products and services <em>without</em> drowning in the<br>
overhead traditionally associated with trying to do so.</p>
<h2 id="research-attitude">Research attitude</h2>
<p>Again, this can be a problem for centralised IT services, because it’s seen as<br>
inefficient for them to put significant R&amp;D time into things which may only<br>
ever be of use to a minority of their users.</p>
<p>In an academic department, however, the culture is different. Success in<br>
research demands innovation, which requires risk. Scientists and engineers, for<br>
example, intrinsically understand the need to experiment, and no-one questions<br>
the idea that many of those experiments will fail.</p>
<p>Notice that word <em>fail</em>. In this context failure is not a loss, it’s merely a<br>
failure to produce the anticipated results. Most researchers still don’t like<br>
failure — they’re human after all. But they learn not to get so hung up on it,<br>
because if you set up your experiment right (which is really the key to the<br>
whole enterprise) then you learn as much or more from failing as you do from<br>
succeeding.</p>
<p>And that’s really the point. We want to help our researchers to do their jobs<br>
even better than they already do, which means we need to learn, which in turn<br>
means we need to make mistakes. There are no lectures and degree courses to<br>
teach us about ideas which don’t exist yet.</p>
<p>So to steal one of those trite little phrases life coaches and the like love so<br>
much: fail early, fail often, fail <em>smart</em> and learn from it.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2012-01-10:/blog/the-research-technologist-research-focus/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/the-research-technologist-research-focus/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/my-first-mooc-introduction-to-online-education/">My first MOOC — Introduction to Online Education</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/my-first-mooc-introduction-to-online-education/">Tuesday 10 January 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">MOOC</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">IOE12</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Meta</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I’ve decided to sign up and join <a href="http://openeducation.us/">David Wiley’s MOOC, Introduction to Open<br>
Education 2012</a>. A <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooc">MOOC (Massively Open Online<br>
Course)</a> is an online course, typically run<br>
by a lecturer at a university, which is freely accessible and built around the<br>
ideas of connectivism and social learning.</p>
<p>The content of the course, which is about the various ‘kinds’ of openness<br>
currently practised in higher education, fits nicely with what I’m doing at the<br>
moment so I thought I’d give it a try.</p>
<p>Although I could theoretically find, study and blog about all of the content in<br>
this course on my own, I think that the social aspect and the defined set of<br>
objectives (in the form of “badges”) combined make it more likely that I will<br>
follow through.</p>
<p>Let’s see if that’s actually true…</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2012-01-10:/blog/my-first-mooc-introduction-to-online-education/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/my-first-mooc-introduction-to-online-education/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/kindle-12-months-on/">Amazon Kindle — 12 months on</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/kindle-12-months-on/">Monday 2 January 2012</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Amazon</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Kindle</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eBooks</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Gadgets</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><a id="post-image" class="alignright" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/43602175@N06/4070018686/" title="Amazon Kindle PDF by goXunuReviews, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2605/4070018686_b8febdd20a_m.jpg" width="185" height="240" alt="Amazon Kindle PDF"></a><br>
I’ve now had my <a href="http://amazon.com/kindle">Kindle</a> for just over 12 months — it<br>
was last year’s Christmas gift from my wonderful wife — and I can quite<br>
honestly say that it’s completely changed the way I read.</p>
<p>I’ve always been a keen reader, but sometimes found it difficult to find time<br>
to read while also having a book available. I also tended only to buy books one<br>
at a time when I was in a physical bookshop. As a consequence, most of my<br>
reading happened at home, either in bed or in the bath, and I would get through<br>
books at around one a month.</p>
<p>Since getting my Kindle (well, since first getting the Kindle app for iPhone 14<br>
months ago) I have read 45 books. I never used to read non-fiction books, but<br>
have just finished my third of the last few months. My decision on what to read<br>
next would generally wait until I’d finished my last book, but now I have 14<br>
books waiting to be read and about another 20 on an Amazon wishlist waiting to<br>
be purchased.</p>
<p>What’s caused this change? As you might guess, it’s a combination of several<br>
things. Compared to a paper book, my Kindle weighs almost nothing, so I can<br>
slip it in a bag or a pocket. I can hold it in one hand while drinking tea, or<br>
lie on my back and read, both of which I found too tiring to do with paper<br>
books.</p>
<p>I also have iPhone and desktop Kindle apps, which are always in sync. I always<br>
have my current book with me, so I have many more opportunities to read.</p>
<p>When I finish a book, I can immediately start the next, whether I have one<br>
already lined up or I need to go online and buy one. I’ve basically turned into<br>
a chain-reader, going from book to book without pause.</p>
<p>Irritatingly, the prices do not reflect the near-zero marginal cost of<br>
distributing digital content — if you shift content in the volume that Amazon<br>
can, your income is almost pure profit.</p>
<p>However, digital books are still cheaper than the print editions. The<br>
difference for popular fiction is pretty small, but I appreciate it<br>
nonetheless. For specialist non-fiction, on the other hand, where low volumes<br>
make print copies prohibitively expensive, digital editions come at a<br>
significant discount — often half price or better in my experience.</p>
<p>I actually wrote the entire first draft of this post without mentioning either<br>
screen quality or battery life. Both are so good that it didn’t even occur to<br>
me to mention them.</p>
<p>There are downsides too. Because I’m locked into Amazon’s infrastructure, I<br>
can’t lend books to friends or family (this feature <em>still</em> hasn’t been enabled<br>
outside the US). I also can’t donate books to charity shops once I’ve finished<br>
them.</p>
<p>Both of these facts still make me uneasy, and I’m not sure that I want all my<br>
books to be controlled by a single company for the rest of my life. And I<br>
haven’t even started on the problem of how many books I need to read on Kindle<br>
to break even on the carbon footprint, or even whether that’s possible.</p>
<p>That said, my pragmatic side is winning at the moment. Reading on Kindle just<br>
works, and it seems to suit my lifestyle much better than books made of dead<br>
tree.</p>
<p>I know a lot of people have been given Kindles this Christmas, so I’d love to<br>
know if any of my readers have thoughts on this.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2012-01-02:/blog/kindle-12-months-on/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/kindle-12-months-on/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/the-research-technologist-proactivity-innovation/">The Research Technologist part 1: proactivity and innovation</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/the-research-technologist-proactivity-innovation/">Thursday 15 December 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research technologist</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ICT</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Job description</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><em>I began writing this a couple of months ago, shortly after <a href="http://www.alt.ac.uk/events/alt-c-2011">ALT-C</a>, the<br>
Association of Learning Technology Conference. Then it turned into “one of<br>
those posts” that I had to perfect before I could publish it. And that’s silly,<br>
so I’m going to publish it now and continue it in further posts, because this<br>
is a blog, not a thesis.</em></p>
<p>Anyway, as is often the case at conferences when you meet a lot of people, I<br>
kept having to answer the question “What do you do?”. My actual job title is<br>
“ICT Project Manager”, which while impressive sounding doesn’t go any way to<br>
explain what I do. In the end, I came up with the following stock response:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I’m a research technologist: I have a very similar role to learning<br>
technologists, except that I support academics as researchers instead of<br>
as teachers.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are a few roles out there which sound similar, or which have similar<br>
names, so I thought I’d mention a few things that set this role apart from<br>
other similar sounding jobs. This post is the first part of a series exploring<br>
those aspects.</p>
<h2 id="first-a-disclaimer">First, a disclaimer</h2>
<p>I’m not foolish enough to think I’m the only person doing this type of job, or<br>
to pick out these features as important, or even to come up with that name. I’m<br>
quite certain there are people doing this in IT departments, in research<br>
development departments, certainly in academic departments and quite possibly<br>
in e-learning departments too. It’s more that there seems to be no standard<br>
position for this role (except where institutions have dedicated e-research<br>
teams) and I’m setting out to find other people in similar roles to share ideas<br>
with.</p>
<h2 id="proactivity-and-innovation">Proactivity and innovation</h2>
<p>Although part of my role is to support existing systems and respond to queries<br>
from users, that’s not the whole of it. I feel it’s important to keep abreast<br>
of the latest technology innovations and explore how they can be used to<br>
support research. This contrasts with the typical approach of central<br>
university IT services, which generally have a core set of “supported” software<br>
and services with rigorous procedures and checks in place to control changes to<br>
that set.</p>
<p>I don’t wish to suggest that this centralised model is inappropriate: on the<br>
contrary it’s absolutely necessary. University IT services have the very<br>
challenging job of providing an acceptable and consistent standard of service<br>
to a huge and diverse user base. To do this efficiently it’s necessary to make<br>
sure that all IT staff have a reasonable understanding of <em>every</em> supported<br>
service, which just can’t happen if that set of services is too large.</p>
<p>The trouble is that as well as providing users with a very stable, high level<br>
of support for essential services (networking, email, payroll and so on), it<br>
also tends to stifle innovation. If a new service is to be offered, a lot of<br>
time and resources must be invested in doing so at the level of existing<br>
services; quite a risk if there’s no guarantee that the new service will<br>
succeed. That means that there’s no scope to start something small, with the<br>
option of either growing it organically if it takes off or letting it die<br>
peacefully if it’s not right.</p>
<hr>
<p>I’ll be exploring this further soon, but for now I’d be interested in your<br>
take, especially if you disagree or recognise some of what I say in your own<br>
role.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-12-15:/blog/the-research-technologist-proactivity-innovation/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/the-research-technologist-proactivity-innovation/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/nose-to-the-blogstone/">Nose to the blogstone</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/nose-to-the-blogstone/">Saturday 3 December 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Meta</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogging</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web design</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Admin</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Well, I’m just back from the launch meeting of the JISC Managing Research Data<br>
programme, of which our <a href="http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/research360">Research360 project at Bath</a> is a part, and coming<br>
to terms with the fact that blogging is now an inescapable part of my job.</p>
<p>Looks like it’s time to get back into my blogging rhythm once more. Time to<br>
make a few tweaks that I’ve been planning to the layout too. Let me know what<br>
you think.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-12-03:/blog/nose-to-the-blogstone/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/nose-to-the-blogstone/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/eurosakai11-slides/">Slides for EuroSakai 2011</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/eurosakai11-slides/">Monday 26 September 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">EuroSakai 2011</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">VRE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Sakai</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Presentations</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>On Wednesday 8 September I’ll be presenting at <a href="http://eurosakai.nl">EuroSakai<br>
2011</a> in Amsterdam. For those who are interested, here are<br>
my slides.</p>
<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_9421872"> <strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope/isuslab-a-sakaibased-virtual-research-environment-for-scientists" title="iSusLab: a Sakai-based Virtual Research Environment for scientists" target="_blank">iSusLab: a Sakai-based Virtual Research Environment for scientists</a></strong> <iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/9421872" width="425" height="355" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> <div style="padding:5px 0 12px"> View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/" target="_blank">presentations</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope" target="_blank">Jez Cope</a> </div> </div>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-09-26:/blog/eurosakai11-slides/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/eurosakai11-slides/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/altc2011-day-3/">#altc2011 Day 3</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2011-day-3/">Thursday 8 September 2011</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ALT-C 2011</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>And so ALT-C 2011 draws to a close. I followed online last year and the year before, but it’s been my first chance to attend in person, which has been a great experience. I’ve met lots of people who I’ve been following online for some time, and plenty more who are completely new to me. I also seem to have come up with a new job title and a bit of a mission, on which more at some future time. For now, here are my first thoughts on this final day of the conference.</p>
<h2 id="project-results">Project results</h2>
<p>I was up bright and early again, this time to hear some of the results from three small learning technology projects.</p>
<p>Lyn Greaves (UWL) and Claire Bradley (London Met) told us about their development of open educational resources to support students’ digital literacy and general academic practice.</p>
<p>Cheryl Middleton and Steve Brierley (Sheffield Hallam) presented their experiences in using enquiry-based learning methods instead of conventional lectures to deliver a course to their Information Systems undergraduates. They were inspired by Donald Clark’s keynote at last year’s ALT-C, and it’s great to see lecturers attending the conference and sharing their own practice from the front lines.</p>
<p>Finally, Vicki McGarvey and Anna Armstrong (Nottingham Trent University) shared with us their project to encourage lecturers to share their learning objects with each other.</p>
<p>Great work all three groups!</p>
<h2 id="making-the-case">Making the case</h2>
<p>My next session of the morning was run by freelancer Sarah Chesney, who recently carried out research commissioned by PebblePad to find how individuals and small teams were convincing senior management to roll out successfully concluded small-scale projects on a wider basis.</p>
<p>Sarah did a good job of getting us talking together over a couple of example scenarios, and gave us some useful pointers. For example, she pointed us towards the <a href="http://sloanconsortium.org/5pillars">Sloan-C Quality Framework</a> as a useful tool to help structure thinking around the quality of a initiative.</p>
<p>I think my main takeaway from this session will be to always be paying attention to data on costs of particular ways of doing things, especially for the period <em>before</em> and after making a change. Gathering data to convince management is not always at the front of your mind when you’re not sure yourself whether a particular change will work.</p>
<h2 id="the-elusive-technological-future">The elusive technological future</h2>
<p>Invited speaker <a href="http://memex.naughtons.org/">John Naughton</a> closed the conference with a thought-provoking talk on the impossibility of predicting the pace and direction of technological change. This is another talk that I doubt I can do justice with a summary, so I encourage you to take a look at the online recording when it becomes available on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/clipsfromalt">ALT YouTube channel</a>.</p>
<p>One aspect which caused a bit of a stir, on Twitter at least, was Naughton’s presentation style: just him, a microphone and a script on his iPad. It sounds like a recipe for all that is bad about the lecture as a format, but in fact it was riveting.</p>
<p>There was a certain amount of frustration that he wouldn’t be drawn on what the implications were for education, but my own feeling is that he was quite sensibly avoiding speaking about something when he didn’t feel qualified to do so — the whole gist of his argument was that it is futile to try and predict what technology will do to our society in the future.</p>
<p>Anyway, I hope you’ve found my small slice of ALT-C useful and interesting. I certainly enjoyed it! It’s sparked off a few different trains of thought which may well develop into blog posts in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space!</p>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/altc2011-day-2/">#altc2011 Day 2</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2011-day-2/">Wednesday 7 September 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ALT-C 2011</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Google Apps</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Collaboration</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web conferencing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Identity</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conferences</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6210/6123669460_c6a81e8d3e_m.jpg" alt="Home on the range" id="post-image" class="alignright"><br>
Continuing with the task I began yesterday, here are my initial thoughts on<br>
today’s talks and workshops at ALT-C 2011.</p>
<h2 id="social-media-and-professional-identity">Social media and professional identity</h2>
<p>I began the day with <a href="http://wishfulthinkinginmedicaleducation.blogspot.com/">Anne-Marie<br>
Cunningham’s</a> talk on<br>
professional identity in the context of medical education. Anne-Marie herself<br>
has a complex identity, as practitioner, educator, researcher and student, and<br>
when she began blogging and tweeting in order to combat the isolation she<br>
sometimes felt as a GP she found that identity challenged in some interesting<br>
ways.</p>
<p>Following Anne-Marie’s talk was a poorly disguised sales pitch from some guy<br>
who works for Blackboard — the least said about that the better, I think.</p>
<h2 id="led-by-the-knows">Led by the “Knows”</h2>
<p>Next up, <a href="http://about.me/dajbelshaw">Doug Belshaw</a> and <a href="http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1990/">John<br>
Traxler</a> gave me a refreshing change: a<br>
workshop which was actually a workshop. They’d chosen a couple of collections<br>
of elearning-related case-studies, and split us into groups to critically<br>
analyse the case-studies therein. We got a really good debate going, trying to<br>
decide what the purpose of a case study should be and what it should contain to<br>
be valid/useful.</p>
<p>For my part, I think that a lot of the weaknesses we identified could be<br>
mitigated by the inclusion of references to the sources of the data quoted, so<br>
that if you choose you can verify the conclusions for yourself.</p>
<p>I did like John Traxler’s comment that we need to be wary of policy-based<br>
evidence replacing evidence-based policy.</p>
<h2 id="are-we-in-open-country">Are we in Open Country?</h2>
<p>The last session before lunch was a bit of fun, but with a serious message too.<br>
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/ambrouk">Amber Thomas</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/daveowhite">David<br>
White</a>, <a href="http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/">David<br>
Kernohan</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/Helenbeetham">Helen<br>
Beetham</a> got dressed up as characters from<br>
the Wild West to talk about issues related to OER. There was even bonus banjo<br>
music from Dave Kernohan!</p>
<p>Some of the most interesting points for me came up in the extended discussion<br>
that followed their introductory presentation. In particular, it’s very<br>
important when thinking about OER to not get sidetracked by the content. Making<br>
content open has some value, but it does not democratise access to education<br>
<em>per se</em>; in some ways it can have the opposite effect. It’s important to<br>
be able to associate the pedagogical context with a given open resource.<br>
Similar arguments seem to apply to other forms of openness as well.</p>
<h2 id="transforming-american-education">Transforming American Education</h2>
<p>After lunch we had a keynote speech from <a href="http://www2.ed.gov/news/staff/bios/cator.html">Karen<br>
Cator</a>, Director of the Office<br>
of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. She told us a<br>
bit about the Obama government’s plans for educational technology, which does<br>
indeed sound quite impressive!</p>
<p>She described technology as a “force multiplier” — not a replacement for<br>
teachers but a way of making teachers more effective, which I think is the<br>
only attitude that can work in the long term. As part of that, they’re making<br>
an effort to make educational research more transparent and accessible to<br>
educators so that they have more opportunities to learn about<br>
evidence-supported good practice.</p>
<p>She also talked about making learning more like a game, something which I’m<br>
currently a bit sceptical about. I can see the advantages, but there’s always<br>
the danger that as you incentivise one group you end up disincentivising or<br>
even alienating another. It has to be implemented in a sufficiently fool-proof<br>
way to avoid that situation occurring.</p>
<h2 id="effective-web-conferencing">Effective web conferencing</h2>
<p>My final session of the day was a workshop on web conferencing with a guy from<br>
<a href="http://www.collab8.com/">collaborATE</a>, who provide support for Adobe Connect<br>
in the UK. I’ll admit, I was a bit wary of this after the earlier Blackboard<br>
sales pitch, but actually the presenter did a great job of providing us with<br>
some useful tips for running a successful webcast.</p>
<p>I took a lot of notes from this session, so I’ll probably save them for another<br>
post, perhaps when I’ve had chance to try them out. The key message, though,<br>
was this: <em>preparation, preparation, preparation</em>. Like all forms of<br>
communication, webcasting works best when you’re confident, well practiced and<br>
in control of your environment.</p>
<p>In a little bit it will be time to relax a bit and have a good old chinwag with<br>
some old and new friends at the gala buffet, so I’ll wrap it up for now.</p>
<hr class="colruler">
<p>PS. If you’re wondering where all my tweets about the conference have gone, I’m<br>
experimenting with a separate conference account,<br>
<a href="http://twitter.com/jezconf">@jezconf</a> to avoid spamming my regular followers<br>
with lots of ALT-C tweets. If you’re interested, please follow that account, or<br>
you can just follow the conference hashtag,<br>
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23altc2011">#altc2011</a>.</p>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/altc2011-day-1/">#altc2011 Day 1</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2011-day-1/">Tuesday 6 September 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ALT-C 2011</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Google Apps</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">OLPC</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Sakai</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Collaboration</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conferences</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<h2 id="plan-ceibal">Plan Ceibal</h2>
<p><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6208/6121549503_7f7377ccda_m.jpg" alt="Keynote" id="post-image" class="alignright"><br>
After a short introduction from the Lord Mayor of Leeds, conference chair John Cook handed over to Miguel Brechner from Uruguay to talk about the inspiring Plan Ceibal.</p>
<p>This project started in 2006 and tapped into the One Laptop Per Child programme to provide every schoolchild in Uruguay with a laptop and Internet access. I can’t really do it justice here, but I encourage you to watch the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ClipsFromALT">recording of his talk and the questions afterwards</a>.</p>
<p>By focusing on users and usability, rather than on the technology, and not just letting vendors taking the lead, Plan Ceibal has made a reall cultural and social difference in Uruguay. Kids are now eager to get to school, parents are getting online with the help of their children.</p>
<p>It raises serious questions about how we do technology in our schools. I don’t have the statistics to hand, but it sounds rather like a developing country has more schoolchildren with Internet access than we do, which is worrying. If they can teach programming and robotics in primary school, why are we still having computer classes (and qualifications, such as ECDL) that focus on word processing and spreadsheets?</p>
<h2 id="cloud-learning-with-google-apps">Cloud Learning with Google Apps</h2>
<p>My first parallel session was about Google Apps in education. I had high hopes of this, but to be honest, I didn’t feel I learnt very much from it.</p>
<p>The guy from Google did wave a Chromebook around, which looks like a very useful device, but possibly a bit hamstrung without a network connection until HTML5 offline web apps become a bit more commonplace. There were also rumours of being able to run virtualised desktop apps in the browser thanks to a partnership with Citrix, but no demonstration of how at might work.</p>
<p>The one thing that did show some promise was the brief mention of Manish Malik’s work to use Google App Engine to start building a <a href="http://edublend.blogspot.com/">VLE integrated with Google Apps</a>, which he calls a Cloud Learning Environment. I’ll be looking into that in a bit more detail when I get a chance.</p>
<h2 id="collaborative-technology">Collaborative technology</h2>
<p>After lunch it was three short papers on the general theme of collaboration with technology. Jill Fresen of the University of Oxford gave a nice overview of the mobile interface, <a href="http://m.ox.ac.uk">Mobile Oxford</a>, to their Sakai-based VLE, WebLearn. They’ve done some really interesting work with it, especially integrating with the Sakai Polls tool to make a cheap, mobile audience response system.</p>
<p>Jak Radice and Maureen Readle had some interesting stories to tell about<br>
digital story telling. They’ve done some really interesting work (with their<br>
colleague at the University of Bradford, Caroline Plews) bringing the stories<br>
of real health service users into the classroom. If you’re interested in<br>
learning more about that, take a look at their fictional town of<br>
<a href="http://bradton.pbworks.com/">Bradton</a>.</p>
<p>Finally, Chris Turnock talked about his work with Erik Bohemia at Northumbria<br>
University setting up tools to help students collaborate with each other and<br>
with external partners. I really like they way they focused on open source<br>
solutions and managed to ensure they were as integrated as possible into the<br>
university systems.</p>
<h2 id="pecha-kucha">Pecha Kucha!</h2>
<p>Next up, I’m afraid I wasn’t paying as much attention as it was my turn to<br>
speak. You can see my <a href="../../blog/altc2011-poster-and-slides">poster and slides about our Virtual Research Environment<br>
in my earlier post</a>, and if I get round to it<br>
I’ll add some words to the slideshare presentation so you can all understand<br>
what it was all about!</p>
<p>Also in the same session, <a href="http://twitter.com/ajcann">Alan Cann</a> from the<br>
University of Leicester asked some interesting questions about reading lists<br>
for students, which came out of his attempts to get his own students <a href="http://scireadr.com/">reading<br>
around the subject more</a>.</p>
<p>Finally, Philip Wane from Nottingham Trent University had some useful thoughts<br>
on his experiments providing feedback to his students via video. Not only did<br>
most students watch their own feedback, they also watched each others, and<br>
watching the videos made them much more likely to collect the paper versions of<br>
their assignments from the office and read the feedback in the margins too.<br>
Great work!</p>
<h2 id="dinner">Dinner!</h2>
<p>I suppose I should mention that the dinner tonight was pretty impressive. I’m<br>
sure <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com">James Clay</a> will have tweeted<br>
photos of it, but it’s a bit late at night to go searching for the link now so<br>
I’ll leave it there.</p>
<p>Looking forward to tomorrows session, especially Anne-Marie Cunningham’s<br>
invited talk on professional identity and some intriguing-sounding banjo<br>
playing from Dave Kernohan in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmN_zdnrQFc">“Are we in open<br>
country?”</a>. Bye for now…</p>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/what-i-do-at-work/">What I do at Work</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/what-i-do-at-work/">Tuesday 6 September 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">VRE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">CSCT</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>About twelve months ago, I started a new job in the <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/csct/">Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies (CSCT)</a> at the University of Bath, with the somewhat vague title of ICT Project Manager. I intended at the time to write a blog post about what I was expecting to do, but never really found the time.</p>
<p>One year on (and half way through my contract), I thought it would be a good time to look back on what I’ve achieved so far and what’s on the horizon. Plus, it’s at least possible that people who meet me or see my Pecha Kucha presentation at ALT-C 2011 might want to know a bit more a out me.</p>
<p>First, the elevator pitch: I help researchers and research students (mostly chemists and chemical engineers) to use technology to communicate, collaborate and work more effectively.</p>
<p>In order to do that, I have to wear a number of hats, and liaise between several of the university’s central services, such as computer services (BUCS), web services, e-learning, researcher development and the library.</p>
<h2 id="isuslab-a-virtual-research-environment">iSusLab: a Virtual Research Environment</h2>
<p>My primary responsibility has been to set up a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for our users in the CSCT, but what exactly is a VRE?</p>
<p>Well, it’s a somewhat more vaguely-defined concept than the VLE, as the needs of researchers in different fields are so diverse. Essentially, though, we’re talking about a set of online tools. Common functionality includes access to supercomputing clusters, research data management, workflow reuse and sharing, and general communication and collaboration tools.</p>
<p>Our VRE, named <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/csct/isuslab/">iSusLab</a>, falls mainly into that last category. We have 25 students and 30+ academics spread across 4 departments, along with 12 industrial partners and 2 international partners institutions, and they all have to stay in touch somehow.</p>
<p>iSusLab provides a safe, secure, flexible online space for our researchers and partners to work together. It’s based on a platform called <a href="http://sakaiproject.org/">Sakai</a>, which began life as a VLE in the US but has since grown into a very comprehensive and flexible collaboration system.</p>
<p>It provides a number of tools, including wikis, forums, email lists, file sharing and calendars and let’s you pick and choose from them on a project-by-project basis. Everything is password protected by default, though it’s possible to make things public if need be, and we have complete control over who has access to which project site.</p>
<h2 id="the-connected-researcher-new-media-training">The Connected Researcher: new media training</h2>
<p>The customised tools that we can provide our researchers are only part of the story, however. Freely available social media tools on the web can do an excellent job of supporting many core academic activities, including networking, information discovery, collaboration, outreach and teaching.</p>
<p>Geraldine Jones, e-learning support officer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and I ran a series of <a href="../../blog/connected-researcher-at-bath/">social media workshops for research students entitled “Connected Rearcher @ Bath”</a>. You can read more about that in our <a href="../../blog/connected-researcher-article-published/">recent article on the subject in Ariadne</a>.</p>
<h2 id="website-maintenance">Website maintenance</h2>
<p>Web Services’ introduction of a new design for the University of Bath site gave me an excellent opportunity to revamp the CSCT web pages. I’ve rewritten a lot of the content into more web-friendly language, cleaned up the navigation and started bugging academics for more regular news items (that last with mixed success, as you might expect!).</p>
<h2 id="other-stuff">Other stuff</h2>
<p>Over the last academic year, Julian Prior and Marie Salter from the central e-learning team have been piloting use of Elluminate (now BlackBoard Collaborate) to support distance learning. As we have a course in sustainable development for our doctoral students which is run by two external trainers who live a long way from Bath, we were able to provide Julian and Marie with a test case for this technology.</p>
<p>In a way, we used the software backwards: we had remote lecturers teaching local students rather than the other way about. It worked fairly well, and though we had a few problems (especially avoiding that scourge of videoconferencing, feedback) we got quite polished by the end of the course.</p>
<h2 id="the-future">The future</h2>
<p>I’ve currently got my eye on better support for research data management and how we might build it into researchers’ workflows. In particular, integrating our institutional digital repository with Sakai to enable straightforward depositing of data is a very attractive idea.</p>
<p>Building on their success from this year, Julian and Marie are continuing to investigate videoconferencing, and I’m looking forward to getting to help them test some other interesting tools in that space.</p>
<p>Geraldine and I are hoping to run Connected Researcher @ Bath again next year, and in the meantime there may be opportunities to provide similar training for researchers through Bath’s Knowledge Transfer Account.</p>
<p>I also have a few thoughts about how we can develop the use of iSusLab, particularly in the direction of an e-lab-notebook (ELN).</p>
<p>But right now we’re approaching the start of a new year and getting ready for the start of the new cohort and all the challenges that will bring!</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/what-i-want-from-altc2011/">What I want from #altc2011</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/what-i-want-from-altc2011/">Monday 5 September 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ALT-C 2011</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conferences</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I’ve been looking over the programme for ALT-C to try and decide which bits I want to attend, so I thought I’d write a short post about what I want to get from the conference.</p>
<p>I’m currently interested in the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Research student development;</li>
<li>Virtual Research Environments;</li>
<li>Open scholarship;</li>
<li>Digital literacy;</li>
<li>Cloud computing;</li>
<li>Generally any overlap between teaching and research, especially in STEM subjects.</li>
</ul>
<p>As well as attending plenty of interesting talks, I’m also looking forward to meeting lots of new people too! Feel free to come and say hi if you see me — you can see what I look like from the photo on <a href="http://people.bath.ac.uk/jc619">my work homepage</a>.</p>
<p>As an aside, this is also the first test of my mobile posting process for the new site…</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/connected-researcher-article-published/">Connected Researcher at Bath: article published</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/connected-researcher-article-published/">Thursday 1 September 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">BathCR</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Researcher development</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Published</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Writings elsewhere</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>It’s been available for a few weeks now, but I just thought I’d draw some<br>
attention to the fact that my <a href="http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/cope-jones/">article with Geraldine Jones from Humanities &amp;<br>
Social Sciences about our Connected Researcher at Bath project</a> has<br>
now been published in <a href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/">UKOLN</a>’s web magazine for information professionals,<br>
<a href="http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/">Ariadne</a>.</p>
<p>In case you haven’t read my <a href="../../blog/connected-researcher-at-bath/">earlier post</a><br>
on the subject, this was a series of workshops we’ve run (and are hoping to run<br>
again next year) encouraging postgraduate research students to try out new<br>
media tools and think about how they could support their research and careers.<br>
We ran workshops on:</p>
<ul>
<li>Twitter;</li>
<li>Feed readers;</li>
<li>Blogging; and</li>
<li>Social bookmarking.</li>
</ul>
<p>Printable versions (Word and PDF) are available from <a href="http://opus.bath.ac.uk/24302/">our institutional repository,<br>
Opus</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-09-01:/blog/connected-researcher-article-published/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/connected-researcher-article-published/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/altc11-poster-and-slides/">Slides for ALT-C 2011</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc11-poster-and-slides/">Monday 29 August 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ALT-C 2011</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">VRE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Sakai</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Presentations</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Next week I’ll be presenting an ePoster and short presentation at <a href="http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc/alt-c-2011">ALT-C<br>
2011</a>. I’ve intentionally made the slides with very few words so without any<br>
video they’re just a tantalising hint, but here they are, along with the<br>
poster.</p>
<p>I’m planning to follow the <a href="http://cicsdir.blogspot.com/">Chris Sexton</a> model of blogging as I go along at<br>
the conference — I guess we’ll see how that works out next week!</p>
<h2 id="slides">Slides</h2>
<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_9061070">Presentation: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope/virtual-research-environments-supporting-research-and-researcher-development" title="Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development">Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development</a><object id="__sse9061070" width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=eposter0210slides-110829161623-phpapp02&amp;stripped_title=virtual-research-environments-supporting-research-and-researcher-development&amp;userName=jezcope">
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</div>
<h2 id="poster">Poster</h2>
<p><a title="View Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/63641777/Virtual-Research-Environments-Supporting-research-and-researcher-development">Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development</a></p>
<iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" src="http://www.scribd.com/embeds/63641777/content?start_page=1&amp;view_mode=list&amp;access_key=key-p0g9i5msb6jp71uy06s" data-auto-height="true" data-aspect-ratio="0.706697459584296" scrolling="no" id="doc_11531" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe>
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<p>You can follow my posts about ALT-C 2011 using <a href="../../feeds/tag/alt-c-2011.xml">this dedicated<br>
feed</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-08-29:/blog/altc11-poster-and-slides/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc11-poster-and-slides/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/the-new-look/">The new look</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/the-new-look/">Thursday 25 August 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Meta</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web design</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Admin</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Well here it is: the new look. I hope you like it. I’ve decided to publish it<br>
with the minimum possible functionality so that I can start publishing with it<br>
straight away, and I’ll be adding a few features here and there over the next<br>
few weeks.</p>
<p>I’ve aimed to make the look as simple and clean as possible so that there’s<br>
just you, me and the content. It really still needs a splash of colour, and<br>
there are a few other little features that I’d like to add, but otherwise this<br>
is the new eRambler.</p>
<p>By the way, I apologise if the changes to the RSS feed mean that you get a lot<br>
of old posts in your RSS reader. This should only happen once.</p>
<p>As I write this, I haven’t yet decided whether or not to have comments enabled<br>
before I publish it, but if not then they’ll be here soon. All<br>
comments/feedback/flames welcome!</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-08-25:/blog/the-new-look/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/the-new-look/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/time-for-a-change/">Time for a change</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/time-for-a-change/">Thursday 18 August 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Meta</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Nanoc</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Ruby</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web design</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">WordPress</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Admin</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">Over the next few days and weeks (or months — we'll see how it goes) I'll be updating
the theme of this blog to something cleaner, and without the enormous background image (lovely though it is). In the process, I'll be migrating it to a new system
and I though it was worth talking briefly about why.
## What's wrong with WordPress?
Don't get me wrong — I really like WordPress. Over the last few years it's
matured into a full-featured and very easy to use CMS.
The plugin system allows you to do a lot of clever things without a lot of
technical knowledge.
But recently I got to thinking: how much of what my blog does needs to be
generated on the server each time someone visits? Answer: none of it! WordPress has a lot of power, and that power is only used when something changes — when I publish a post or someone adds a comment.
The only thing that really needs some clever stuff behind it is the comments,
because visitors need to be able to add comments without editing the page source directly. But there are services like
[Disqus](http://disqus.com) which can deal with that.
The main reason I use WordPress, in the end, is because I can cleanly separate
content (posts and pages) from design (themes). But there are other ways of
doing that.
## What's the new system?
The software I'm moving to is called [nanoc](http://nanoc.stoneship.org) and
here are a few cool things about it:
- It generates static HTML, so my web server ([Nginx](http://nginx.net)) can
just focus on serving up content (and I can save a little bit by downsizing
because I'm not having to run a whole RDBMS).
- It does this by processing a folder full of plain text files formatted with (for example) [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown). That means that I can write with whatever tools I have available, whether that's [Vim](http://vim.org/) on the desktop, one of many iPad/iPhone text editors or even an SSH connection to the server.
- It's based on Ruby, my current favourite programming language. I love the
way Ruby lets you express what you want to do clearly and concisely without
compromising on power. There's less code and it does more.
- Though it's easy to maintain, it's quite technical (though not difficult) to set up, which gives me a lovely warm geeky feeling inside without anyone else having to put up with it!
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's gone through the same process, or have been thinking along the same lines. There are a few who've [done it already](http://userprimary.net/posts/2010/02/07/from-wordpress-to-nanoc/), and their experiences are proving handy.</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-08-18:/blog/time-for-a-change/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/time-for-a-change/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/blogging-for-perfectionists/">Blogging for perfectionists</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/blogging-for-perfectionists/">Tuesday 19 July 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogging</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Perfectionism</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Writer's block</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I had an idea for a post. I could feel it growing in some ill-defined region inside my skull. I’ll just bash it out in half and hour and hit publish — I could do with getting a few more posts up. So I started to write.</p>
<p>Half an hour came and went. And still it grew.</p>
<p>I wanted to be able to do my thoughts justice, to bring the world some insight. It wanted to be lucid, well-researched, a valid contribution to society that could hold it’s head up high.</p>
<p>So I kept writing for a while, but it still wasn’t ready. I had to take a break. I’ll get back to it tomorrow.</p>
<p>And so I did, for a few days at least. Then other things became important and I couldn’t quite remember what my point was and the whole thing lay half-finished like some simile I can’t quite think of right now.</p>
<p>Sorry for inflicting that lump of stream of consciousness on you — I wanted, for reasons which are probably apparent, to get in some practice writing what I thought and then publishing it. A lot of my posts seem to go that way</p>
<p>It’s tricky overcoming perfectionism. It feels like everything I do should be a work of unmitigated genius before I can expect anyone to read it but it also feels like sheer arrogance to think that <em>anything</em> I do might be considered genius!</p>
<p>There’s a balance to be found between expressing your ideas with clarity and wit and grace and just getting them out there. We all get the balance wrong some of the time, but it’s by recognising this and correcting it that we get better at it.</p>
<p>I’m glad I got that out of my system. If you’re still here, congratulations for making it this far.</p>
<p>Here’s to having faith that my ideas will stand on their own. I’m not an idiot you know. :)</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-07-19:/blog/blogging-for-perfectionists/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/blogging-for-perfectionists/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/ipad-first-thoughts/">iPad: First Thoughts</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ipad-first-thoughts/">Tuesday 21 June 2011</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">iPad</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Gadgets</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reviews</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get a new iPad at work. Now that I’ve had it for a little while, I thought it was time I shared my first impressions.</p>
<h1 id="the-device">The device</h1>
<p>It’s a good size with plenty of screen real-estate — I’ve never found myself wishing that I had a little bit of extra space, something I often do when browsing the web on my iPhone. That size also makes browsing much less effort: the buttons and links on most websites provide a big enough target to hit with a finger.</p>
<p>It feels very thin, although that’s partly the illusion given by the bevelled edge, but also nicely substantial. In fact, if I have one criticism in this area it’s that it’s a bit too heavy to hold in one hand and type with the other for more than a minute or so, but then trying to type on QWERTY with one hand is a pain at the best of times.</p>
<p>I expected typing to be quite difficult, but it’s actually pretty painless, especially with a flat surface to set it down on. Because you only have to touch the screen, rather than pushing down a physical key, very little effort is required to type, which seems for me to cancel out the disadvantage of not having any haptic feedback.</p>
<h1 id="useful-apps">Useful apps</h1>
<p>There are loads of really good apps for iPad, but a few really stand out. <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/twitter/id333903271?mt=8">Twitter for iPad</a> is beautifully designed, making perfect use of the extra screen space to pop up profiles, hashtag searches and conversations without hiding the main feed. Because you can scroll to the left and right with a swipe, you can explore many levels deep without getting lost.</p>
<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/omnifocus-for-ipad/id383804552?mt=8">OmniFocus</a> is another excellent app, syncing well with the desktop and iPhone versions. It lets me view my tasks in a number of different ways, including syncing custom perspectives (combinations of filters and sorts) from the desktop. You can turn it to portrait mode to hide everything but the list of tasks, which is also nice. Easily my favourite feature, though, is the new Review mode, which makes doing a GTD-style review on a Friday afternoon with a cuppa a doddle and keeps my todo list complete and focused.</p>
<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/goodreader-for-ipad/id363448914?mt=8">GoodReader</a> is a recent discovery for me, though it’s been available on iPhone for some time. It’s a very well designed PDF-reading app, with some very cool features: sync with DropBox and SFTP; download documents from email; and highlight and annotate documents as you read. The ability to both read and annotate documents on a decent-sized screen has pretty much reduced my printing to almost zero.</p>
<p>It’s great that you can connect a projector via the VGA adaptor to the iPad and use it to present, but since I use LaTeX and beamer.sty quite a lot for this I need to be able to project PDF files. <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/pdf-presenter-for-ipad/id376809625?mt=8">PDF Presenter</a> is a very simple app which does just that, displaying next and previous slides on the iPad itself and giving you a selection of simple transitions to boot. Keynote eat your heart out.</p>
<h1 id="cool-stuff">Cool stuff</h1>
<p>I have a fairly recent iMac at home with one of the new Apple wireless keyboards — imagine my delight at discovering that I can disconnect it from the iMac, pair it with the iPad and start typing away! I can even set it to use my preferred Dvorak keyboard layout.</p>
<p>When I took a look at the “official” iPad Smart Cover, I was pretty underwhelmed — they’re pretty expensive (though coming down in price) and even the leather version just looks cheap and tacky. Thankfully, there’s an alternative in the <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/TeckNet-Leather-Generation-Magnetic-Feature/dp/B000MPNIZW/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1310919045&amp;sr=8-5">TeckNet folio case</a> which is both cheaper and nicer.</p>
<h1 id="niggles">Niggles</h1>
<p>Support for images in the CMYK colour space is lousy, which is unusual for Apple, since they tend to think things like that through quite carefully. I can’t imagine it’ll affect many people, but it’s been a real pain because the background we use for our slides at CSCT turns out to be in CMYK and the luminous green it became on iPad put me off using it for presentations until I finally figured out how to fix it using ColorSync on Mac.</p>
<p>As I mentioned above, I prefer to use the Dvorak keyboard layout, so it would be nice if it was possible to switch layout on the on-screen keyboard, but that isn’t currently possible.</p>
<h1 id="overall">Overall</h1>
<p>I can see how it wouldn’t make a big difference for everyone, but for me the iPad has really made a big change to the way I work. I’ve stopped printing things to read (and my annotated reading material is now backed up). My todo list is looking a lot leaner because I can do many of the little bitty jobs on the go instead of needing to sit down at a desk or open up a laptop.</p>
<p>I’m still learning how to make it a seamless part of my workflow, but I’m pretty happy so far!</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-06-21:/blog/ipad-first-thoughts/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ipad-first-thoughts/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/connected-researcher-at-bath/">Connected researcher at Bath</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/connected-researcher-at-bath/">Thursday 14 April 2011</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Academia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">RSS</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">BathCR</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Researcher development</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Microblogging</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><img alt="Shoots by Gemma Garner" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4077/5414162854_2eba8151a7_m.jpg" title="Shoots" width="240" height="175" class="alignright"> How often do you try something new? Not sure? Well today a whole bunch of research students at the University of Bath gamely had a go at signing up for Twitter and investigating the power of RSS feeds.</p>
<p>This was the first of a series of events under the banner of “The Connected Researcher @ Bath” (a title shamelessly stolen from Cardiff University’s <a href="http://cardiff.academia.edu/SusanSmith">Susan Smith</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/SarahNicholas">Sarah Nicholas</a>; I hope they don’t mind!). The whole thing came about when <a href="http://twitter.com/edsgmj">Geraldine Jones</a> (E-learning Officer for Humanities &amp; Social Sciences) and I got our heads together. We’d both been wondering how to get more research students to try out social media and found that together we were in a position to make it happen.</p>
<p><a href="http://adventuresincareerdevelopment.posterous.com/">Tristram Hooley</a> very kindly travelled down from Derby to explain to our students why he feels social media are an important tool for modern academics. He also led the first of our two workshops, getting students to sign up to Twitter and take their first hesitant Twittering steps. Geraldine led the second workshop, introducing the students to RSS and iGoogle, and I finished off that session with a brief introduction</p>
<p>The main thing I learned from today’s event? If you’d like your Twitter followers to join in with a real-world activity by tweeting at a particular time, give them plenty of notice. I’d tried this before without the notice and it was something of a flop, but today Twitterers all over campus were primed and didn’t disappoint! Having chosen a hashtag (<a href="http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/Bathcr">#bathcr</a>) and started using it a couple of days ago, there was a real buzz going on by this morning, which really added to the atmosphere when the participants saw it on Twitter for the first time.</p>
<p>So my thanks to Bath’s Twitterers, to the students who took part and to Tristram, Geraldine and everyone else who contributed to making today work.</p>
<p>Initial feedback from today has been great, and we’re going to be running several more (smaller) events over the next few months, starting with a panel discussion and workshop on blogging on 11 May. I’m looking forward to it already!</p>
<p><em>Image credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/3fold/5414162854/in/photostream/">Shoots by Gemmer Garner</a></em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/thoughts-on-jisc11-part-2-open-scholarship/">Thoughts on #JISC11 part 2: open scholarship</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/thoughts-on-jisc11-part-2-open-scholarship/">Sunday 3 April 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">JISC11</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open scholarship</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open access</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open bibliography</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open citation</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open data</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conferences</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Scholarship</span></li>
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<p>My second main session at the JISC conference was entitled <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/03/jisc11/programme/2openscholarship.aspx">The A-B-C-Ds of Open Scholarship</a>, a panel discussion with four speakers:</p>
<ul>
<li>Open Access: <a href="http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lac/">Dr Les Carr, University of Southampton</a>;</li>
<li>Open Bibliography: <a href="http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/">Dr Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge</a>;</li>
<li>Open Citation: <a href="http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/staff/academics/shotton_dm.htm">Dr David Shotton, University of Oxford</a>;</li>
<li>Open Data: <a href="http://rufuspollock.org/about/">Dr Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Les Carr began the introductory remarks with a little bit of roleplay. Though perhaps a little bit over the top, this nicely illustrated his point.</p>
<p>Publishers used to (and arguably still do) serve a useful purpose. Before the rise of the internet, communicating your research to large numbers of your peers around the world would have been impossible without publishers to provide the benefits of scale.</p>
<p>Yet in an age where rises in journal subscription spending is rising even as numbers of subscriptions fall and putting a new page up on the Web costs almost nothing, it’s feeling pretty hard to justify keeping the publishers around.</p>
<p>Clearly the major hurdle is quality-assurance. Without publisher-mediated peer-review, I can publish absolutely I like on the web without an up-front guarantee that it meets some minimum standard of rigour. We need either to make pre-publication peer-review work right for open access (the risk is that the publishing author becomes the paying customer who has to be kept happy), or work out an acceptable system of post-publication peer-review.</p>
<p>For Peter Murray-Rust, bibliographic data itself is an incredibly rich source of information. As well as helping us find useful books and articles, it also lets us look at who’s worked with whom, when they did so and where they were working at the time. In an world where collaboration is vital, that’s a very valuable tool.</p>
<p>Although bibliographic collections can be copyrighted, individual record cannot. Projects like Mendeley are giving us the tools to build up high-quality open bibliographies, rather that having to buy them from large companies who don’t get what we need and tend to munge the data in unhelpful ways.</p>
<p><img alt="OPEN by Tom Magliery" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2198/1914076277_059bddaa68_m_d.jpg" title="OPEN by Tom Magliery" class="alignleft" width="240" height="240">David Shotton followed on, adding that “citation is the glue which holds scholarly endeavour together.” The majority of citation data is currently locked up in the references sections of papers, but by making it open and accessible to data mining lots of interesting possibilities open up.</p>
<p>Key among these in my opinion is the ability to trace the evolution of ideas through series of articles and make visible the conversations which researchers are having through their published outputs. This turns the citation record into a valuable companion to peer review in assessing the quality of ideas.</p>
<p>Dr Shotton talked about citation distortion (where an idea starts life as hypothesis but becomes accepted as fact because it is cited a lot rather than because overwhelming evidence is presented). Opening up citation data means that this type of distortion can be objectively analysed.</p>
<p>Rufus Pollock heavily stressed the need for incentives: his favourite phrase seems to be “Where’s the candy?” It’s clear at the moment that many researchers repeat effort in many places that they don’t need to, even taking account of the need to independently verify findings.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it’s easy to slip into thinking that my own openness benefits everyone except me, and overlook the fact that my openness also encourages others to be more open with me. Charmingly naive though this may seem to the average embattled academic with marking deadlines and REF looming large on the horizon, the success of projects like Wikipedia tells a different story.</p>
<p>The quote of the conference for me came from Les Carr in this session: “Science is the by-product of scientists trying to get promoted.” For me, this embodies the main theme of this session, that researchers have the same basic motivations as everyone else, and are not necessarily driven by some high-minded ideal of making all knowledge equally accessible to all people.</p>
<p>There are big benefits to be had from making scholarship more open, but they will only be realised as and when individual researchers see them as outweighing the cost of changing their behaviour.</p>
<p>As Les Carr pointed out: until then, those who “get it” will share their stuff and damn everyone else, while those who don’t will do anything to avoid rocking the boat.</p>
<p>We need the true value of openness to be recognised as intrinsically linked with academic success. For example, we need standards for the citation of data so that it can contribute properly to the impact metrics so beloved of funding bodies.</p>
<p>It would be nice to think that all it needs is for someone to come up with the one idea that convinces everyone and causes a step-change in academic culture. But that’s not going to happen. It’s going to be a long, hard slog in a sector where change happens at rates comparable to continental drift, but I think it’ll be worth it.</p>
<p><em>Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/1914076277/in/photostream/">OPEN by Tom Magliery</a></em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/thoughts-on-jisc11-part-1-cloud-computing/">Thoughts on #JISC11 part 1: Cloud computing</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/thoughts-on-jisc11-part-1-cloud-computing/">Sunday 20 March 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">JISC11</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Cloud computing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">JANET</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eScience</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conferences</span></li>
</ul>
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<p><em>This post is part of a short series in which I share the thoughts prompted by the recent <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/03/jisc11.aspx">JISC conference in Liverpool</a>.</em></p>
<p>The first session I attended at the JISC conference was entitled “<a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/03/jisc11/programme/1cloudsolutions.aspx">Cloud Solutions: Risk or Reward?</a>” I was particularly looking forward to it as I’ve become increasingly interested in the affordances of cloud computing for higher education.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/paul.watson">Prof. Paul Watson, Director of the Digital Institute at the University of Newcastle</a> was first to speak. I think he has it spot on to go after the ‘long tail’ of researchers: that large majority with little access to IT skills &amp; resources.</p>
<p>It’s too easy to focus on serving the easy few, with the budget to purchase their own computing power and the expertise to make use of it. The remainder of researchers who could make use of shared computing resource to analyse and store their data more effectively have neither the time, the expertise nor the budget to buy big machines for relatively small tasks. It’s these users who represent the majority of those who could benefit from cloud computing, if only the tools can be found to let them.</p>
<p>To make this work, using the cloud has to be much more like using apps researchers are familiar with, like Office and EndNote. Newcastle’s e-science central project seems to be taking a good approach: everything works through a web browser and is designed to be as easy as possible.</p>
<p>They’ve even thought about supporting a progression in use, from simply storing data, to analysing it, automating common analysis workflows and finally sharing and reusing those workflows. As well as supporting research, this has big implications for teaching too: the ability to let students experiment with established workflows on real datasets could be a really powerful tool.</p>
<p>As an aside, there was an interesting question from the floor about whether this heralded a return to thin-client computing, with all the loss of freedom that entails. My own view is that cloud computing finally let’s us find a happy medium between running everyday apps on the desktop and passing resource-hungry jobs off to dedicated clusters.</p>
<p>Going the other way, <a href="http://www.lboro.ac.uk/admin/vc/emg/director-it.html">Dr Phil Richards, Director of IT Services at the University of Loughborough</a> suggested that the “killer app” for the cloud would be the ability to provide cheap virtual servers, an approach known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS.</p>
<p>This makes sense from the perspective of those supporting the IT needs of researchers, but without the skills to know what to do with a virtual server, I’m not sure the researchers themselves will see immediate benefits. IaaS might make the cloud worthwhile to implement in the first place, but it’ll only make a big difference when it’s easy and cheap for researchers to store and analyse data.</p>
<p>All three speakers naturally made the point about cost reduction. Phil Richards cited HP as an example of a large organisation who have made real savings by rationalising their data centres, going from 85 to just 6 and halving the number of applications running on them to 3,000, and saving $1b per annum in return.</p>
<p>Cloud computing brings the cost benefits of scale to end-users who only need a small proportion of the total resource available. It also transmutes up-front capital expenditure to ongoing operational expenditure for those end-users, making planning much easier at a time of great financial upheaval.</p>
<p>As ever, there are risks attached to new developments. <a href="http://websrvr01.ukerna.ac.uk/about/janet/staff/h.hughes.html">JANET’s Middleware Group Manager, Henry Hughes</a>, gave a good summary of these. Cloud services must be able to comply with legislation (such as the Data Protection Act, with the US Patriot Act muddying the waters). They must handle multi-tenancy securely, without putting sensitive or confidential data at risk. They must provide protection against lock-in, so that applications can be migrated to new services as necessary. Finally, they must be able to guarantee availability of their services. These are all big challenges, but I think we can meet them.</p>
<p>In meeting these challenges, we have a big advantage on our side. One of the biggest costs in HP’s data centre project was building a secure, high-performance network, and UK HE already has one in the form of JANET.</p>
<p>I know not everyone will agree with me, but my overall impression is that the rewards of cloud computing for HE vastly outweigh the risks. It’s time for those universities still holding out to stop talking about it and got on with it!</p>
<p><em>Thanks to Chris Sexton for her <a href="http://cicsdir.blogspot.com/2011/03/clouds-and-clouds-and-feeling-strange.html">cloud computing notes</a>, which reminded me of a few figures that I’d failed to write down.</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/off-to-jisc11/">Off to #JISC11</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/off-to-jisc11/">Monday 14 March 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">JISC11</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ICT</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Higher education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conferences</span></li>
</ul>
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<p>Right now I’m on a train on my way to Liverpool for the annual <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/03/jisc11">JISC Conference</a> there. There are a few small things going on this afternoon, but the main event doesn’t start til tomorrow.</p>
<p>There are loads of interesting sessions going on, but I’ve narrowed it down to these three based on the abstracts:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cloud Solutions: risk or reward?</li>
<li>Open scholarship</li>
<li>Amplified Events, Seminars, Conferences: What? Why? How?</li>
</ul>
<p>If you’ll be there too, please come and introduce yourself — it’s my first JISC conference and it’s always nice to meet new people. I’ll be blogging and tweeting for anyone who’s interested (so apologies in advance to anyone who doesn’t care: it’s only for one day).</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/research-uses-for-new-social-media/">What uses do researchers have for new/social media?</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/research-uses-for-new-social-media/">Monday 7 March 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Academia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
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<p>As part of my ongoing efforts to introduce a virtual research environment to the <abbr title="Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies">CSCT</abbr>, I’ve been thinking about running a general <a href="http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/1269-314021/Digital-Researcher.html">Digital Researcher</a> type workshop for our students. After putting out feelers I discovered that quite a few other people across the university are thinking about similar things right now, so we’re working together to avoid duplication as much as we can.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to focus on things that researchers actually want to do, rather than just thinking about the technologies. So far, based on my own experiences and conversations with one or two research students, I’ve come up with the following list of goals:</p>
<ul>
<li>Promote my research;</li>
<li>Communicate with existing collaborators;</li>
<li>Find potential new collaborators;</li>
<li>Find reliable information on X (including recognised experts);</li>
<li>Keep up to date with news &amp; opportunities;</li>
<li>Find my next job.</li>
</ul>
<p>What do you think? Is there anything missing?</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/short-book-review-here-comes-everybody-by-clay-shirky/">Short book review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/short-book-review-here-comes-everybody-by-clay-shirky/">Tuesday 15 February 2011</a>
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<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Book review</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Sociology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reviews</span></li>
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<p>I promised some shorter posts, so here’s one. I’ve just finished reading <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Here-Comes-Everybody-Happens-Together/dp/0141030623/">Here Comes Everybody</a> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky">Clay Shirky</a> and since it made me think I thought I’d post a few of those thoughts up here.</p>
<p>It’s a clear and well written, and gives a well constructed theory of how and why communities form in or around things like Wikipedia, MeetUp and the Linux kernel.</p>
<p>Through the use of case studies, Shirky builds up a convincing framework of three elements: the promise of what the community offers; the tool which sets the environment for the community; and the bargain between the users which sets the rules of engagement. He also points out that the patterns of behaviour we see today have been emerging for quite a long time.</p>
<p>If there was a weakness to the book, it was that Shirky labours the point a bit with his case studies; at times it feels like he’s repeating himself so as to make use of all the carefully researched examples. I don’t think that really detracts from the overall picture though.</p>
<p>I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in what makes the social web tick.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/groundhog-day-resolutions/">Groundhog Day Resolutions</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/groundhog-day-resolutions/">Wednesday 2 February 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
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<p>As I’ve grown older, I’ve gradually made more conscious attempts to think about what I want my life to be like. Like most people, I’m typically rubbish at either making or keeping New Year’s resolutions, so this year I’m following David Seah’s <a href="http://davidseah.com/2007/02/groundhog-day-resolutions/">Groundhog Day Resolutions</a> pattern.</p>
<p>The idea is to start thinking about the resolutions around Christmas and actually commit to them on the 2nd of February (2/2) and then review them on 3rd March (3/3), 4th April (4/4) etc. I’m not making these solid commitments, but things that I want to track my progress against. It’s ok to let one or two go if I don’t have the time — I’m not Superman after all.</p>
<p>I hope that by publishing this that I’m more likely to follow through on the process, and that it will prompt others to do the same.</p>
<h1 id="do-more">Do more</h1>
<ul>
<li>Blogging;
<ul>
<li>My strategy here is to write shorter posts — this one is an example;</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Playing <a href="http://www.bathgo.org/">Go</a>;</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jezcope">Photography</a>;</li>
<li>Running (10k target time 50 minutes);</li>
<li>Walking with Elly and friends;</li>
<li>Playing music, at home and socially.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="do-less">Do less</h1>
<ul>
<li>Watching crap telly;</li>
<li>Avoiding things that are important but not urgent (housework, taxes, etc.).</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="keep-the-same">Keep the same</h1>
<ul>
<li>Kicking ass at work;</li>
<li>Meeting new and interesting people;</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.bathampton-morris-men.org.uk/">Morris dancing</a>.</li>
</ul>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/further-video-conferencing-thoughts/">Further video-conferencing thoughts</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/further-video-conferencing-thoughts/">Wednesday 26 January 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Video-conferencing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Training</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
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<p>The other day, I blogged about my <a href="../../2011/01/24/simple-video-conferencing-with-bigbluebutton/">experiences using BigBlueButton for video-conferencing</a>. It occurs to me though, that getting the technology right is only half the battle, or even less: the rest is about people’s familiarity with the concept.</p>
<p>Several times over the last few months I’ve been using Skype a bit more to communicate with friends and family. With people who are used to using Skype or similar technologies, it’s a pretty seamless extension of the phonecall. For inexperienced users, however, there’s a lot of awkward silence and waving and repeating “Hello? Can you hear me?”, especially when there’s a bit of a delay on the line.</p>
<p>Then there’s The Feedback Issue. Unlike analogue audio systems there’s no squeaking or whining. Instead, everything that comes out of the speakers is retransmitted through the microphone on a slight delay, which is offputting for the person speaking and downright confusing for everyone else listening. And when more than one participant is causing feedback it just gets worse.</p>
<p>Feedback can be mitigated by turning down the volume on speakers and gain on microphones, but it can only really be eliminated by the use of headphones or echo cancellation hardware/software. Yes, the solution to this is so simple it bears repeating: <strong>use headphones</strong>.</p>
<h1 id="how-to-fix-this">How to fix this</h1>
<p>Getting the user interface right can help. This is where Elluminate falls down: the window is covered in buttons, none of which are labelled and many of which have icons which only vaguely represent their purpose.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> BigBlueButton is better: it has very few buttons. There was a minor issue that one of the buttons didn’t do exactly what was expected (you had to click the microphone button to be able to hear the sound). This stuff is important and worth spending time to get right.</p>
<p>Training can help too, and I think the best form of training in this case is just to give people a safe place to try things out and get used to them. We’ve lived with phones for so long now that we know exactly how they work, but there are a lot of people who just aren’t familiar with video-conferencing.</p>
<p>Anyway, that’ll do for now, though it feels like I’ll probably be visiting this again in the future. Let me know what you think.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the developers to make it too easy to use, as Elluminate makes part of its money from training. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-01-26:/blog/further-video-conferencing-thoughts/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/further-video-conferencing-thoughts/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/simple-video-conferencing-with-bigbluebutton/">Simple video-conferencing with BigBlueButton</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/simple-video-conferencing-with-bigbluebutton/">Monday 24 January 2011</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open source</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Video-conferencing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">BigBlueButton</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Last week, some colleagues and I tried out promising new videoconferencing tool <a href="http://bigbluebutton.org/">BigBlueButton</a>. I’d previously used it It’s completely open source and based on Adobe Flash so it works in your browser without the need to download any software.</p>
<p>University of Bath colleagues <a href="http://colligo.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/focusing-on-bigbluebutton/">Nitin</a> and <a href="http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/al412/2011/01/21/an-assessment-of-bigbluebutton/">Alex</a> have already published their thoughts, so I’ll try to avoid duplicating them. I’ll also draw comparisons with <a href="http://www.elluminate.com/">Elluminate! Live</a>, which I’ve been using quite a bit recently to facilitate a guest lecturer on our course: she lives in Yorkshire and we’re trying to reduce the need for her to travel to Bath, especially since our course is all about sustainability!</p>
<p>As someone who supports the IT needs of research staff and students, I can clearly see the value in this type of tool: all the end user needs is a web browser and they’re away.</p>
<h1 id="positives">Positives</h1>
<ul>
<li>Uses technology that almost all users have installed already — Elluminate, for example, requires users to download and install Java on platforms that don’t ship with it, and there’s always one person who didn’t read the instructions and complains 10 minutes into a session that they can’t connect;</li>
<li>Seems to cope quite well with lots of people — we had 6+ transmitting sound and video at times;</li>
<li>Simple, no-nonsense interface — Elluminate has lots and lots and <strong>lots</strong> of features, which can be useful but makes for a very cluttered and confusing interface.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="negatives">Negatives</h1>
<ul>
<li>There’s currently no pre-flight check for users to test their hardware is detected and set up correctly, so there tends to be a lot of testing going on as people connect — ideally this could be done beforehand;</li>
<li>There are a few minor user interface tweaks which would be useful: for example, it’s not clear why you need to enable your microphone to hear audio, and there’s no easy way to neatly arrange a large number of video feeds;</li>
<li>There’s apparently an incompatibility between the current Flash plugin for Mac and Google Voice which prevents video from working, but this will apparently be fixed in the next Flash release.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="other-notes">Other notes</h1>
<p>Importantly for us in the CSCT, there’s a rapidly maturing <a href="https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BBB/Home">Sakai interface for BigBlueButton</a> which allows users to schedule their own meeting for collaborators in their project sites. It’s one of the few Sakai tools being developed in the UK, with Adrian Fish of the University of Lancaster as a major (main?) contributor.</p>
<p>The Sakai interface is also open source, making it much cheaper than the Sakai bridge for Elluminate! Live (the bridge itself is open source, but requires Elluminate to flick a switch at their end to enable the API it uses).</p>
<h1 id="summary">Summary</h1>
<p>Overall I think that, for fairly technically savvy users, BigBlueButton can and should be used in higher education. Open source projects like this need the oxygen of community, and the only way to smooth off the rough edges is to find them and talk about them.</p>
<p>For everyday use, it might need a little more polish, but probably not much. As long as it avoids the feature bloat which plagues Elluminate! Live, it will soon become a much better option than that product, both on price (usual caveats about open source cost-of-ownership notwithstanding) and on usability<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>If you’d like to try it out for yourself, just visit the <a href="http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/">BigBlueButton demo server</a>: as long as you’ve got Flash installed, it should just work.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>And as a bonus, it lacks the annoying extraneous exclamation mark too. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2011-01-24:/blog/simple-video-conferencing-with-bigbluebutton/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/simple-video-conferencing-with-bigbluebutton/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/kindles-for-researchers-and-students/">Kindles for researchers and students</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/kindles-for-researchers-and-students/">Tuesday 7 December 2010</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Mobile</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">E-reader</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Kindle</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Sustainability</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Printing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eScience</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-content">
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/orb9220/4794069185/"><img alt="Nook Storytelling A New Way 2 of 2" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4135/4794069185_bde57cedd6_m.jpg" title="Nook Storytelling A New Way 2 of 2" width="240" height="161"></a><p>Photo by orb9220</p>
</div>
<p>Last week, in conversation over a cup of tea with a handful of PhD students and the <abbr title="Doctoral Training Centre">DTC</abbr> Co-ordinator, someone remarked on the large quantity of printing that PhD students (and researchers in general) do. It’s common to end up with piles and piles of printed articles which have been read only a few times before being “archived”.</p>
<p>Not only is this wasteful, both environmentally and economically, it also means carrying all of those dead-tree documents around if you want to read them out of the office (which most people do).</p>
<p>One alternative is to read on-screen, but I’ve never found this very satisfactory, either on desktop or laptop. I don’t mind reading on an iPhone/iPod touch, so I think the key for me is being able to hold what I’m reading in my hand — perhaps something to do with fine control of focal distance, or taking advantage of hand-eye coordination reflexes. There’s also the fact that I don’t always want to carry a laptop around with me.</p>
<h1 id="a-possible-solution">A possible solution</h1>
<p>So that led us on to thinking about e-readers such as <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/kindle">Amazon’s Kindle</a> and <a href="http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/ebook-reader">Sony’s Reader</a>. Perhaps one of these devices could solve the problems of printing on dead trees <em>and</em> reading on screen.</p>
<p>We can’t just buy a batch of these things on a whim for our students and staff though. We’ll want to know:</p>
<ul>
<li>Are they cost effective compared with paper?</li>
<li>Are they more sustainable, environmentally?</li>
<li>Will people actually find them useful?</li>
</ul>
<p>The first question should be fairly easy to estimate, especially since the university is moving to a centrally-managed print service with fixed costs per page. The second is tricky, since it still seems unclear <a href="http://blog.sustainablog.org/new-report-finds-kindle-greener-than-physical-books-is-that-really-so/">what the lifetime environmental impact of a Kindle actually is</a>. The third is probably going to generate the most discussion, since it’s going to vary widely from person to person.</p>
<h1 id="but-will-it-work">But will it work…?</h1>
<p>I’d be really interested to know if any of my readers have any relevant thoughts or experience.</p>
<p>Issues that we’ve come up with so far include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Most scientific articles come in PDF format. It needs to be possible either to view PDFs easily on a 6” e-reader screen or to reformat them consistently to make them readable. Images, diagrams and equations need to be preserved;</li>
<li>One of the key reasons for printing off articles is to annotate them, by highlighting or scribbling notes in the margin. This has to be possible in an effective e-reader as well;</li>
<li>One early question was whether this is something that the students would actually want/use. Currently about 80% are in favour (22 out of 26 having voted in a quick poll), but there’s a difference between thinking something’s cool and actually using it.</li>
</ul>
<p>Let me know what you think.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2010-12-07:/blog/kindles-for-researchers-and-students/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/kindles-for-researchers-and-students/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/dont-force-it-feel-it/">Don't force it, feel it</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/dont-force-it-feel-it/">Wednesday 1 December 2010</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Marketing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Matlab</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">LabVIEW</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Part of my role in the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies is to provide advice on how our students and researchers can make the best use of ICT in their work, and that includes software. Recently I’ve attended a couple of “free workshops” covering first Matlab and then LabVIEW, both of which the University has a site license for.</p>
<p>They were both run for free by the vendors of the software in question: the Matlab workshop by Mathworks and the LabVIEW one by National Instruments. The experiences couldn’t have been more different.</p>
<p>The Matlab workshop was a whole-day affair, gathering several hundred researchers from across the university. A succession of Mathworks employees whizzed through feature after impressive feature, clearly caught up in the shining brilliance of their own product.</p>
<p>Because of the diversity of the audience, the examples chosen to illustrate different features could only really appeal to a fraction of those watching at any one time. The presenters each chose to focus on developing a small number of examples in detail, and rushed head-over-heels to try and show off as many features as possible.</p>
<p>The net effect was leave much of the audience somewhat non-plussed. I know Matlab to be an excellent piece of software even for very basic analysis such as plotting a graph or two (though it can be a little annoying to a certain type of snobbish coding geek; i.e. me). The chemistry PhD students I was sitting with, though, were left with the strong impression that it was a very complicated piece of software, only useful for engineers and financial analysts.</p>
<p>The LabVIEW session was quite different. National Instruments had planned several shorter workshops to keep audience sizes small. They’d put together a workbook with some tasks and provided enough laptops with LabVIEW installed for every two people to have one.</p>
<p>A little bit of standard marketing speak was followed by an interesting session of putting together a ‘virtual instrument’ to analyse data from an interesting little USB thingy with an LED, a microphone and some other bits and bobs soldered to it.</p>
<p>We had complete freedom to experiment, so we were soon taking the task in interesting directions related to our own backgrounds. Much more engaging, and I had soon got to understand some of the power of an application that I’d never really even heard of before.</p>
<p>So, it seems it applies as much to selling as teaching: you can’t “just tell ‘em”.</p>
<p>Please, please, please. If you’ve got a great product that you’re proud of, let it speak for itself and don’t ram it down my throat.</p>
<p>And that goes for teaching too.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2010-12-01:/blog/dont-force-it-feel-it/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/dont-force-it-feel-it/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/digital-curation-centre-roadshow-day-1/">Digital Curation Centre roadshow, day 1</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/digital-curation-centre-roadshow-day-1/">Tuesday 2 November 2010</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">DCCSW10</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Data management</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Digital Curation Centre</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eScience</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Events</span></li>
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<p>Today saw the first day of the Digital Curation Centre’s (DCC) 3-day workshop on data management here in Bath. Today was just a half-day and gave a general overview of the data management landscape.</p>
<p>My aims for the event are to better understand how I can teach our doctoral students about good data management, and provide them with the right tools to do it in practice.</p>
<p>I’ll be looking out for:</p>
<ul>
<li>Examples of good practice from people who are already doing this with their students;</li>
<li>Ways of making data management easy (nay even attractive) for researchers who would not otherwise be interested;</li>
<li>Advice on how to assess the data needs of researchers and select appropriate methods of storing and archiving that data.</li>
</ul>
<p>We had an excellent strategic overview from Liz Lyon (Director of <a href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/">UKOLN</a>), followed by three case studies presented by Chris McMahon (University of Bath), Gregory Tourte (University of Bristol) and Kenji Takeda (University of Southampton). The afternoon closed with a short talk from the DCC’s director, Kevin Ashley, on what <a href="http://www.dcc.ac.uk/">resources the DCC provides to support people in rolling out good data management practice</a>.</p>
<p>I’ve been promised that the slides will be available on the web soon, so I’ll post those as soon as I know where they are. There also seem to be a few twitterers there so I’ve saved the <a href="http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/dccsw10">twitter stream from the event</a> for future reference, and if you want to follow it live the hashtag is #dccsw10.</p>
<p>Tomorrow’s session is a little bit high-level for me, being aimed at senior management and similar roles, but I’ll be attending both of the more practical workshops on Thursday.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2010-11-02:/blog/digital-curation-centre-roadshow-day-1/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/digital-curation-centre-roadshow-day-1/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/mendeley-open-bibliography-for-everyone/">Mendeley: open bibliography for everyone</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/mendeley-open-bibliography-for-everyone/">Sunday 17 October 2010</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open source</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bibliographic management</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open science</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eScience</span></li>
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<p>I’ve just discovered a great piece of reference management software called <a href="http://www.mendeley.com/">Mendeley</a>. I’ve heard it mentioned a bit recently, by people like <a href="http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/">Brian Kelly</a>, <a href="http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/">Peter Murray-Rust</a> and <a href="http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/">Jean-Claude Bradley</a>, but when my wife mentioned it after her recent visit to the <a href="http://www.internet-librarian.com/2010/">ILI2010 (Internet Library International)</a> conference I finally thought I’d give it a go.</p>
<p>Keeping your references together is an ongoing problem for any researcher. For years the standard software has been Endnote, though I’ve never used it much myself<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. <a href="http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/">BibDesk</a> has been my tool of choice for the last few years, but I can’t recommend it to many people because it’s Mac-only, as is the beautifully-designed but paid-for <a href="http://mekentosj.com/papers/">Papers</a>. More recently, I’ve found <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a> very useful, but it’s only available as a plugin for Firefox.</p>
<p>And whatever tool you use, keeping it in sync between multiple computers is a pain for anyone who doesn’t have a good grasp of version control software. There have been some online tools like <a href="http://connotea.org/">Connotea</a>, but mostly they felt a bit clunky, and had no integration with any kind of word processing tool.</p>
<p>I’ve not played with Mendeley for long yet, but it feels different: <del>it’s open-source</del> <ins cite="http://erambler.co.uk/2010/10/17/mendeley-open-bibliography-for-everyone/comment-page-1/#comment-222">(<strong>Correction</strong>: it’s free, has an open API and the catalog is Creative-Commons licensed)</ins>; it’s cross-platform; it’s a desktop app but syncs between computers via a web tool.</p>
<p>The online version isn’t just for syncing though: it adds real value. There are social networking features, so you can discover new references based on what your contacts are reading. It’s also building up a free and open bibliographic database, like <a href="http://www.isiknowledge.com/">Web of Knowledge</a> or <a href="http://www.scopus.com/home.url">Scopus</a> but without the price-tag, and with statistics on how many people are reading the articles.</p>
<p>I’ll certainly be using it myself for a while and recommending it to our students to try. Anyone else tried it out yet?</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Mostly because I used <a href="http://www.latex-project.org/">LaTeX</a>, <a href="http://www.bibtex.org/">BibTeX</a> and <a href="http://pybliographer.org/">Pybliographer</a> as an undergraduate, and endlessly exporting BibTeX files from another system seemed a bit klunky. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
</div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/moving-on/">Moving on</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/moving-on/">Friday 27 August 2010</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">CSCT</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">VRE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Digital scholarship</span></li>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/4114167117/"><img class="alignright" title="Future Tense by Kevin Dooley" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2569/4114167117_461065fe2a_m_d.jpg" alt="Future Tense by Kevin Dooley"></a> Well, what a busy few months it’s been. As I’ve <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2010/06/17/briefly-brushing-away-the-cobwebs/">already alluded to</a>, my wife and I got married in June. In addition, I took the difficult decision a few months ago to leave my PhD, and now I have a new job!</p>
<p>No jobs being forthcoming after withdrawing from my course, I set up as a freelance web developer. It’s been an incredible learning experience, and great fun. I’ve learned a lot about business, from marketing through to finance and everything in between, and I’ve met lots of new people into the bargain.</p>
<p>However, life is always ready with a curveball. (What’s the appropriate British metaphor here? A googly perhaps?) I’d stopped applying for jobs to focus on freelancing, and business was just starting to pick up. Then out of the blue I was interviewed for, and subsequently offered, a post for which I’d applied back in May.</p>
<p>The job? ICT Project Manager at the University of Bath’s <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/csct/">Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies</a> (CSCT) and, basically, it’s my perfect job. I get to be involved with setting up a virtual research environment (VRE) for the centre, which will involve lots of web stuff along with consulting, training and supporting users, all of which I really enjoy.</p>
<p>So, I’m back working in higher education, and I’ll be back blogging on similar subjects after a hiatus of several months. Given the nature of the job, there will be more of a focus on research and digital scholarship than before, but I’m sure I’ll still have plenty of opportunities to talk about elearning and education too, especially as the EPSRC-funded <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/csct/dtc/">doctoral training centre</a> is a major part of CSCT.</p>
<p>I’m really excited about the whole thing. Bye for now!</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/briefly-brushing-away-the-cobwebs/">Briefly brushing away the cobwebs</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/briefly-brushing-away-the-cobwebs/">Thursday 17 June 2010</a>
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<p>So, in case any of my regular readers (do I have any?) have been wondering why there hasn’t been a lot to read regularly, I thought I’d post a short update to let you all know what I’ve been up to: planning a wedding and starting a business, in between commuting to my part-time job tutoring kids. It’s all been <em>loads</em> of fun (and will continue to be) and I’ve not really had time to make blog posts.</p>
<p>More posts, when I get back from the honeymoon. Bye for now!</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/how-do-you-protect-yourself-online/">Ask the readers: How do you protect yourself online?</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/how-do-you-protect-yourself-online/">Tuesday 27 April 2010</a>
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Tagged with
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Twitter</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web 2.0</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Identity</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Privacy</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Facebook</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Ask the readers</span></li>
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<p>In my last post, <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2010/04/15/privacy-identity-and-control-on-the-web/">Privacy, identity and control on the web</a>, I talked about about how important it can be to take control of your online presence.</p>
<p>But I got to thinking: <strong>What do you do to protect your privacy and/or identity on Facebook, Twitter or the rest of the web?</strong></p>
<p>Please share your thoughts by posting a comment below, or by writing a post on your own blog and linking to this one — a link will automagically appear below.</p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2010-04-27:/blog/how-do-you-protect-yourself-online/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/how-do-you-protect-yourself-online/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/privacy-identity-and-control-on-the-web/">Privacy, identity and control on the web</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/privacy-identity-and-control-on-the-web/">Thursday 15 April 2010</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Google</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web 2.0</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Identity</span></li>
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<p><img alt="My Identity by Kathryn B (via Flickr)" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/4464828517_2fdf5f479c_m_d.jpg" title="My Identity by Kathryn B" class="alignright" width="240" height="209"><br>
Recently, my dad contacted me to ask some advice about Facebook: a friend of his (who shall remain nameless, for obvious reasons) had been a victim of Facebook identity theft. The friend is a school teacher, and unbeknownst to him, someone or other had set up a Facebook profile in his name with his photo and begun befriending his school pupils.</p>
<p>It’s still unclear what the intention was here. It may have been to groom children by posing as someone they knew. It may have been to falsely accuse the friend of grooming children. It may even have been totally innocent.</p>
<p>In the end, the friend was very lucky. Well before the situation could get out of hand, he was able to contact Facebook, prove satisfactorily that this was a fake account and have it taken down. But reputation being what it is, it could have ended his career.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>Last week was the <a href="http://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/e-learning/">Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2010</a>, and although I didn’t attend, I have been reading some of the coverage on the blogosphere. In particular my eye was caught by James Clay’s blog post, <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/privacy-has-gone/">Privacy has gone…</a> which in turn discusses Josie Fraser’s keynote on privacy.</p>
<p>As I was reading James’s blog post, that story came back to me, and it occurred to me that there’s an element of balance to be found in protecting one’s privacy and identity online.</p>
<p>Those of us engaged in education often teach our students about the dangers of revealing too much information about ourselves online. The publishing of addresses, birth dates, account numbers will almost inevitably lead to identity theft.</p>
<p>But it seems just as important to strongly establish your identity online. Perhaps by having a well-established Facebook page it would be much easier to say “that fake profile is not mine.” If there are even a dozen people who you’ve friended online who you know in real life, and who can vouch for the real you, you’re in a much stronger position.</p>
<p>In addition to this, having a Facebook account permits your friends to tag photos of you properly if they wish, rather than just entering your name, which in turn allows you to restrict who sees those tags.</p>
<p>The way to protect yourself online is not to become the Ungooglable Man — James rightly points out that this strategy doesn’t work. Much better to step up and proudly say “<a href="http://thisisme.reading.ac.uk/">this is me</a>”. Take control of your brand, and don’t let other people have the only voice in what the web says about you.</p>
<hr>
<p>Do you have a Facebook profile? How tightly do you control your privacy settings? What comes up if you <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jez+cope">Google yourself</a>? Share your thoughts in the comments below.</p>
<p><em>Photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/56695083@N00/4464828517/">My Identity</a> by Kathryn B</em></p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2010-04-15:/blog/privacy-identity-and-control-on-the-web/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/privacy-identity-and-control-on-the-web/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/reflective-writing/">Reflective writing</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/reflective-writing/">Monday 8 February 2010</a>
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<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Personal development</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Professional development</span></li>
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<p><img alt="" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2679/4315247682_0ec0540b84_m_d.jpg" title="Young Narcissist" class="alignright" width="240" height="161"></p>
<p><strong>“The unexamined life is not worth living.”</strong></p>
<p>So said Socrates, anyway, and he was a pretty bright chap by all accounts.</p>
<p>Reflective writing is increasingly being used as a form of evidence in many qualifications and as part of professional development programmes. It was central to the assessment of my <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lets/lt-supp/pche.html">PCHE</a> qualification, and it’s the main method of assessment for my other half’s <a href="http://www.cilip.org.uk/Pages/default.aspx">CILIP</a> chartership process.</p>
<p>By why? What’s so important about it?</p>
<!--more-->
<p>Well professional qualifications are typically about being better at <strong>what you do</strong>.</p>
<p>Now, if you’re studying mathematics, biology or astrophysics, the object of your learning is external and independent. On the other hand, if you want to be better at teaching or people management, it’s <em>your own behaviour</em> that needs to change.</p>
<p>It’s not enough to know what you should be doing in theory. You also need to know what you’re actually doing so that you can work out how to improve.</p>
<h1 id="where-does-writing-fit-in">Where does writing fit in?</h1>
<p>It’s perfectly possible to think about your own behaviour without going near a pen (or computer). Why would you want to write it all down? For me, reflective writing serves several purposes.</p>
<p>First, it makes a permanent record. I can quite easily forget what I was thinking five minutes ago, let alone remember everything I thought last month. But if I write something down it’s a lot harder to lose.</p>
<p>Plus, it can be enlightening and even surprising to look back at a later date at what you thought in the past. It can be particularly useful to see how your thoughts develop over a period of time, particularly if you have an interest in how people learn.</p>
<p>Next, it can act as evidence of your learning. A portfolio which includes reflective writing shows not only that you have the right skills, but also that you’re both willing and able to improve them.</p>
<p>Finally, it externalises your thought processes, placing them in the real world where you can examine them more objectively. It’s far to easy to get wrapped up in those processes if you keep them locked away inside your head.</p>
<h1 id="how-can-i-write-reflectively">How can I write reflectively?</h1>
<p>As I rapidly discovered when I started, reflective writing doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. Thankfully there are a number of tricks which can help — here are a few that have worked for me:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p><strong>Use a timer</strong>: Set an ordinary kitchen timer for 10 minutes, and write without pausing until it goes off. Don’t worry about staying on topic; just don’t stop writing.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Write a letter</strong>: Try imagining that you’re writing a to a friend or family member. You don’t have to ever send it, but writing for someone else can make reflection feel less futile.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Ask a question</strong>: If you’re writing about a particular problem, seeing it phrased as a question can help to trigger problem-solving thought processes.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Mix it up</strong>: If writing doesn’t do it for you, try talking things through into a dictaphone. If you have a trusted friend or colleague, you could set up a tape recorder (or use a laptop or mobile phone) and record a conversation with them.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Learn more</strong>: <a href="http://www.gilliebolton.com/writing/reflective-writing.html">Gillie Bolton</a> isn’t the only author to write about reflective writing by a long way, but I found her book <a href="http://www.gilliebolton.com/books/reflective-practice-book.html">Reflective Practice</a> full of useful ideas. I’m also planning to take a look at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Schon">Donald Schön</a>’s classic work on the subject, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflective-Practitioner-Professionals-Think-Action/dp/1857423194/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265574365&amp;sr=8-1">The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action</a> soon.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>But I’m interested: <strong>what works for you?</strong> Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.</p>
<p><em>Photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/behind-the-lense/4315247682/">Young Narcissist</a> by Victoria Henderson</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/looking-back-on-a-year-of-blogging/">Looking back on a year of blogging</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/looking-back-on-a-year-of-blogging/">Wednesday 20 January 2010</a>
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<p>Looking at the date of my last post, it’s been almost exactly two months since I last posted. I suppose that’s not surprising, since those two months contained an awful lot of stuff happening elsewhere in my life, such as moving house and Christmas.</p>
<p>However, it does mean that I’ve so far missed out on the traditional ritual of looking back on one’s year to date and using it as blog-fodder. So here we are then. Time to have a look back and see what I’ve learned from the experience so far.</p>
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<p>2009 has been my first full year of blogging. It took me a while to get going, and to begin finding my voice (I’m still working on that), but then I made some <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/03/06/blog-career-news/">decisions about my future career</a> and suddenly this blog had a purpose: to give me a way to join in the e-learning community, reflect and learn. Since then, I’ve posted on pretty much whatever’s seemed appropriate, and started getting to grips with what makes this medium tick.</p>
<h1 id="what-did-people-read">What did people read?</h1>
<p>My most popular (i.e. most viewed) posts seem to fit into one or both of two categories: “hot topics” and conversations.</p>
<p>By “hot topics”, I mean subjects which interest a large portion of the online community enough to see what I’ve got to say. Examples of this type of post include:</p>
<ul>
<li>My <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/03/15/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i/">three part</a> <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/03/16/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">beginners guide</a> <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/03/17/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-iii/">to Twitter</a>;</li>
<li>A brief note on the <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/05/27/university-sheffield-google-mail/">University of Sheffield’s decision to use Google Mail</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>By “conversations”, I refer to posts which are actively trying to engage with my audience. My favourite of these (and my favourite post of the year) has to be:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/05/30/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I think its success lies in the fact that it was a question broad enough for everyone to have an opinion on and important enough for many people to <em>want</em> to comment on. I intentionally kept the original post quite short, and ensured that the question I was asking stood out.</p>
<p>Then, of course, there are posts which fall into both categories, such as my <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/08/19/moving-to-a-more-agile-vle/">contribution to the debate on the death or otherwise of the VLE</a>.</p>
<h1 id="what-didnt-work">What didn’t work?</h1>
<p>I tried a couple of different things to keep things interesting, such as posting a weekly summary of links that I’d found around the internet and trying monthly themes, but neither of these really caught on as I didn’t have the motivation to keep on with them.</p>
<p>I think perhaps the monthly theme idea would work better for a blog which was consciously aimed at being educational resource for the reader, forming part of the ongoing story which keeps learners engaged. For this blog, though, which is more reflective and tends to be a reaction to my own thoughts and experiences, it feels unnecessarily prescriptive.</p>
<h1 id="other-highlights">Other highlights</h1>
<p>In August, I moved from Wordpress.com to my own self-hosted blog, thanks to the generosity of a friend with a server to host it. I wanted to have scope to experiment and expand, so I went with <a href="http://mu.wordpress.org/">Wordpress MU</a>, the multi-user version of Wordpress which allows multiple blogs to run off a single installation.</p>
<p>I also tried my hand at writing some <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/08/16/something-a-little-different/">fiction</a> in response to a challenge on Joanna Young’s <a href="http://confidentwriting.com/">Confident Writing</a> blog. I really enjoyed it, but decided that it didn’t really fit into my plan for this blog, so I took advantage of Wordpress MU and started a <a href="http://personal.erambler.co.uk/">separate non-work-related blog</a> to keep all of the random writings and photos that I wanted to share.</p>
<h1 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h1>
<p>I’ve found blogging to be valuable. It lets me reflect and organise my thoughts in a form suitable for consumption by other human beings; it lets me connect to the e-learning community and build a useful professional network; it lets me take part in a global conversation.</p>
<p>Enough cliches.</p>
<p>Here’s looking forward to the next twelve months.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/strictly-come-teaching/">Strictly Come Teaching</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/strictly-come-teaching/">Saturday 21 November 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Television</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Dancing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Quickies</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I should make it clear before getting into this that it’s <em>my fiancee</em> who watches Strictly, not me. My fiancee. I just happened to catch it out of the corner of my eye while I was doing something manly, like DIY. Anyway…</p>
<p>If you live in the UK, you’ll probably not have managed to avoid at least hearing about <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/strictlycomedancing/">Strictly Come Dancing</a>, a reality TV show in which professional dancers teach celebrities to dance (in the US and Australia it’s called Dancing with the Stars).</p>
<p>In recent years the big Saturday show has been supported by a half-hour gossip show every weekday evening, going by the name Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two.</p>
<p>In case you were starting to wonder where I was going with this, the first little bit of yesterday’s It Takes Two saw the professionals talking about the approach they take to teaching their celebs, and it makes for quite interesting watching. If you’re in the UK, you can watch it on BBC <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p1lb4/Strictly_It_Takes_Two_Series_7_Episode_45/">iPlayer</a>, around 1:10.</p>
<p>What’s interesting is that all of the celebrities think that their pro is a great teacher, but from a dispassionate point of view there are differences. I think Brian sums it up nicely when he says “a really good teacher is a teacher who learns to adapt their teaching style to different types of student.” It’s noticeable that the professionals who have consistently done well across series have been the ones who adapted well to their celebrities.</p>
<p>And as Erin points out: “‘World Champions’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good teacher.”</p>
<p>Just a little something to think about.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-11-21:/blog/strictly-come-teaching/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/strictly-come-teaching/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/annotating-the-web-diigo-vs-google-sidewiki/">Annotating the web: Diigo vs. Google Sidewiki</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/annotating-the-web-diigo-vs-google-sidewiki/">Saturday 31 October 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Google</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Diigo</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Magnolia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SideWiki</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Annotation</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Wiki</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Conversation</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Bookmarking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/plindberg/32809925/"><img alt="Margin Notes by Peter Lindberg" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/21/32809925_6b27ccbda6_m.jpg" title="Margin Notes" width="180" height="240"></a><p>Margin Notes by Peter Lindberg</p>
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<p>For a long time, I’ve been the sort of person who tends to read and absorb information, without really wanting or needing to scribble notes down. This is probably because my background has been maths and computing, and the elegance of mathematics as a language is in its ability to express big ideas and small in a concise way: no annotation needed if everything you need is there.</p>
<p>More recently, though, I’ve been reading things with, well, more words in them.</p>
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<p>Learning how to teach has been an education (pun fully intended) — I’ve started reading a much broader range of material, and a lot of it is quite social-sciencey. This stuff is necessarily quite verbose, and I find I need to take notes and rephrase things in my own way to get the most out of them.</p>
<p>Now, with library books, people seem to get a bit upset if you start scribbling in the margins. I have to keep a notebook in which to jot down thoughts.</p>
<p>Out on the web, the situation used to be much the same: unless a web page specifically included features for commenting, any annotation had to be kept in a notebook or a separate file, leaving you searching through to find what notes go with which page or dreaming up an ingenious indexing system.</p>
<p><strong>No longer!</strong></p>
<p>A while back, <a href="http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/">Mark Morley</a> pointed me in the direction of <a href="http://diigo.com/">Diigo</a>. I’d variously been using <a href="http://delicious.com/">Delicious</a> and Magnolia (now defunct, but replaced by the intriguing <a href="http://gnolia.com/">gnolia</a>) for storing bookmarks, so I thought I’d give this rival service a try.</p>
<p>For a while, I used it just as a bookmarking service, but it wasn’t long before I cottoned on to the real power of Diigo: highlighting and sticky notes.</p>
<p>Using the Diigo plugin for Firefox, or the diigolet (a rather clever little bookmarklet) you can:</p>
<ul>
<li>highlight any part of any web page, in a variety of colours;</li>
<li>add comments to your highlightings;</li>
<li>add sticky notes to the page.</li>
</ul>
<p>Now, I can take all the notes I want, and keep them right next to the page they refer to. Great for getting the most learning out of what I read.</p>
<p>But the really exciting thing is that I can choose to make my comments public. And so can other people. And when we do that, it becomes a conversation. I can talk and debate with people all over the world on any website, whether or not that site allows it or not.</p>
<p>And that’s <em>pretty cool</em>. If you want to learn more, check out this <a href="http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/video-guide-to-diigo-annotations/">video guide</a> or take a look at an <a href="http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.copyblogger.com%2Fbad-writing-habits?tab=comment">annotated blog post</a>.</p>
<p>Now, a few weeks ago, Google got in on the act with their new <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/help-and-learn-from-others-as-you.html">Sidewiki</a> project, and it’s <a href="http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/google-sidewiki-the-web-just-changed-again/">caused</a> <a href="http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/surfacing-google-sidewiki-comments-within-a-web-page/">a bit</a> <a href="http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2009/09/25/google-force-feeds-social-media-on-the-world/">of a</a> <a href="http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/09/24/googles-sidewiki-shifts-power-to-consumers-away-from-corporate-web-teams/">stir</a>. It’s not as flexible as as Diigo — it’s a very simple sidebar-type affair — but it does a similar job in terms of turning the web into a conversation.</p>
<p>The big advantage it has is the Google brand behind it. It’s built into a special version of the Google Toolbar and I think we can expect it to make it into the standard version before long; it’ll also be working its way into Google’s new browser, Chrome. There’s an open API too, which means that if you don’t want to use Google Toolbar, there’s <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46311">this standalone client for Firefox</a>.</p>
<p>So now, I can scribble all over your web page. What are you going to do about it?</p>
<p><em>On a semi-related note, I’m still looking for ideas and opinions about <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/10/21/ask-the-readers-do-you-keep-a-portfolio/">using a portfolio to record professional development</a>, so please drop by that post and join in the conversation.</em></p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-10-31:/blog/annotating-the-web-diigo-vs-google-sidewiki/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/annotating-the-web-diigo-vs-google-sidewiki/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/ask-the-readers-do-you-keep-a-portfolio/">Ask the readers: do you keep a portfolio?</a></h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ask-the-readers-do-you-keep-a-portfolio/">Wednesday 21 October 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Portfolio</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Personal development</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Professional development</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Ask the readers</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/917press/3539927781/"><img alt="Room 800: Police Evidence Room by Sam Teigen" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3332/3539927781_d81fb910b2_m_d.jpg" title="Room 800: Police Evidence Room" width="240" height="178"></a><p>Room 800: Police Evidence Room by Sam Teigen</p>
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<p>One of my favourite posts so far has been my <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/05/30/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">first Ask the Readers post</a>, so I’ve decided it’s time to continue the series with another request for ideas. I’ve written before about how I kept a <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/07/22/portfolio-assessment-age-computer/">digital portfolio</a> as part of my Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education qualification. It’s something that I learned a lot from, particularly in conjunction with learning about learning, and I’ve continued the reflective ethos of that portfolio here on the blog.</p>
<p>But as I’ve come to the end of my current stint of volunteering at the National Trust (on which more in a later post), I’ve been feeling that I want something a bit more than just the shouting into the void that I do here.<br>
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<p>I have two difficult tasks ahead:</p>
<ol>
<li>Find a challenging and rewarding job in a very competitive marketplace;</li>
<li>Continue to learn and grow outside the structures of formal education.</li>
</ol>
<p>What I really want, then, is somewhere I can:</p>
<ul>
<li>Continue to reflect and learn, even when said reflections aren’t suitable for public consumption;</li>
<li>Gather a base of evidence for my skills, to draw on when applying for jobs, and to identify gaps for me to work on;</li>
<li>Access online, from work, home, conferences, etc.;</li>
<li>Keep private but make available to individuals for PDRs, professional qualifications, etc.;</li>
<li>Retain control of and keep regular backups of (this stuff’s valuable).</li>
</ul>
<p>It seems to me like it’s time to resurrect a full portfolio, but as I’m new to this I thought I’d ask for some advice. My question to you is this: <strong>Do you keep a professional portfolio and if so, what are your top tips for doing so?</strong></p>
<p>To get the ball rolling, this is where I am at the moment:</p>
<ul>
<li>I’ve set up a new blog on my trusty self-hosted <a href="http://mu.wordpress.org/">Wordpress MU</a> installation;</li>
<li>For advice I have <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/careers/students/advice/wep.html">this advice</a> from the University of Sheffield careers service, the <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lets/lt-supp/pche-info.html">course guide</a> from the PCHE and my other half’s copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Your-Portfolio-CILIP-Guide/dp/1856046125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1256154507&amp;sr=8-1">Building Your Portfolio</a> (aimed at qualified librarians seeking chartership).</li>
</ul>
<p>I look forward to reading your comments and I’ll be sure to summarise them in a blog post next month and continue to keep you informed about my progress.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-10-21:/blog/ask-the-readers-do-you-keep-a-portfolio/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ask-the-readers-do-you-keep-a-portfolio/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/help-teachers-make-most-of-technology/">Two techniques to help teachers make the most of technology</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/help-teachers-make-most-of-technology/">Friday 16 October 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Trust</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teachers</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Advice</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Someone recently asked me a very interesting question: what two techniques would you use to enable academic staff to make the most of new technology for teaching?</p>
<p>A number of thoughts ran through my mind at this point:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ooh, interesting question…</li>
<li>Hmm, that depends…</li>
<li>That sounds like a blog post in the making…</li>
<li>What! Only two?!</li>
</ul>
<p>But I like the idea of narrowing it down to just the two most important; a bit like some weird and geeky version of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr">Desert Island Discs</a>. Plus, to keep my analytical side happy, there’s plenty of scope for categorising loads of specific ideas under two broad techniques.</p>
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<p>So, on with the game. After some thought, I think that my two favourite techniques are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Talking to people; and</li>
<li>Leading by example.</li>
</ol>
<p>Let’s take them one at a time.</p>
<h1 id="talking-to-people">Talking to people</h1>
<p>Well, when I say talking to people, I don’t really mean talking all the time so much as listening. I may not know everything there is to know about technology, but I know more than a little about how it can support teaching; I know plenty about how it’s useful for teaching <em>for me</em>.</p>
<p>But I’m not you. I’m not him over there. And I’m certainly not a busy academic with half a dozen research grants on the go trying to teach my students as best I can alongside the myriad other commitments of life in HE.</p>
<p>And when I say listening, it’s not just about listening. It’s about <em>caring</em>. If I knew the right techniques, I could probably convince you that I was listening, but if I didn’t actually care what you were saying, you’d probably guess pretty quickly.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about neurolinguistic programming or anything like that, but what I do know is that when I take a genuine interest in what someone’s saying then I really get a lot out of it. That’s not something you can fake, but I’ve found that you can actively take an interest in pretty much anything or anyone if you make a bit of effort.</p>
<p>Why is this important? The only way I can help you (or him over there) to make the best of technology is to get a clear picture of what your needs are. I need to <em>understand</em> you. It’s no use me patronising you with information you already know; neither is it helpful to force-feed you information that you just have no use for.</p>
<p>Only if I understand your unique situation can I provide the advice that will help you improve your teaching, or leave well alone if that’s the best option.</p>
<h1 id="teaching-by-example">Teaching by example</h1>
<p>This is something I try to do all the time, in everything I do. I won’t claim that I succeed all of the time, but I’m getting better at it the more I do.</p>
<p>A little while back I read Postman &amp; Weingartner’s <em>Teaching as a Subversive Activity</em> (and I recommend you do to if you’re interested in improving the quality of education). One of the big messages I took away from it was that <em>we learn what we do</em>.</p>
<p>In other words, <em>how</em> we teach (and thus how students learn) is just as important, if not more so, than <em>what</em> we teach.</p>
<p>So, if I want to help you understand how technology can improve your teaching and make life easier for both you and your students (“Why should we make life easy on our students?” I hear them cry) it won’t help if I stand up in front you and your colleagues and give a 45 minute death-by-Powerpoint presentation on how to use Facebook.</p>
<p>Instead (and having listened to you I’ll have an idea of what fits the way you work) I’ll use a whole range of techniques. By giving you a 2-minute online video of tips on how to facilitate online discussions, I can show you how effective YouTube is for teaching. By encouraging you to take part in an online discussion about teaching with video, I can help you see what does and doesn’t help people learn from forums. I might even give you a 45-minute presentation on the theoretical pedagogies of Facebook, if that’s what works for you.</p>
<p>This technique does at least two useful things. First, it gives you an opportunity to get first-hand experience of what tools are out there and what they’re like to use. Secondly, it demonstrates that when it comes to e-learning I have a good enough idea of what’s going on to give you advice that you can trust.</p>
<h1 id="in-the-end">In the end…</h1>
<p>…it mostly comes down to trust. If you trust that I both care about you (and your students) and know what I’m talking about, how much more likely are you to consider listening to me?</p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-10-16:/blog/help-teachers-make-most-of-technology/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/help-teachers-make-most-of-technology/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/reader-poll-how-do-you-follow-blogs/">Reader poll: how do you follow blogs?</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/reader-poll-how-do-you-follow-blogs/">Friday 2 October 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogging</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web 2.0</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Poll</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">RSS</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Ask the readers</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I have several reasons for writing this post. Chief among them is curiosity: I like pulling the universe to bits and poking it to see what happens, and I’m genuinely interested in finding out how readers of this blog actually keep up to date with the blogosphere. Second, I’ve spent a lot of time in academia, where evidence is a key part of life; I’m aware that a lot of what I say on here is just my opinion so it’ll be nice to make a change to that (self-selecting samples aside). Third, it’s useful from a promotion perspective to know how people are getting here: <a href="http://www.feedburner.com/">Feedburner</a> and <a href="http://analytics.google.com/">Google Analytics</a> stats only tell part of the story. Finally, the <a href="http://polldaddy.com/">PollDaddy</a> plugin for Wordpress has been around for a while now and I really want to try it out.</p>
<p><strong>Update 17 May 2015:</strong> I’m doing some cleanup and this poll is no longer accessible.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-10-02:/blog/reader-poll-how-do-you-follow-blogs/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/reader-poll-how-do-you-follow-blogs/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/bringing-history-to-life-with-multimedia-guides/">Bringing history to life with multimedia guides</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/bringing-history-to-life-with-multimedia-guides/">Thursday 1 October 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">M-learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">National Trust</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Commandery</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Worcester</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Down House</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Darwin</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Museum</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tourism</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">History</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Multimedia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Mobile</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Museums</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jezcope/3971274879/"><img alt="Down House (Darwins House) by yours truly" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3511/3971274879_003b7d1fcc_m.jpg" title="Down House (Darwins House)" width="240" height="180"></a><p>Down House (Darwin's House) by yours truly</p>
</div>
<p>Today’s blog post was inspired by a trip to <a href="http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.14922">Down House</a> in Kent, where Charles Darwin spent the latter years of his life with his wife and family, and where he wrote, amongst many other works, <em>On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection</em>.</p>
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<p>It was a fascinating day out, and I thoroughly recommend it, but what prompted me to write was their wonderful new multimedia guides. On arrival we (my mum, my fiancée and myself) were each handed a fairly ruggedly built little PDA with headphones attached. Having arrived too early to see the house (the gardens open at 10am, but the house doesn’t open until 11) we set off into the garden, shown around by our multimedia guides.</p>
<p>Audio guides to exhibitions and historical sites aren’t particularly new, and I have vague recollections of having been using them for some years, but it seems that the people responsible for setting these things up are getting a lot more creative. Additionally, the technology is becoming better and cheaper: not long ago handing every visitor a PDA would have been out of the question, but English Heritage have found funding from somewhere and I think it’s worth every penny.</p>
<p>Although the guide is set up to take you round in a specified order by default, you can also bring up a map, labelled with all the locations that have audio content so that you can skip bits out or make up your own tour of the grounds. After the main narration for each location, given by Andrew Marr in the garden and Sir David Attenborough in the house, there is a menu of other short bits of relevant information, taken from interviews with various experts. We were each able to customise our tour and include only the information we were interested in: very useful when we moved onto the house and time was starting to run a bit short. There is also a small interactive game for each section, which should help to keep the kids entertained.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dalbera/550975041/"><img alt="Laudioguidage de lexposition Anselm Kiefer au Grand Palais by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/248/550975041_0b97c86d01_m.jpg" title="Laudioguidage de lexposition Anselm Kiefer au Grand Palais" width="240" height="180"></a><p>L'audioguidage de l'exposition Anselm Kiefer au Grand Palais by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra</p>
</div>
<p>It’s very freeing having a well-written audio guide to an English Heritage property. The best part is that you can look around at whatever is being described without having to constantly shift attention between it and an information plaque. Also having the full-colour screen on the device meant that photos and videos could be shown, which added an extra dimension to the tour.</p>
<p>There were a few minor shortcomings with the guides. The headphone cables were very long and got caught up occasionally. The visual aspects of the guide occasionally felt like they were needlessly distracting from what I was looking at. Also, having an audio guide did dampen down conversation within our little group, but reading text on displays often has the same effect so there probably wasn’t much lost. All in all though, it was a very well designed package.</p>
<p>The whole thing put me in mind of another, very different but equally enjoyable, audio tour. This one was at the <a href="http://www.worcestercitymuseums.org.uk/comm/commind.htm">Commandery</a> in Worcester. The Commandery is a very old building indeed and has been repurposed many times through its history. It’s recently been refurbished, and it’s been done in quite a wonderful way.</p>
<p>The whole place has been fully redecorated but left almost empty. On arrival you’re given an audio guide and you then choose one of the periods of history (I think there were five). You then take a tour of the whole building from the perspective of that period. Because the decoration is so sparse, it’s necessary to imagine how it would have been in days gone by, and the narration, dramatisation and atmospheric sounds on the audio guide really bring the period to life. Because we chose different periods for our tours, we were able to compare notes and it turns out that there are some nice links between the different narrations.</p>
<p>I really enjoyed both of these audio tours. The Commandery, in particular, I would love to revisit and spend the whole day doing the tours for each of the different periods of history. But the experience has really reminded me that putting control of learning into the learner’s hands can sometimes quite literally mean just that, and that it can work very well indeed. I felt that I was able to really get a handle on Darwin’s life and work in a way that wouldn’t have been possible by just walking round the garden or reading a display: the experience made use of all of my senses.</p>
<p><em>What’s your take on audio/multimedia guides? When do they work and when do they detract from the experience? Leave me a comment below.</em></p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-10-01:/blog/bringing-history-to-life-with-multimedia-guides/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/bringing-history-to-life-with-multimedia-guides/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/mobile-blogging-with-posterous/">Mobile blogging with Posterous</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/mobile-blogging-with-posterous/">Thursday 3 September 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogging</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Email</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Posterous</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Photos</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Video</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Audio</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Mobile</span></li>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<img src="http://erambler.co.uk/files/2009/09/Posterous-welcome-email-300x266.png" alt="Posterous welcome email" title="Posterous welcome email" width="300" height="266" class="size-medium wp-image-341"><p>Posterous welcome email</p>
</div>
<p>Followers of my <a id="aptureLink_SHsCcXosIT" href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">twitter stream</a> will have noticed that over the last few days I’ve been posting to my <a id="aptureLink_jmqLVqzSiT" href="http://jezcope.posterous.com/">Posterous account</a> from <a id="aptureLink_0eDRxEDYCY" href="http://www.shrewsburyfolkfestival.co.uk/">Shrewsbury Folk Festival</a>.<br>
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<p>I first signed up for <a id="aptureLink_26avr2rs1K" href="http://posterous.com/">Posterous</a> after seeing <a id="aptureLink_B9R8eTaLB9" href="http://twitter.com/tamegoeswild">Joseph Tame</a> using it to post photos (though I don’t think he has recently). I played briefly then left it alone for a while because, already having a blog, I didn’t really see a place for it for me. Then a few months ago I finally got email working properly on my (now fairly dated) Sony-Ericsson phone. Last week, I remembered about Posterous again and thought I’d try it out.</p>
<p>I had two reasons for testing it out in more detail. First, I have a relative whose views I admire and want to get blogging; being able to blog by email might lower the barrier to entry for him. Second, I wanted to see whether mobile blogging worked for me and in what way. So, I set to work trying out what features I could from my mobile, using the festival to provide a motive for posting.</p>
<h1 id="features">Features</h1>
<p>The first thing you notice about Posterous is how easy it is to set up. And I mean <em>really</em> easy. You send an email with your first post to <a href="mailto:post@posterous.com">post@posterous.com</a>, and you get an almost immediate response with a link to your new blog. That’s all you need to do to have a presence on the web. No forms to fill in, no special software, nothing.</p>
<p>Now, of course, you probably won’t leave it there. To start off with, you’re assigned a randomly-generated subdomain of posterous.com (mine was originally jeremy-jfjyk.posterous.com) which isn’t too easy to tell people about. Although an indecipherable blog address might have its uses, most people will want to customise this, which you can do by logging into your new Posterous through the link in the welcome email. This also provides you with the opportunity to set a password for your account, which I thoroughly recommend even if you do nothing else.</p>
<p>You can also customise a number of other aspects, such as the title and subtitle and privacy settings. You can use your own domain name for your blog instead of a posterous.com subdomain. You can even integrate <a href="http://blog.posterous.com/add-google-analytics-to-your-p">Google Analytics</a> and a <a href="http://blog.posterous.com/posterous-now-supports-using-feedburner-to-tr">Feedburner feed</a> to track traffic to your new blog.</p>
<p>Now, being able to set up a blog so easily is all very well, but where Posterous really comes into its own is in its handling of the content of your emails. Rich text formatted emails keep their formatting, and any URLs are automatically turned into links. If you include the URL of a video in a supported service, the <a href="http://jezcope.posterous.com/bonus-post-hoven-droven-video">video itself is embedded</a>. If you attach a file that Posterous knows how to handle, that too will be embedded in the post. Over the course of the weekend I’ve posted photos, video and audio content; multiple photos are turned into a clever <a href="http://jezcope.posterous.com/morris-dancing-isnt-all-just-fun-and-games-yo">gallery</a>.</p>
<p>Last, but by no means least, is the AutoPost feature. This allows you to link in accounts from a whole load of social networking sites so that every time you post to Posterous, it gets sent out to them as well. It currently supports Facebook and Twitter, will post your photos to Flickr or Picasa, can send videos to YouTube or Vimeo and will save URLs to Delicious. You can also set it up to post to most major blog platforms, so even if your own blog doesn’t have a post-by-email option, you can use Posterous to replicate that feature.</p>
<h1 id="thoughts">Thoughts</h1>
<p>My overwhelming impression of Posterous is how easy it is to use. Being based on email meant that I could post almost as easily from the middle of a field as I can from my desk at home (though my poor aching thumbs might beg to differ). Knowing that it could take pretty much any media I threw at it and do something useful with it made the experience even more pleasing. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to start blogging but has so far been put off by a lack of familiarity with the technology: if you can send email you can start a blog.</p>
<p>I quite enjoyed being able to blog while out and about: it was a good way of recording my thoughts on the day and sharing them with others at the same time. The material was probably of minimal interest to most of my followers (although Google Analytics shows that a surprising number of my Twitter and Facebook followers clicked through to view my posts), but it would make a good tool for covering, say, a conference in which many of my followers had an interest. I will note that my fianceé did complain once or twice that she was becoming a social media widow, but she didn’t really seem to mind and I didn’t actually spend more than a few minutes each day blogging.</p>
<p>Will I carry on using it? You bet. It’s instantly replaced <a id="aptureLink_JigHYeiPmh" href="http://twitter.com/TwitPic">TwitPic</a> as my photo-tweeting tool of choice, especially as I can use it to post video, audio and text as well. Just the ticket when I want to post a thought that’s more than 140 characters but doesn’t fit on my main blog here. I suspect that my Posterous will turn into a bit of a scrapbook, but I’m OK with that and it’ll be interesting to be able to look back in a few years time and see what I’ve been posting. I probably won’t be posting as regularly as I have done over the bank holiday weekend though!</p>
<p>I’m also tempted to set up a second Posterous (yes, you can set up a second, third or more through the website once you’ve set up your first) to use purely as a conduit for posting to this blog. If I give that a go I’ll let you know how well it works.</p>
<p>For more info, and lots of useful tips and tricks, check out the <br>
<a id="aptureLink_XKQle7TJm3" href="http://blog.posterous.com">Official Posterous Posterous</a> (i.e. their blog).</p>
<p><em>Do you have a blog? If so, what platform do you use to host it. Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-09-03:/blog/mobile-blogging-with-posterous/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/mobile-blogging-with-posterous/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/followup-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Followup: Why use technology in teaching?</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/followup-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Thursday 27 August 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Some while ago, now, I asked for answers to the question <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/05/30/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Why use technology in teaching?</a> I was preparing to run an afternoon workshop for some fellow students on a HE teaching course and wanted to present them with some convincing reasons to consider technology in their teaching, so I turned to twitter and the blogosphere. At the time I promised a follow-up post summarising the discussion, so here it is.</p>
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<p>I put together the slides for the initial presentation using <a href="http://sliderocket.com/">SlideRocket</a>, and you can flip through them here:</p>
<embed src="http://data.sliderocket.com/SlideRocketPlayer.swf" flashvars="id=C2A0613E-357C-9C91-9A93-A272D250341D" width="400" height="300" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/beckacurrant">Becka Currant</a> kicked off the discussion by pointing out that “too many assumptions are made about digital fluency.” This is something that I’ve since come to agree with: it’s all too easy to assume that because young people appear comfortable with technology, they are completely turned on to the consequences of its use. Becka also pointed me in the direction of <a href="http://www.elp.ac.uk/downloads/Defining%20Generation%20Y%20Bradford.pdf">this typology</a> from <a href="http://www.elp.ac.uk/">JISC’s Enhancing Learner Progression project</a> which does a great job of explaining the separation between students’ level of technological experience and its contribution to education.</p>
<p><a href="http://dougbelshaw.com/blog">Doug Belshaw</a> pointed out <a href="http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/20444">Ben Grey’s post</a> from <a href="http://www.techlearning.com/">Tech &amp; Learning</a> and his <a href="http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/20664">crowdsourced followup</a>, along with <a href="http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2009/05/13/why-educational-technology/">Doug’s own response</a>. All three are worth a read, so go ahead and check them out.</p>
<p><a href="http://human.edublogs.org/">Tomaz Lasic</a> made an insightful comment that many the skills we were looking to achieve with technology (or education in general) are far from new:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“2nd century BC” skills that even some of the old Greek wise heads were talking about — democracy, participation, freedom of expression &amp; thought, active citizenship — you know those pesky old things that never seemed to go out of fashion with thoughtful people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tomaz followed up with a <a href="http://human.edublogs.org/2009/06/03/4th-century-skills/">thought-provoking post</a> on his own blog, which underscored the point that I was trying to make originally: that it’s vital to consider what we want to achieve with technology, not just how cool it is.</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/cat8canary">Catherine Werst</a> suggested that one of the best reasons for using technology to teach is that it pushes us out of our comfort zones, forcing us to question our assumptions about what it means to teach:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Technology presents opportunities and challenges that stretch us to become better teachers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://bookishbrunette.wordpress.com/">Jenny Evans</a> drew on her work with Wolverhampton City Council interviewing kids for an <a href="https://www.wolverhampton-engage.net/sites/anonymous/BSF/Shared%20Documents/Focus.aspx">e-learning promotional video</a> (the site seems to have some odd certificate problems, but you can view the video there). She summarised her experience thus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We got loads of interviews with kids about what they got from from technology — a really strong theme of improving life chances emerged.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Finally, <a href="http://learningunlearning.blogspot.com/">Paul Jinks</a> suggested that teachers tend to use technology when it makes their lives easier and students use it when it’s necessary for their assessments: a paraphrasing of his <a href="http://learningunlearning.blogspot.com/2009/06/technology-for-learning-technology-for.html">earlier blog post</a>. Although I agree with this in part, I think this overgeneralises a complex situation. I also live in hope that some, if not all, teachers can be persuaded that improving their own teaching practice and using technology is one (though not the only) way to do this.</p>
<p>In summary, this post turned up some really useful opinions on why we use technology in teaching. Indeed, it’s worked so well that I’m going to try to keep up the theme of “Ask the Readers”, as it fits in well with my desire to learn from this blog and help others to do the same. I hope you’ve found the responses as interesting as I did, and encourage you to continually ask the question “Why use technology?”</p>
<p><em>This is the first time I’ve summarised a discussion from a previous post. Did it work? Did I add enough value to justify the new post? What could I have done better? Please let me know in the comments below.</em></p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-08-27:/blog/followup-why-use-technology-in-teaching/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/followup-why-use-technology-in-teaching/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/acceptingjack/">Quickie: Accepting Jack</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/acceptingjack/">Monday 24 August 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Quickies</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I’ve got Radio 4 on while I do the washing up, and I’m listening to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00m68c0/Its_My_Story_Accepting_Jack_Six_Years_On.../">It’s My Story: Accepting Jack - Six Years On</a>. It follows a number of families with kids who have special needs, and about 20 minutes in, there’s a wonderful moment when a sibling is describing the benefits of having a brother with disabilities. In between not having to walk far to school and getting to skip the queue at the theme park, this young boy announces that he’s had “a lot of learning experiences”, having had to learn sign language which he might need later in life.</p>
<p>Kids have a natural ability and desire to learn, and given the opportunity they can understand this and grow. How can we keep that going into adulthood?</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-08-24:/blog/acceptingjack/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/acceptingjack/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/moving-to-a-more-agile-vle/">Moving to a more agile VLE</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/moving-to-a-more-agile-vle/">Wednesday 19 August 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web 2.0</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">VLE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PLE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open standards</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open source</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
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<div class="post-content">
<p>There’s been an interesting debate going on in the blogosphere over the last week about the future of the VLE. It all kicked off with Steve Wheeler’s (intentionally over-polarised) post suggesting we should <a href="http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/08/two-fingered-salute.html">stick two fingers up at the centralised VLE</a>. Posts from <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/its-not-dead-yet/">James Clay</a>, <a href="http://mattlingard.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/vl-istically-speaking/">Matt Lingard</a>, <a href="http://lindsayjordan.edublogs.org/2009/08/12/the-vleple-debate/">Lindsay Jordan</a> and many others swiftly followed.</p>
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<p>I thoroughly recommend you read their opinions before reading on. Go on, I’ll wait…</p>
<p>Right then. My take on the whole thing is heavily coloured by my use of Unix-based computers over the last 10 years or so. To cut a long story short, it’s long been common on these systems to have lots of small separate tools which each do one job very well; you can then do more complex tasks by combining them in various ways through well-defined interfaces.</p>
<p>Compare this with, for example, Windows. Each piece of software is fighting with all the others to include every feature the user could possibly want, which results in big, heavy programs which take ages to load and are often full of bugs. I accept that I’m overgeneralising here, but I hope you understand what I’m aiming at.</p>
<p>So, one of the big problems that I see with the current generation of VLEs is that they try to do everything all in one package. The result is a textbook illustration of the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none”.</p>
<p>WordPress, Blogger and others do blogging better. MediaWiki, WetPaint <em>et al</em> are better for wikis. Facebook and friends connect people much more easily.</p>
<p>I agree with James, Matt and Lindsay (and, I suspect, Steve as well, despite the stance in his post) that there’s still a place for the centrally-run VLE. But it should be more flexible. The word that keeps coming to my mind is ‘agile’. We should be following good software engineering principles and providing tools that are best-of-breed and put the effort instead into making them play nicely together. And we should give learners and teachers the option of using something else if they prefer.</p>
<p>This is where the idea of the personal web/personal learning environment comes into play. By providing a diverse toolset instead of insisting on one monolithic solution our learners and teachers can choose what works best for them. The VLE can evolve into a framework to help coax these tools to play together nicely, and to join them into a coherent whole for those who lack either the time or the inclination to choose their own.</p>
<p>Open standards will help with this. Open source will be a big help too, particularly if a community of developers with educational experience start to contribute. But above all, we need to start trying it out. We’ve got the tools already, all we need to do is persuade our institutions to use them.</p>
<p><em>What’s your take on all of this? Do you think the VLE should lay down quietly to die? Or should we bravely resurrect it and bring it back to its former glory? Leave your opinion in the comments below, or by linking here from your own blog.</em></p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-08-19:/blog/moving-to-a-more-agile-vle/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/moving-to-a-more-agile-vle/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<p class="archive-warning"><strong><em>Please note:</em></strong> this older content has been <strong>archived</strong> and is no longer fully linked into the site. Please go to the <a href="../../">current home page</a> for up-to-date content.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/something-a-little-different/">Something a little different</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/something-a-little-different/">Sunday 16 August 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Fiction</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SciFi</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Writing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Group writing project</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Joanna Young</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Confident writing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Something Different</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>One of my main reasons for having this blog is so that I can experiment, throw some ideas out there and learn from what sticks and what doesn’t. So when I came across <a href="http://confidentwriting.com/2009/07/mission-impossible-group-writing-project/">Joanna Young’s Mission Im(Possible) group writing project</a> for this month, I thought I’d give it a go. The challenge was to produce something in a different <em>form</em> or a different <em>medium</em>. I’ve had a desire for a few years now to write a science fiction novel, but never really got round to it, so this seemed like a good way to test the waters and stretch my comfort zone a bit.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>So, without further ado, I give you what may one day become part of my first novel.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He took a deep breath and stepped out. The sun was just peeping over the horizon and there was a fresh smell in the air, of dew and day-old cut grass, with a hint of something spicy he couldn’t quite name. The sky above was clear and blue, fading to a pale orange where it touched the horizon. There were a couple of cotton-wool clouds, bathed from below in gold.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>It was the kind of morning when it felt good to be alive, good just to be walking the earth. And, of course, it didn’t hurt that there was no other human movement for miles. He enjoyed, sometimes, taking a run out in the morning air back home, when few were awake save the milkman and the early commuter. But this was different, this time he could almost believe he could feel the peace and tranquillity that comes of being the only human for miles.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>It was strange for him to feel so much at home, scores of lightyears from the planet which gave him birth. Close up, the plants looked foreign; branching filaments emerged from the stem of each, starting the thickness of his wrist on the largest specimens, and bushing out until they were only slightly thicker than a hair at their tips. But as the landscape stretched away to the horizon, the details blurred together, and if he didn’t know better, he would have said that the lake glistening in the distance was a neighbour to Windermere or Ullswater.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>A gentle vibration just behind his left ear awoke him from his reverie. “I’m here, go ahead,” he announced, startling a small birdlike creature into the air with a squeak.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Great, boss, that’s good to know,” came a slightly irritated voice with a Scottish accent into his earpiece, “we were starting to wonder if we’d be doing this one without you.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“OK, OK, I’m with you now. Let’s get on with this.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>He looked around until he found what he was looking for and concentrated.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It took me a week to work my way up to writing this, but finally I decided I’d better get on with it, so I set a timer for 15 minutes and just started writing. This is a great technique and I really ought to use it more often; I didn’t really know what would come out when I started, but just let it flow out. I haven’t done any editing: this is exactly as it came out onto the page in the first place. It feels good to have written something so different to what I’d usually write, and I got a big confidence boost from my fianceé when she read it and told me it was good: high praise from someone who’s not really a fan of scifi! Now that I’ve got started, I hope I’ll write more; it will be interesting to see the impact that writing fiction makes on my non-fiction writing.</p>
<p><em>I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Let me know what you think in the comments section below.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-08-16:/blog/something-a-little-different/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/something-a-little-different/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/blog-moved/">Blog moved!</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/blog-moved/">Thursday 13 August 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogging</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">WordPress</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Admin</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Well, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, but I’ve finally got the hosting sorted out and got on with it. The site is based on <a href="http://mu.wordpress.org/">Wordpress MU</a> and the theme is a customised version of the <a href="http://themehybrid.com/themes/hybrid">Hybrid</a> framework. All of the content from my old site is here, so update your links. I’m still not entirely happy with everything yet, so it’ll probably change a bit over the next few weeks, but I’m learning to accept when things are good enough and override my perfectionist instincts. I’ll probably blog some more about the process of setting up the site.</p>
<p>Any feedback would be very welcome: just leave a comment below. I’ve installed the <a href="http://comluv.com/download/commentluv-wordpress/">Comment Luv</a> plugin, so if you enter a blog URL when you leave a comment it’ll show a link to your latest blog post. How’s that for generosity!</p>
<p>Also, for the benefit of Technorati, my verification code for this blog: pe7ajbxvfz</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-08-13:/blog/blog-moved/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/blog-moved/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/social-networking-at-the-university-of-sheffield-uspace/">Social networking at the University of Sheffield: uSpace</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/social-networking-at-the-university-of-sheffield-uspace/">Tuesday 28 July 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Academia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Sheffield</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">uSpace</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<img class="size-medium wp-image-278" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/uspace.png?w=300" alt="uSpace" width="300" height="127"><p>uSpace home page</p>
</div>
<p>If you’ve read a few of my previous posts, you might have noticed me talking about something called uSpace. This is the University’s new social networking platform and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve had to keep relatively quiet about it until recently but now it’s been launched, here are my thoughts on where I think this is going.<!--more-->I was quite excited to discover, in the middle of last year, that the University was investigating social networking platforms with a view to setting up their own. A whole raft of options were considered, including open-source and proprietary solutions, but CICS eventually decided to go ahead and buy <a href="http://www.jivesoftware.com/">Jive Software</a>’s Clearspace (now known as Jive SBS).</p>
<p>Having begun life as a Java-based bulletin board system, Clearspace has since evolved into a fully-fledged communication platform, incorporating a hierarchical structure, wiki-like documents, discussions, blogs and project-management features. According to <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/cics/uspace">CICS’s own information page</a>:</p>
<blockquote>It has been chosen to meet the needs of the diverse communities within the University.
<ol type="1">
<li>Academics - Develop an interactive learning area for your students in an environment integrated with MUSE and MOLE.</li>
<li>Researchers - Collaborate with external and internal colleagues in a secure and fluid way.</li>
<li>Administrative staff - Enjoy new types of communication with the University population. You can create intranet type areas for your department or Faculty, interest groups, discussions or polls. It enables much wider networking across department and role.</li>
<li>Students - It enables you to work collaboratively and creatively on course work as well as socialise with others.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>I think the main strength of uSpace is that it provides a university-controlled, safe and secure environment within which to collaborate. In research in particular it’s often considered necessary (though whether this is actually the case is another discussion altogether) to hide ones ideas from the wider research community and the general public until they are published. Using services provided by a third party, however secure and trustworthy, to collaborate is often seen as risky (though in reality insecure passwords are probably a much greater risk). In addition, there’s the very real danger that a third party could go up in smoke, taking all of your discussions, documents and data with it. Having a university-maintained system will go some way to alleviate these fears and get people using social media to the benefit of all.</p>
<p>I also like the democratising nature of social media, and that seems to have carried over to uSpace. Too many of the university’s services are segregated into students vs. staff: for example while both students and staff have an online calendar, neither can see the other’s which limits its usefulness somewhat, especially when you consider that many postgraduates need to work with research staff every day, but are classed as students. By contrast, everyone has access to the same facilities (to a greater or lesser extent) within uSpace. This might put off some staff, but will encourage use amongst students who won’t feel they’re being shortchanged.</p>
<p>On the other hand, uSpace isn’t perfect. It suffers somewhat from being a jack-of-all-trades: while all of the components are good and are well integrated, none of them can hold a candle to the best in their individual classes. Google Docs are more powerful than uSpace documents, and most wiki services provide greater flexibility. uSpace blogs provide very limited functionality, especially when compared to systems such as Wordpress. The social networking features such as friending and status updates feel clunky next to the power of Facebook or the simplicity of Twitter.</p>
<p>Another potential difficulty is Jive Software’s attitude towards the education market. They were obviously keen to play up their commitment to HE in order to make the sale, but I don’t think they’re really that bothered about it. It feels like they’ll be continuing to focus on the business sector, particularly with the recent renaming of Clearspace to Jive Social Business Software. At the start, they were very keen to provide support and help with education-related customisation. I’m not as involved as I was so I don’t know whether they’re maintaining this level of service, but I hope they do.</p>
<p>There’s definitely going to be an issue of training. Although some staff will have no problem hitting the ground running with uSpace, many others will need help getting used to such a novel way of working. And let’s not forget the students: I think we sometimes attribute them with more IT literacy than they possess. Tied into this is the fact that people will need a reason to use uSpace over whatever they already do, and it’s going to have to be a pretty good reason to overcome the natural human resistance to change. Staff and students alike will only use the service if they can understand how it will make their lives and/or work better, and at the moment a clearer message on this is needed.</p>
<p>I’m not convinced that uSpace in its current form is the way to go in the long-run, but it seems to be a good compromise for now, while the real work of embedding a culture of social media use within the university continues. In the longer term I’d like to see a more flexible solution using separate (ideally open-source) components such as Wordpress for blogging and MediaWiki for collaborative editing, but I can see this would be a big leap for most potential users and would require a lot more effort integrating and maintaining them. For the time being though, it will be interesting to see how uSpace develops and how people use it.</p>
<p>This blog post seems to have gone on a bit, so I’ll cut it off now. I will, of course, be discussing uSpace and social media in general more soon.</p>
<p><em>Have you used uSpace or something similar? How did you find it? What uses can you see? Share your thoughts in the comments below.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-07-28:/blog/social-networking-at-the-university-of-sheffield-uspace/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/social-networking-at-the-university-of-sheffield-uspace/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/portfolio-assessment-age-computer/">Portfolio assessment in the age of the computer</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/portfolio-assessment-age-computer/">Wednesday 22 July 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Portfolio</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">e-Portfolio</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Assessment</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Academia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>On the PCHE course, a major component of the assessment is the portfolio. We have to maintain this portfolio throughout the course, and include reflections on our learning and teaching experiences, along with anything else we feel is relevant, such as clippings from articles and planning materials from sessions we’ve taught. At the end of the course, we all submit our portfolios and then the external examiner selects a few (partly at random, but to cover a decent cross-section of the course demographic) to make sure that the overall standard is good.</p>
<p>I keep my portfolio in digital form, using <a href="http://www.circusponies.com/">Circus Ponies Notebook</a> on my laptop. This works very well for me, as I can type prose considerably quicker than I can write with pen and paper, so I’m able to keep up with my thoughts better. It also means that I can include movies and audio clips: for example, I have done a couple of supervision sessions with other people on the course and recorded the debrief session rather than taking notes. There are still a few physical bits of paper that I have too, primarily handouts from course workshops, but almost all of it is digital.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephanieasher/131012025/"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/56/131012025_612696397b_m_d.jpg" alt="Files by S. C. Asher, Flickr" width="240" height="180"></a><p>"Files" by S. C. Asher, Flickr</p>
</div>
<p>Now, I fully understand the reasoning behind having everyone submit their portfolio on the same day, even if only 3 or 4 will actually be checked by the examiner. If only those requested by the examiner were submitted, how could the examiner know that the rest had even produced a portfolio?</p>
<p>What I struggle to understand is this: <strong>why do I have to print off 100+ pages of A4 that may never leave the folder I submit them in?</strong> I’m going to have to put the multimedia bits on a CD anyway, so why can’t I submit the whole thing on CD. I could export it both as HTML for screen reading and as a PDF for the examiner to print and read offline if she prefers. All the links between sections would be preserved for easy browsing. I could even submit it by email (albeit quite a large one) and do away with having to submit a physical artifact at all. With a digital copy of the digital original, there’s nothing to stop the examiner from perusing it in whatever way she sees fit.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why it is that it’s done in this way: most likely it made sense when the course was first set up. I am sure, though, that it’s time to update this policy. In my ideal world, there would probably be a central e-portfolio system for us to use, but given the very personal nature of the PCHE portfolio this would probably need to be optional, since for some people the advantages of a physical portfolio outweight the disadvantages. However, even being allowed to submit the portfolio on CD would be a start.</p>
<p><em>Do you assess your learners using a portfolio? Is it a physical or digital artifact, or somewhere in between? Leave your comments below.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-07-22:/blog/portfolio-assessment-age-computer/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/portfolio-assessment-age-computer/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Saturday 30 May 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Professional development</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Ask the readers</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Today I have a challenge for you, dear reader; but first a little context.</p>
<p>Each year, the PCHE course has a couple of special interest sessions: optional workshops to look at issues related to learning and teaching in HE.</p>
<p>For a number of years this has included a session on blended learning, run by previous PCHE graduate AC. This year I offered him my assistance, little knowing that he would soon be offered a new job leaving me with an opportunity to lead the whole session.</p>
<p>So, that session is next Wednesday, and as well as selling the use of technology in teaching, I’d also like to demonstrate it’s use for professional development; this ties in nicely with themes of reflective practice and social learning.</p>
<p>To that end, I would like to ask you, the readers, to take a few seconds to answer the following question:</p>
<blockquote>What is your top reason for using technology in teaching?</blockquote>
<p>To start the ball rolling, here’s one from me:</p>
<blockquote>To make courses interesting, we should make use of a wide variety of different media, particularly those with which our students are fluent.</blockquote>
<p>Please leave your answer in the comment section, or <a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">tweet me</a>. I’ll summarise the responses on the blog next week, and they’ll also help me persuade a group of keen, talented new teachers to make more use of elearning.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-05-30:/blog/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/university-sheffield-google-mail/">Quickie: University of Sheffield to use Google Mail</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/university-sheffield-google-mail/">Wednesday 27 May 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">CICS</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Email</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">GMail</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Google</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">GoogleMail</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Sheffield</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Quickies</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I got an email in my inbox today announcing that the university will be transferring all taught students’ email accounts to <a title="Google Apps for Education" href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html#utm_medium=et&amp;utm_source=catch_all">Google Apps for Education</a> (also previously discussed <a href="http://cicsdir.blogspot.com/2009/05/quick-update-before.html">on Chris Sexton’s blog</a>). As is fairly standard, university email has until now been handled in-house. I’ve never had any problems with it: it’s reliable, and the webmail interface (based on <a href="http://www.horde.org/imp/">Horde Imp</a>) is clunky but dependable.<!--more-->However, it’s never compared with either the interface or the storage available with Google Mail. As soon as Google enabled POP3 download I set that up and I’ve never looked back. I think it’s great that the university is outsourcing its email to Google, and this is going to mean a major improvement in the student experience; after all, most students use email as instinctively as breathing these days.</p>
<p>It seems to be a win for everyone. Google gets a whole generation of students exposed to more of its products. The university gets email services for free while allowing its support staff to concentrate on doing the stuff they specialise in: supporting the institutions educational and research needs.</p>
<p>My one issue so far is that this change is currently only affecting taught students. Research students and staff will still be on the old system for a while yet. I can understand that some staff, at least, will be more resistant to this change than the students, who are with us for a few years at most. I also know a number of staff who, like the students, don’t like the current system because it’s a bit dated and awkward to use at times. It looks like I’ll be sticking with my own GMail account for now, but the transfer to Google Apps for staff/research students certainly gets my vote.</p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-05-27:/blog/university-sheffield-google-mail/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/university-sheffield-google-mail/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/storytelling/">Storytelling</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/storytelling/">Monday 25 May 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Stories</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Storytelling</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I love a good story, don’t you? I mention this because I recently had the good fortune to sit in on a lecture taught by a PCHE colleague of mine who is a brilliant storyteller. The lecture was on the subject of magic in the Bible, and consisted of a short introduction to the subject followed by a series of short stories apparently involving magic, taken from the Bible and told in her own style. She’s very exuberant, competed in storytelling competitions when she was younger and held the students spellbound for 50 minutes, at the end of which time they had not only enjoyed themselves, but had also taken in enough to come out with some intelligent questions.<!--more--></p>
<p>The whole experience really brought home the importance of the art of storytelling in teaching. When I think back to my school days one of the things that I really enjoyed in English lessons was writing stories. The key thing that my teachers always used to try to get across is that a good story should have a beginning, a middle and an end.</p>
<p>The beginning sets the scene, fills the audience in on any background they might need and generally gets the ball rolling. The middle is the meat of the story and should be where everything really happens. The end wraps up, ties up the loose ends and is the point of the rest of the story happening at all.</p>
<p>Now I come to look at it in this way, everything I write and every presentation I make tells a story. On the micro scale, each paragraph and slide tells it’s own little story. On a big scale, a lecture course or a research project is also a story.</p>
<p>I’ve particularly noticed the story structure of the PCHE course. In the beginning, we learned about reflective practice and supervision: the tools we needed to make sense of the rest. The middle consisted of a wide range of workshops related to teaching practice and theory. Now, at the end, we’ve moved on to subjects like curriculum design and course evaluation, which round everything off quite elegantly by placing it in back in the wider context which we considered earlier on.</p>
<p>Seeing teaching done in this way, with both explicit and implicit reference to stories has caused two changes in me. First, I want to start going to storytelling workshops at the folk festivals I sometimes visit. Second, I’m going to pay more attention to storytelling in my own teaching, speaking and presenting.</p>
<p><em>How do stories fit into what you do? Are you aware of the stories you tell every day? Share your thoughts in the comments section.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-05-25:/blog/storytelling/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/storytelling/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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</article>
<article>
<div class="row">
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/equity-education-giving-everyone-fair-chance/">Equity in education: giving everyone a fair chance</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/equity-education-giving-everyone-fair-chance/">Monday 18 May 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Equality</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Equity</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>There’s no denying it, it’s a tricky concept. How do we make sure that you offer everyone a fair chance? How do we define fair? Who is ‘everyone’ and what chance are we going to give them? One of the more recent <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lets/lt-supp/pche.html">PCHE</a> workshops had us discussing these very questions, so here are my thoughts on what I’ve learned.<!--more--></p>
<p>I used to think that to treat people fairly meant to disregard their race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability and all those other things which make them unique. After all, equality is touted as being a central value of modern society, and my copy of Chambers Dictionary gives the following definition:</p>
<blockquote>
<strong>equality</strong> <em>n </em>the condition of being equal; sameness; evenness.</blockquote>
<p>Looking back, though, that interpretation seems a trifle naive. No two people are identical, so treating them in the same way is always going to be a compromise; doing so blindly seems particularly insensitive.</p>
<p>For example, under that original assumption, the ideal way to interact with a person who is disabled is to treat them as though they were completely able-bodied. But think about that a bit more. I’m fortunate enough never to have been considered disabled, but I have sprained my ankle in the past, and even being so minimally-hobbled it would have seemed wrong for someone to be expecting me to carry heavy boxes up and down stairs. Treating someone in a wheelchair like that just seems downright offensive, if not just plain dim.</p>
<p>And yet neither can we jump to conclusions. Staying with the disability theme, take <a title="Wikipedia page for Evelyn Glennie" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_glennie">Evelyn Glennie</a>, who has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12. It would be easy to assume that music wouldn’t be an ideal career for her. Amazingly, she is a world-class percussionist and composer. If you’d like to see her in action, take a look at <a title="TED talks: Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen" href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html">this talk in which she teaches her audience how to listen</a>. It’s about half an hour long, so make yourself a nice cup of tea and I’ll wait for you to come back.</p>
<p>So fairness means more than just equality: we have to take people’s differences into account. However, we can’t jump to conclusions either. Not only do people differ in their natural capabilities, they also differ in how they relate to them. When you get right down to it, the only person who can tell you how I want to be treated is me.</p>
<p>But that still isn’t an end to it. If I lose my sight in an accident, I’m guessing that you probably won’t want me flying passenger aeroplanes (although check out <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/08/raf-pilot-stroke-blinded">this story about a pilot who was guided to safety after being blinded by a stroke in mid-air</a>). Even making all reasonable effort to give everyone the same opportunities, there are still cases where we just can’t.</p>
<p>When it comes down to it, we have to be sensitive to the capabilities of everyone around us. If you had a team-member who was amazing at customer service but lacked a little in the time-management department, you’d make allowances. Dealing with disability, cultural differences or whatever is no difference.</p>
<p>One person who’s really helped me learn this is a colleague of mine. Her English is good; so good that it’s easy to forget that it’s not her native language. But every now and then I’ll use a word or idiomatic phrase that I take for granted and she’ll stop me and ask what on earth I’m talking about it. Thanks to her patience, I now try to be aware of those I’m talking to, whether I’m teaching or not, and whether they’ve understood me. If not, I try to rephrase what I’ve just said or explain myself without being patronising. I’m still learning, but I’m getting there.</p>
<p><em>Have you ever run into difficulty dealing with someone who’s different to you? How do you cope with the natural diversity of the people you meet every day? Leave a comment below to share your experience.</em></p>
<p><strong>Related links:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a title="Wikipedia page for Evelyn Glennie" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_glennie">Evelyn Glennie's page on Wikipedia</a></li>
<li><a title="TED talks: Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen" href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html">TED talks: Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/08/raf-pilot-stroke-blinded">Pilot struck blind in flight shepherded to safe landing by RAF</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-05-18:/blog/equity-education-giving-everyone-fair-chance/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/equity-education-giving-everyone-fair-chance/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/mays-theme-reflection/">May's theme: reflection</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/mays-theme-reflection/">Thursday 7 May 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Uncategorized</span></li>
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<p>I’m coming up to the end of the PCHE course, so I thought I’d give over this month’s blog posts to some reflection on what I’ve learnt over the two years I’ve been studying it. I’ll be mixing up some shorter and longer posts and aiming to prompt some discussion about the wide variety of issues affecting modern education, incorporating as much of my own experience as I can shoehorn in. I expect to get at least as many things wrong as I get right: I hope you’ll join us for a good argument! <br> <br>I’ll also be experimenting with some different methods of posting — I’m posting this, for example, by email via my Posterous account (<a href="http://jezcope.posterous.com/)">http://jezcope.posterous.com/)</a>. I’ll let you know how that gets on too. <br> <br>Have any topics you’d particularly like to read my opinion on? Please let me know in the comments below.</p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-05-07:/blog/mays-theme-reflection/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/mays-theme-reflection/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/weekly-links-blogging-books-and-business/">Weekly links: blogging, books and business</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/weekly-links-blogging-books-and-business/">Sunday 26 April 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogging</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Links</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reading</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Quickies</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p style="clear:both">Here are a few things that have caught my eye this week and I thought might interest you as well.</p>
<p style="clear:both"></p>
<ul style="clear:both">
<li>
<a href="http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2006/02/10-things-to-build-blog-readership.html">open...: 10 Things to Build a Blog Readership</a> — I'll certainly be following these tips. I feel that particularly the first is relevant to practically anything you do.</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.librarything.com/topic/11264">On active reading (aka highlighting books religiously) | Readers Under 30 | LibraryThing</a> — an interesting discussion on the merits or otherwise of highlighting things in books.</li>
<li>
<a href="http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/2009/04/four-ways-to-use-serendipity-t.html">Four Ways to Use "Pull" to Increase Your Success - The Big Shift - HarvardBusiness.org</a> — a business take on the benefits of the modern web.</li>
<li>
<a title="Permanent Link: Amplified Twittering and Social Reporting" rel="bookmark" href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/amplified-twittering-and-social-reporting/">Amplified Twittering and Social Reporting</a> — James Clay suggests having dedicated 'social reporters' at conferences to keep up the real-time social media coverage when delegates are otherwise engaged in workshops.</li>
</ul>
<p><br class="final-break"></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-04-26:/blog/weekly-links-blogging-books-and-business/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/weekly-links-blogging-books-and-business/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/quickie-new-twitter-client-tweetie-released-for-mac/">Quickie: new Twitter client, Tweetie, released for Mac</a></h1>
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<div class="row">
<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/quickie-new-twitter-client-tweetie-released-for-mac/">Monday 20 April 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Clients</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tweetie</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Twitter</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Quickies</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p style="clear:both"><a href="http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/" class="image-link"><img src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/atebits-tweetie-for-mac-thumb.png" height="229" align="right" width="214" style="float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px"></a>I've been playing with Twitter for a couple of months now, and I have to say, I rather like it. I've graduated from interacting with it purely through <a href="http://twitter.com/">the Twitter site</a>, and tend to use a client for most of my tweeting.</p>
<p style="clear:both">On my iPod touch, I've been using a client by the name of <a href="http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/">Tweetie</a> from an indie developer by the name of <a href="http://www.atebits.com/">atebits</a>, which has loads of great features that I won't bore you with here. Today it was announced (<a href="http://twitter.com/atebits/status/1564541335">via Twitter, of course</a>) that the <a href="http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/">Mac version is ready for human consumption</a>.</p>
<p style="clear:both">I've switched over to it as my primary Twitter client already and I have to say I really like it. It's still got some rough edges and it's missing some useful functionality that I liked in <a href="http://www.nambu.com/">Nambu</a>, but it's already showing the great attention to detail and some of the range of features that have made the iPhone/iPod touch version so good. There are already some detailed reviews up, from <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/17/tweetie-twitter-client-with-oomph/">The Unofficial Apple Weblog</a> and <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/20/tweetie-for-mac-a-powerful-native-twitter-client-for-the-masses/">TechCrunch</a>, so I'll leave it at that, but if you're a Mac twitterer and you haven't already, I strongly recommend you give it a try.</p>
<p style="clear:both"><em>I'm also testing out another bit of software right now: a Mac blogging client by the name of <a href="http://www.drinkbrainjuice.com/blogo">Blogo</a>. This is my first post using it, and I'll let you know how I get on with it.<br></em></p>
<p style="clear:both"><em>In the meantime, how do you access Twitter? Or perhaps you dont? Leave a comment below to share your opinion.</em></p>
<p><br class="final-break"></p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-04-20:/blog/quickie-new-twitter-client-tweetie-released-for-mac/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/quickie-new-twitter-client-tweetie-released-for-mac/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/weekly-links-twitter-bits/">Weekly links: Twitter bits</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/weekly-links-twitter-bits/">Sunday 19 April 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Links</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Twitter</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Quickies</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>I often come across links that I find useful or enjoyable and that I’d like to share, but that I haven’t got time to write a full blog post about. I’ve decided, therefore, to try wrapping a few of my favourites up into a weekly(ish) digest which I’ll post here.</p>
<p>This week, a selection of Twitter-related links:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://hootsuite.com/">HootSuite</a> — Describing itself as "the ultimate Twitter toolbox", HootSuite lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts, have multiple users on one account (without revealing the password for that account), schedule tweets and much more.</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.twitip.com">TwiTip</a> — A blog filled to the brim with helpful Twitter advice and tips.</li>
<li>
<a href="http://wthashtag.com/wiki/Main_Page">What the Hashtag?!</a> — A user-written encyclopaedia of hashtags: great for figuring out the meaning of that cryptic hashtag you've just found in your Twitter stream.</li>
<li>
<a class="fn url" title="Permanent Link to 13 Twits Who Will Change Your Perspective on Reality" rel="bookmark" href="http://mashable.com/2009/04/14/twitter-science/">13 "Twits" Who Will Change Your Perspective on Reality</a> — A list of Twitter users who are well worth following.</li>
<li>
<a class="fn url" title="Permanent Link to The 10 Users You'll Meet on Twitter" rel="bookmark" href="http://mashable.com/2009/01/01/twitter-user-types/">The 10 Users You'll Meet on Twitter</a> — A breakdown of the types of people you might run into on Twitter.</li>
<li>
<a href="http://confidentwriting.com/2009/04/why-i-talk-about-the-weather-on-twitter/">Why I talk about the weather on Twitter</a> — A nice, brief comment from Joanna Young of <a href="http://confidentwriting.com/">Confident Writing</a> on joining in the conversation</li>
</ul>
<p>You can also get an idea of what I’ve been reading and doing from:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://delicious.com/jez.cope">My Delicious bookmarks</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16518345416216548412">My Google Reader shared items</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">My Twitter feed</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-04-19:/blog/weekly-links-twitter-bits/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/weekly-links-twitter-bits/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/does-wikipedia-have-a-place-in-education/">Does Wikipedia have a place in education?</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/does-wikipedia-have-a-place-in-education/">Monday 6 April 2009</a>
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Tagged with
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Academia</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tools</span></li>
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<div class="post-content">
<p>Like it or loath it, people use <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>. Some use it as a quick reference for unimportant matters, or as a jumping-off point for more detailed research. Some use it, inappropriately, as a source in its own right: English Heritage was recently <a href="http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=426&amp;storycode=3136686&amp;c=1">criticised by Building Design magazine</a> for citing a Wikipedia article as evidence in a buildings listing case. When I mentioned on Twitter recently that I was in a discussion about using wikis (though not Wikipedia itself) as an aid to research student supervision, one of my contacts replied, referring to Wikipedia as “kinda… dodgy”. <!--more--></p>
<p>As a publicly-editable wiki, Wikipedia works by and large as a repository for human knowledge, which is great. The problem is that some of the people who edit it choose to wilfully present incorrect information. For example, the birthday of the artist Titian was <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7884121.stm">recently falsified</a> in Wikipedia following an exchange in the British House of Commons; the edit was quickly traced back to the headquarters of the Conservative Party. Other users vandalise the site, while others still are simply wrong.</p>
<p>What about the case in Wikipedia’s favour? Four years ago, an <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html">article</a> (subscription required, <a href="http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69844">report in Wired here</a>) published in Nature compared 42 articles between Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. The authors reported “eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, […] four from each encyclopaedia.” In minor errors, Britannica still had the edge, but not by much.</p>
<p>Whichever way you fall on the issue, an understanding of Wikipedia is an important element of information literacy which cannot be ignored. As such, it needs to be considered by educators. So what are people doing already?</p>
<p>On the one hand, we have Prof. Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton, who <a href="http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/1961862.lecturer_bans_students_from_using_google_and_wikipedia/">bans her first year students</a> (found via <a href="http://cicsdir.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-and-future-of-thinking.html">Christine Sexton’s blog post</a>) from using Wikipedia or Google. Her aim in doing so is to force them to use and understand conventional scholarly literature so that they know what to look for in a reliable source.</p>
<p>On the other hand, we have Jeremy Boggs of George Mason University in America. His tactic is to have <a href="http://clioweb.org/2009/04/05/assigning-wikipedia-in-a-us-history-survey/">students actually contribute a well-researched article to Wikipedia</a>, and then observe how it grows and changes over the remainder of the term. This time, the aim is to give students a direct insight into the workings of Wikipedia to inform future use.</p>
<p>It is this second approach that I think we, as educators, should be taking. The constructionist view of learning, which I find useful, suggests that learners will tend to stick with their existing beliefs until these are rendered untenable through experience. Since many university students have now grown up with Wikipedia, I feel that some may need to be shown the flaws in this model of publishing before they will engage with more conventional scholarly resources. Forcing them to use these resources without a reason (and “telling them” is not sufficient reason) could result in them learning simply that books are difficult to use because of the lack of search capabilities (Google Book Search notwithstanding).</p>
<p>And it’s not just students in school and university who need to be taught these skills. There are many professionals who don’t understand this amazingly useful resource. Either they regard it with suspicion and miss out on its benefits, or fail to understand its shortcomings and treat it as more reliable than it is. Either way, all educators must engage with Wikipedia and its flaws to ensure that our learners make the best that they can of it.</p>
<p><em>Do you actively engage with your learners about Wikipedia? What tactics do you use to help them learn to use it effectively? Or do you feel that it has no place in the classroom at all? Leave me a comment below.</em></p>
<p><em>By the way, if you’re interested in this debate, I can strongly recommend listening to the <a href="http://digitalcampus.tv/">Digital Campus</a> podcast, which has covered the issue right from the <a href="http://digitalcampus.tv/2007/03/06/episode-01-wikipedia-friend-or-foe/">first episode</a>. The <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/e-learning-stuff-podcast-019-w-w-w-w-wikipedia/">most recent episode</a> of <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/">James Clay’s e-Learning stuff</a> podcast also covers Wikipedia in some detail.</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/self-selecting-audience/">Teaching with social media: engaging the audience</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/self-selecting-audience/">Wednesday 1 April 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogs</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Wikis</span></li>
</ul>
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<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035602859@N01/814099991"><img class=" " src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1235/814099991_1114cdd4a0.jpg" alt="Photo by Pete Ashton" width="350" height="233"></a><p>Photo by Pete Ashton</p>
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<p>Do you like having an audience? I know I do: that’s at least part of the reason I’m writing this blog post.</p>
<p>The social web has greatly lowered the barrier to entry for those of us who want an online presence, and given us the greatest possible chance of reaching an appreciative audience through, for example, Google, social networking and RSS aggregation. Each one of us has a unique audience, defined by our own interests and views and how those come across in our writing, photography, music or whatever else we choose to share.</p>
<p>Those people who are interested in what we have to say will listen. Those who aren’t, won’t.</p>
<p>Now, if we want to reach more people, we can put effort into tailoring our output to their interests, marketing our stuff and generally going out to meet our audience half way. But for a personal blog or special-interest wiki, we don’t have to: we can just say what we want to say, and eventually a few people will start to read it. This is one of the things that makes social media great.</p>
<p>Education is not like this (and neither is business for that matter). We cannot just do what we want to do and expect it to be eventually found by those learners who can benefit from it. If students are taking your course and you’re using social media, then they’re pretty much obliged to participate: it’s common to enforce this with assessment. Because by now we’re getting used to the democratic nature of social media, it’s easy to confuse this captive audience with a genuinely interested one and assume that they will engage.</p>
<p>So, if we make them, they will participate. But unless they’re interested in what we have to say, they won’t be engaged, and if they’re not engaged, then their learning will be severely limited.</p>
<p>But fear not, for all is not lost! They’re generally taking a course (at least in HE) in which we have some expertise, so there will be at least some overlap in interests. Take advantage of social media to get rapid feedback and comments from learners; then <em>respond to it</em><em>!</em> Thing of a blogger who you really respect: chances are that they respond quickly to comments left on their blog, learn from them and adapt to make their future posts more relevant to their readers. Why can’t this work with students too? Here are a couple of ideas that I can think of:</p>
<ul>
<li>If you're asking students to blog, try to leave a relevant comment or two on each student's blog to connect their views with your material;</li>
<li>If your students are collaborating on a wiki, check up on it from time to time and use it to inform your lectures.</li>
</ul>
<p>Yes, this takes effort, but so does everything that’s worth doing (although I won’t claim that that <em>makes</em> it worth doing). And yes, they should be hanging on your every word because you’re the expert and they’re not. But only a few of them will: the rest you have to meet halfway.</p>
<p><em>Do you use social media to engage with your students and tailor your teaching to them? Why/why not? What’s your top tip? Share your comments below.</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/ask-yourself-what-is-this-for/">Ask yourself: "What is this for?"</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ask-yourself-what-is-this-for/">Monday 23 March 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Evaluation</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tools</span></li>
</ul>
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<p>I heard an interesting anecdote a while back. I don’t know how true it is, but bear with me because it serves to illustrate a point. The story goes that when the first motion-picture camera was invented, it was intended to be used to create photographs in which the people could move, smile, wave, whatever; think wizard photos from Harry Potter. People made, sold and used these things for years before eventually, some bright spark came up with an idea: don’t just capture a single static scene, but several scenes in succession.</p>
<p>Suddenly, the landscape changed. This new medium wasn’t for helping you remember what Auntie Doris looked like. It could do that, but that wasn’t what it was for: it was for telling stories! And now, it’s used for teaching, disseminating information and even for <a href="http://www.skype.com/">two-way communication</a>. The rest, as they say is history.</p>
<p>The point of the story is that when new technologies emerge, we tend to interpret them in terms of what we already know. It generally takes us a while to figure out how to use new tools that we’ve not seen before; sometimes the problem that the new tool solves doesn’t even exist yet.</p>
<p>So when you come across a new tool (and this applies to all walks of life, not just the web), don’t just think about it in terms of things you already know. Have a play, try a few things out, then ask yourself:</p>
<blockquote><strong>What is this for?</strong></blockquote>
<p>Then keep asking until you’ve figured it out. Then tell everyone your idea and ask again. With any luck, your eventual answer will surprise even the clever folks who made the tool in the first place.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-iii/">Beginners guide to Twitter Part III: cool tools</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-iii/">Tuesday 17 March 2009</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Howto</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Hashtags</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Clients</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">URL shortening</span></li>
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<h1><span style="font-weight:normal;font-size:13px">Time for the third part of my beginners guide to Twitter. Here's how far we've got:</span></h1>
<ol>
<li>
<a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i/">Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching</a>;</li>
<li>
<a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs</a>;</li>
<li>Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier (this post).</li>
</ol>
<p>Today, I’ll be making a whistle-stop tour of some of the tools and websites that can take your twittering to a whole new level. There are far too many of these to include here, so I’ll just try to give you an overview of some of the ones I’ve come across so far. As I come across more, I’ll certainly tweet about them (<a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">follow me on Twitter here</a>) and I’ll blog in more depth about some of them too.</p>
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<h1>Useful tools</h1>
<p>First, an aside. One of the things that makes Twitter so powerful is its Application Programmer Interface or API. An API is a well defined standard which allows direct communication between a service, such as Twitter, and another piece of computer code. Because Twitter has a well-documented public API, anyone with the requisite know-how can write a software tool to add new capabilities. Not all of the tools we’ll be looking at today make use of the API, and you don’t need to know anything about how it works to use them, but I just wanted to mention another great design feature of Twitter.</p>
<h2>URL shrinking</h2>
<p>If you’ve been using Twitter for any length of time, you’ve probably used it to pass on the URL (web address) of a web page to your network. In that case, you might have noticed that since URLs can be pretty long, you don’t get much space left to describe what it is you’re actually passing on. This is where URL shrinkers come in.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<img class="size-full wp-image-174" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/shrunkurl.png" alt="A shrunk URL" width="178" height="53"><p>A shrunk URL</p>
</div>
<p>Quite simply, a URL shrinker takes your long, unwieldy URL and spits out a nice, short URL which points to the same web page. You can copy-and-paste a URL from your browser’s location bar into the URL shrinker, but most of these services will give you a bookmarklet; a link which you can drag to your browser’s bookmarks/favourites bar which becomes a button to automatically grab the URL, shrink it and copy it to the clipboard ready for use. Look this up in the online help for your URL shrinker, or look for links with titles like “Trim this”.</p>
<p>There are loads of URL shrinkers out there, but here’s a few that I’ve come across:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://snipr.com">snipr.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://bit.ly/">bit.ly</a></li>
<li><a href="http://is.gd/">is.gd</a></li>
<li><a href="http://tinyurl.com/">TinyURL</a></li>
<li><a href="http://tr.im/">tr.im</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Of these, my favourite is <a href="http://snipr.com">snipr.com</a> because of the options it provides, but I encourage you to try a few until you find one you like.</p>
<p>This class of tools are, by and large, completely independent of Twitter: you can use them to shrink any URL for any reason whatsoever. For example, I’ve used them to make URLs more manageable to distribute in print, since readers will have to type these in by hand. There are a few, though, which will allow you to shrink a URL and automatically post it straight on Twitter (yes, using the Twitter API). My favourite of these is <a href="http://twitthis.com/">TwitThis</a>.</p>
<h2>Searching, trends and hashtags</h2>
<p>As I mentioned in the previous posts, searching and hashtags provide a great way to follow specific conversations or trends on Twitter. However, Twitter’s built-in search isn’t ideal for this, particularly if there are keywords or hashtags that you search for on a regular basis. There are a whole range of search-based websites out there which allow you to track specific words or hashtags more easily.</p>
<p>The first group simply provide you with an automatically-updating stream of tweets matching a specific search. Some of these allow you to save searches that you perform regularly or display several searches onscreen at once. Here are a few to try:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://tweetgrid.com/">TweetGrid</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitterfall.com/">TwitterFall</a></li>
</ul>
<p>The second group actually allow you to interact with the conversation you’re interested in by turning the hashtag of your choice into a modern version of the old-fashioned chat rooms: they display a live log of tweets with a particular hashtag and allow you to post your own tweets which will have the hashtag in question automagically appended. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://tweetgrid.com/irc">twIRC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://tweetchat.com/">TweetChat</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Twitterfeed</h2>
<p>The next tool, <a href="http://twitterfeed.com">TwitterFeed</a> helps to combine your online offerings: it takes any RSS feed (typically a list of blog posts or news items) and checks it on a regular basis, posting any new items automatically to Twitter. So, for example, my Twitter followers will have received a brief message with a link to this blog post, which happened completely automatically a short time after it was published.</p>
<p>A word of warning: it’s easy to overdo this. Some people use Twitter and Twitterfeed purely as another outlet for their blog or news site. Your view may differ, but I find this quite annoying, particularly if there’s a high volume of traffic. If I notice a user doing this, I generally subscribe to there RSS feed elsewhere if it interests me and then stop following them: I prefer to keep my news and blogs in a separate place. However, I think for low-volume, infrequent, personal blogs such as this one it’s a great way to let people know what you’ve written, as well as a legitimate answer to the question “What are you doing?”</p>
<h2>Twitter clients</h2>
<p>If you’re becoming a regular Twitter user, you might be finding it a bit of a pain to log in to the Twitter website every time you want to get up to date. This is where clients come in. These bring Twitter right to your desktop in a dedicated application. Many of them incorporate features of other tools, such as URL shrinking and searching. Most of them have an option to check automatically for new tweets and pop up an alert to tell you when there’s something you haven’t read yet: make up your own mind about whether that’s good or bad! All of them, though, let you read your latest incoming tweets and post new ones. There are far too many to list them here, so after pointing out that I currently use <a href="http://www.nambu.com/">Nambu</a> on my laptop and <a href="http://www.atebits.com/software/tweetie/">Tweetie</a> on my iPod Touch, I’ll send you in the direction of <a href="http://twitter.com/downloads">this list on the Twitter website</a> and <a href="http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps">this more comprehensive list</a>. Download one and give it a go.</p>
<h2>Analytics</h2>
<p>If you’re really interested in that kind of thing, you might want to look at some statistics about your Twitter account and network. I won’t go into much detail on this, as I’ve not used them very much, but here are the ones I’ve come across so far:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://twitter.grader.com/">Twitter Grader</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitteranalyzer.com/">Twitter Analyzer</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twittercounter.com/">Twitter Counter</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<img class="size-full wp-image-175" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/twitter-on-facebook.png" alt="Twitter on Facebook" width="200" height="197"><p>Twitter on Facebook</p>
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Other social networks</h2>
<p>There are, of course, other social networks out there, and there are a number of ways to get them to play nicely with Twitter. There’s a <a href="http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/">Twitter app</a> for Facebook, which allows you to tweet from within Facebook, and even offers to post each tweet as a status update in your Facebook profile. I don’t use Facebook much these days, but this is an easy way for me to keep it updated.</p>
<p><a href="http://friendfeed.com/">FriendFeed</a> is a kind of meta-social-network. It aims to tie a number of other networks together in one place, so that you can read and post without having to visit a dozen different websites. I haven’t found it that useful yet, but give it a try.</p>
<p><a href="http://ping.fm">Ping.fm</a> is slightly different again. This one allows you to update your status, micro-blog, post full-length blog posts and save bookmarks in a huge variety of different social media websites simultaneously. It also gives you a wide variety of ways of doing this: through the website, by SMS (in the US only at the moment, I think), by email, by instant message (Jabber/GTalk, Yahoo!, MSN/Windows Live, AIM) and many more. An increasing number of Twitter clients are also supporting it, so you can transparently update your status on a number of different sites as you tweet.</p>
<h2>More tools</h2>
<p>There are plenty of tools that I haven’t had space or time to mention. I’ll try to blog about some of them in the future, but for now, you might want to have a look at <a href="http://twitter.pbwiki.com/">this wiki</a> — there are plenty listed under Apps, plus lots more useful information about Twitter.</p>
<p>Have you got a favourite tool that I’ve missed? Share it by posting a comment below: it’ll be great to hear from you.</p>
<p><em>That’s it for this series. If you’ve found these posts helpful, you can find out when I write new stuff by signing up for email updates or subscribing to my RSS feed: just click on the appropriate link at the top left of this page.</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">Beginner's guide to Twitter Part II: @s, #s and RTs</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">Monday 16 March 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Twitter</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tweet</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tutorial</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Retweeting</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Message</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Howto</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Hashtags</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web 2.0</span></li>
</ul>
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<h1><span style="font-weight:normal;font-size:13px">So, here's the second part of what's become a three-part introduction for new Twitterers. Here's where we are so far:</span></h1>
<ol>
<li>
<a href="../../2009/03/15/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i">Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching (yesterday)</a>;</li>
<li>Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs (this post);</li>
<li><a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-iii/">Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier (coming tomorrow).</a></li>
</ol>
<p>Let’s get on with the second part, on some of the conventions that are commonly seen on Twitter.</p>
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<h1>Conventions</h1>
<p>In my previous post, I introduced you to the basic tools of the Twitter trade: messages, followers and searches. But it doesn’t end there. Since its inception, a number of conventions have sprung up which make it much more powerful, but they can be quite confusing to the beginner. You’ll probably have noticed lots of “@this” and “#that” and “RT the other”. This post attempts to explain what all these actually mean.</p>
<h2>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<a href="http://twitter.com/replies"><img class="size-medium wp-image-168 " src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/twitterreplies.png?w=300" alt="Some replies on Twitter" width="300" height="190"></a><p>Some replies on Twitter</p>
</div>
@replies</h2>
<p>This is the most common convention: you can refer to another twitterer in a tweet (and by extension, it seems, anywhere else) by preceding their username with an ‘@’ sign. So in my case, that would be ‘@jezcope’. This is so common, in fact, that it’s been absorbed into Twitter itself. Each mention of @<em>username</em> will be turned into a link to that user’s profile page: this is a very easy way to follow new people.</p>
<p>An extension to this is that any tweet which <em>begins</em> with @<em>username</em> is interpreted as being a reply to something said by that user, or at least a comment aimed primarily at them. Unlike direct messages, these are still public, but are treated slightly differently by Twitter. In particular, you’ll see a link on the left-hand side of your Twitter home page: this will take you to a list showing only tweets starting ‘@<em>yourname</em>’. Also, if you click the reply button next to a tweet (the little curvy arrow), Twitter automatically inserts ‘@<em>theirname</em>’ at the start of the text box into which you type your tweets.</p>
<p>It’s worth paying attention to messages aimed at you in this way, because someone might be expecting a response! However, bear in mind that these messages will be visible to everyone following you, so if it looks like your conversation is likely to drag on and it’s not going to be interesting to the rest of the community, consider switching to direct messages.</p>
<h2>Retweeting</h2>
<p>Another convention that you’ll come across is retweeting. Quite simply, this entails re-posting a tweet previously posted by someone else. As is the case elsewhere, it’s important to attribute tweets to their original source, and the most common way to do this is to start the tweet with ‘RT @username’, replacing username with the originator, and then copy and paste the message in afterwards. If someone says something that you think would be interesting to people in your own network, you can pass it on with minimal effort by retweeting it.</p>
<p>So if, for example, my pal @fred posts:</p>
<blockquote>Take a look at this really cool link</blockquote>
<p>and I think it’s interesting enough to pass on to those of my followers not already following him, I would post the following message:</p>
<blockquote>RT @fred Take a look at this really cool link</blockquote>
<p>Many Twitter clients (see tomorrow’s post) allow you to do this with a single click.</p>
<h2>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ngtip09"><img class="size-medium wp-image-169 " src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/ngtip.png?w=300" alt="Search results for #ngtip" width="300" height="251"></a><p>Search results for #ngtip</p>
</div>
#hashtags</h2>
<p>Tagging is a way of describing an item on the internet, such as a blog post, using single-word descriptions. Someone had the bright idea of tagging tweets using the form #word: it’s then trivial to find everything with this tag using Twitter search. Remember that this is just a convention, and it works simply because putting # on the start of a word makes a unique string of characters that you can search for.</p>
<p>The cool thing about hashtags is that if you combine them with search tools you can separate particular threads of conversation out of the vast mélange of the twitterverse. It’s quite common for a hashtag to be prearranged for tweets discussing a conference or other event; for example, the recent JISC <a href="http://ngtip.pbwiki.com/">Next Generation Technologies in Practice</a> conference used used <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ngtip09">#ngtip09</a> to mark discussions related to the conference. Try searching for <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23rednoseday">#rednoseday</a> to find out what people have been up to for <a href="http://www.rednoseday.com/">Comic Relief</a>. If someone’s using a hashtag you don’t recognise, try looking it up on <a href="http://wthashtag.com/wiki/Main_Page">What the hashtag?!</a>, an online directory of hashtags.</p>
<p><em>That’s all for today. In tomorrow’s blog post, I’ll describe some useful tools for making Twitter work for you, including a few which make use of the power of hashtags.</em></p>
<p><em>Agree? Disagree? Leave me a comment below or contact me through Twitter at <a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">@jezcope</a>.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-03-16:/blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<article>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i/">Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i/">Sunday 15 March 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Howto</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Message</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tutorial</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Tweet</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Twitter</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web 2.0</span></li>
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<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<img class="size-medium wp-image-153" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/twitterhomepage.png?w=300" alt="Twitter home page" width="300" height="194"><p>Twitter home page</p>
</div>
<p>I’ve recently signed up to <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a>. It’s not a new thing; it’s been around for a few years and it’s probably safe to say that I’m way behind the curve on this one. For those who haven’t come across it yet, it’s a very, <em>very</em> simple social networking site which allows you to broadcast 140-character messages. However, in spite of this simplicity, it’s a very powerful tool, and can be quite off-putting for new users.</p>
<p>Since I’m a bit techie and tend to pick these things up quite quickly, a few friends have suggested that I lay down some words on how to get to grips with Twitter. I’ve ended up breaking it into three to make it a bit more digestible:</p>
<ol>
<li>Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching;</li>
<li><a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs;</a></li>
<li><a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-iii/">Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier.</a></li>
</ol>
<p>I’ll spread them out by publishing them over a period of three days. So, without further ado, here’s the first part of my guide to making this very cool tool work for you.</p>
<!--more-->
<h1>How does it work?</h1>
<p>When I said it was simple, I wasn’t kidding. Once you’ve signed up on the Twitter website, you do one of three things: send and receive messages, follow people (more on what this means in a bit), or search through the archive of old messages. That’s it. Let’s have a look at those components in more detail.</p>
<h2>Messages</h2>
<p>The core of Twitter is the status update or tweet; that’s a brief message, broadcast to every other user, taking up no more than 140 characters (letters, digits, punctuation, spaces). By and large, this will be some form of answer to the question “What are you doing?” You can send as many of these as you like, whenever you like. You can even split a longer message across several tweets (manually), but if you need to do this, you might want to question whether another medium might be more appropriate.</p>
<p>You can also send direct messages to specific users: these are completely private one-to-one communications. If you’re having a conversation publicly with another user and it’s starting to ramble on, think about switching to direct messages to avoid subjecting everyone else to a conversation that doesn’t concern them. You can only send direct messages to users who are following you: more on what this means next.</p>
<h2>Followers</h2>
<p>Wading through the tweets of every other twitterer on the planet is going to take some time. The answer to this problem is ‘following’. You’ll notice that, to begin with, your home page shows only your own tweets. No, Twitter isn’t broken: this page will only show the tweets of people you’re following.</p>
<p>This hands control over what you read back to you: you don’t have to follow anyone you don’t want to. I can’t emphasise enough how important this is: <em>don’t follow anyone whose tweets aren’t worth reading</em>. By all means follow someone for a while before you make this decision, and change your mind all you want. Just remember that if you’re not interested in updates on userxyz’s cat at 90-second intervals, no-one says you have to follow them.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<img class="size-full wp-image-155" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/followbutton.png" alt="Follow button" width="157" height="129"><p>Follow button</p>
</div>
<p>You can follow someone by visiting their profile page, which will have the form “http://twitter.com/<em>username</em>”. This page lists their most recent tweets, newest first. Right at the top, underneath their picture, there’s a button marked “Follow”: click this and it’ll change to a message telling you that you’re now following them. To stop following someone, click this message and it’ll reveal a “Remove” button for you to press. Twitter will send them an email when you start following them, but not when you stop.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<img class="size-full wp-image-156" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/following.png" alt="Following info" width="500" height="200"><p>Following info</p>
</div>
<p>On the left of your home page, there are links entitled “Following” and “Followers” which take you to a list of people you follow and people who follow you, respectively. On your followers list, you’ll see a tick next to anyone you’re also following, and a follow button next to anyone you’re not. Following people who follow you is good for at least three reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>It allows you to hold a conversation, and to receive direct messages from them;</li>
<li>It's a great way to build your network;</li>
<li>It's considered polite.</li>
</ol>
<p>That said, my previous advice still stands: you don’t have to follow anyone you don’t want to.</p>
<p>So how do you find people to follow? You’ve got a few options here. The best way to get started is to follow people you know in real life: try searching for them. As I’ve already mentioned you can follow people who follow you. You can wade through the global list of tweets and follow people with similar interests (searching will help here: see the next section). You could have a look at the <a href="http://wefollow.com/">we follow directory</a> to find people. Finally, you can explore your network by looking at your followers’ followers and so on.</p>
<p>It’s worth reiterating at this point that all your tweets are visible, ultimately, to anyone on the network. If you’re not happy with this, you can restrict access, which means that only your followers can read your tweets. It’ll also mean that you have to give your approval before someone can follow you. This might work for you, but openness has it’s benefits: you’ll find it a lot more people will follow you if you keep your account open. You’ll get a lot more out of Twitter if you stay open and simply avoid saying anything that you don’t want the whole world to know.</p>
<h2>Search</h2>
<p>So, you’ve got to grips with sending and reading tweets, you’ve chosen a few people to follow and started to join in the global conversation that is Twitter. You’re already getting a lot out of this great tool. But what about all the tweets you’re missing?</p>
<p>Perhaps you represent a company and want to know who’s talking about your brand. Maybe you’re going to attend a conference and want to connect with other delegates. Maybe you just want the answer to a question and want to see if someone’s already mentioned it.</p>
<p>For these, and many more, problems, Twitter search is the answer. Try searching for a brand, a conference or anything else you’re interested in, and you’ll quickly and easily discover what twitterers the world over are saying about it. You might even want to follow some of them.</p>
<p>Well, that’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at some of the initially confusing but massively useful conventions that have grown up within Twitter: @replies, #hashtags and retweeting.</p>
<p><em>Did you find this post useful? Is there something I’ve totally missed that you think should really be in there? Perhaps you just think I’m great (well, it might happen). I want to bring you really high quality stuff, and the only way I do that is if you (yes, you with the web browser) tell me how I’m doing. Please leave a comment below or link to me from your own blog (that’ll appear here as a comment too, with a link back to you: free publicity!). I’ll do my best to respond to feedback, correct inaccuracies in the text and write more about things that interest both me and you. Finally, if you find this post useful please tell your friends and colleagues. Thanks for stopping by!</em></p>
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<div class="post-comments-link"><a data-disqus-identifier="tag:erambler.co.uk,2009-03-15:/blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i/" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i/#disqus_thread">Comments</a></div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/social-media-resources/">Social media resources for learning and teaching</a></h1>
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<div class="post-info">
<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/social-media-resources/">Wednesday 11 March 2009</a>
</div>
Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Resources</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Sheffield</span></li>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>This post is specifically intended to support my seminar given as part of the seminar of the same title, given to my colleagues on the PCHE course as part of the “Expanding your repertoire” special interest session on Wednesday 11th March 2009. I’ll give a brief description of this seminar at the end of this post. The remainder is dedicated to a partial list of some of the most popular/interesting social media tools for learning and teaching.</p>
<!--more-->
<h1>What is "social media"?</h1>
<p>Social media, Web 2.0 (and by extension, Learning 2.0) or whatever you want to call it can be pretty slippery to actually define. Here are a few starting points:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html">What is Web 2.0?</a> — Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media</li>
<li>Wikipedia articles:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0">Web 2.0</a></li>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media">Social media</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Some <a href="http://www.commoncraft.com/show">cool introductory videos</a> from the Common Craft show</li>
</ul>
<h1>Examples</h1>
<p>Here are some of the most common types of social media tools currently available on the web, with examples. This is by no means a complete list, but <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> should help you if you want more.</p>
<h2>Wikis</h2>
<p>A wiki is a collection of web pages that can be edited in-place in the web browser by any user, with little or no knowledge of how to write conventional web pages using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML">HTML</a>. Most wikis allow you to restrict what it means to be a “user”, provide some standard navigational features and record the full edit history of each page. They’re great for collaboratively building a knowledge base on a particular subject, or for organising projects as a group.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki">The first ever wiki</a></li>
<li>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> — the best-known example</li>
<li>Places to set up your own wiki:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.pbwiki.com/">PBwiki</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.wetpaint.com/">WetPaint</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.wikia.com/">Wikia</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Blogs</h2>
<p>A blog (from web-log) is a website based around a series of articles, which are indexed and presented in chronological order. The articles may be as long or short as the author likes, and on any subject. Most blogging platforms provide management tools and an editor which, again, requires no knowledge of HTML. Here are some places to start your own blog:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.wordpress.com/">Wordpress</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.typepad.com/">Typepad</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.blogspot.com/">Blogspot</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Social networking</h2>
<p>Social networking connects people together, allowing them to share content with friends and friends-of-friends.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a> — begun for university students, but now available to all</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.myspace.com/">MySpace</a> — now popular primarily with musicians and bands</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a> — aimed at professional networking</li>
<li>
<a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> — centred around broadcasting of 140-character status updates, referred to as microblogging; simple and flexible</li>
</ul>
<h2>Social bookmarking</h2>
<p>Social bookmarking allows you to tag any page you find on the web, save a bookmark for later and share it with your connections.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.delicious.com/">Delicious</a></li>
<li><a href="http;//ma.gnolia.com/">Magnolia</a></li>
<li><a href="http://citeulike.com/">citeulike</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Media sharing</h2>
<p>Media sharing sites allow you to upload and share photos, videos and types of multimedia content.</p>
<ul>
<li>Photo sharing:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://flickr.com/">Flickr</a></li>
<li><a href="http://photobucket.com/">Photobucket</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Video sharing:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://youtube.com/">YouTube</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Presentation sharing:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/">SlideShare</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Specific educational sites</h2>
<p>While all of the above have educational uses and many of them provide specific services for educational users, there are a couple of websites which cater specifically to the educational community.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://moodle.org/">Moodle</a> — A learning management system (LMS) built on Web 2.0 principles</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.edmodo.com/">Edmodo</a> — A microblogging service (like <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a>) for education</li>
</ul>
<h1>The seminar</h1>
<p>The goal of the seminar was to introduce some of my fellow trainee teachers to the potential of social media for learning and teaching, and perhaps infect them with some of my enthusiasm, and also to inform them about the <a href="http://snipr.com/bluecloud">bluecloud project</a>. I began by showing the wonderful video from <a href="http://www.commoncraft.com/show">the Common Craft Show</a> on social media, using ice cream as a metaphor. I then gave a few examples of well-known social media tools and listed the common features, before asking those present to split into groups to come up with ideas for how they could use these new tools in their own learning, teaching or research. We then discussed these together as a whole group, and I demonstrated one way of using blogging by directing them here for further resources.</p>
<div class="video-container">
<iframe src="//www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/40vegaZNIXqbo3" width="425" height="355" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC; border-width:1px; margin-bottom:5px; max-width: 100%;" allowfullscreen=""> </iframe> <div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="//www.slideshare.net/jezcope/social-media-in-teaching-and-learning" title="Social Media In Teaching And Learning" target="_blank">Social Media In Teaching And Learning</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="//www.slideshare.net/jezcope" target="_blank">Jez Cope</a></strong> </div>
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<h1 class="post-title"><a href="../../blog/blog-career-news/">Blog/career news</a></h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/blog-career-news/">Friday 6 March 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Admin</span></li>
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<div class="post-body">
<div class="post-content">
<p>Hello loyal readers! I thought you might like to know where this blog will be going over the next few years, so I’m announcing that I’ve taken a decision to pursue a career in training and development, with a focus on e-learning. I’ll continue to blog about the bluecloud project, but I’ll also be writing about more general e-learning topics that I think you might find interesting and reflecting on my experience of making the transition to my new career. I’ve updated the about page on this site to give a bit more professional info about myself.</p>
<p>If you’ve got any advice for a new e-learning professional, or would like to contact me for any other reason, please leave a comment here or follow me on Twitter (<a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">@jezcope</a>).</p>
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<p>I’ve got Radio 4 on while I do the washing up, and I’m listening to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00m68c0/Its_My_Story_Accepting_Jack_Six_Years_On.../">It’s My Story: Accepting Jack - Six Years On</a>. It follows a number of families with kids who have special needs, and about 20 minutes in, there’s a wonderful moment when a sibling is describing the benefits of having a brother with disabilities. In between not having to walk far to school and getting to skip the queue at the theme park, this young boy announces that he’s had “a lot of learning experiences”, having had to learn sign language which he might need later in life.</p>
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<p>Next week I’ll be presenting an ePoster and short presentation at <a href="http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc/alt-c-2011">ALT-C<br>
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<p>I’m planning to follow the <a href="http://cicsdir.blogspot.com/">Chris Sexton</a> model of blogging as I go along at<br>
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<h2 id="slides">Slides</h2>
<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_9061070">Presentation: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope/virtual-research-environments-supporting-research-and-researcher-development" title="Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development">Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development</a><object id="__sse9061070" width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=eposter0210slides-110829161623-phpapp02&amp;stripped_title=virtual-research-environments-supporting-research-and-researcher-development&amp;userName=jezcope">
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<p><a title="View Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/63641777/Virtual-Research-Environments-Supporting-research-and-researcher-development">Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development</a></p>
<iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" src="http://www.scribd.com/embeds/63641777/content?start_page=1&amp;view_mode=list&amp;access_key=key-p0g9i5msb6jp71uy06s" data-auto-height="true" data-aspect-ratio="0.706697459584296" scrolling="no" id="doc_11531" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe>
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<h2 id="plan-ceibal">Plan Ceibal</h2>
<p><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6208/6121549503_7f7377ccda_m.jpg" alt="Keynote" id="post-image" class="alignright"><br>
After a short introduction from the Lord Mayor of Leeds, conference chair John Cook handed over to Miguel Brechner from Uruguay to talk about the inspiring Plan Ceibal.</p>
<p>This project started in 2006 and tapped into the One Laptop Per Child programme to provide every schoolchild in Uruguay with a laptop and Internet access. I can’t really do it justice here, but I encourage you to watch the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ClipsFromALT">recording of his talk and the questions afterwards</a>.</p>
<p>By focusing on users and usability, rather than on the technology, and not just letting vendors taking the lead, Plan Ceibal has made a reall cultural and social difference in Uruguay. Kids are now eager to get to school, parents are getting online with the help of their children.</p>
<p>It raises serious questions about how we do technology in our schools. I don’t have the statistics to hand, but it sounds rather like a developing country has more schoolchildren with Internet access than we do, which is worrying. If they can teach programming and robotics in primary school, why are we still having computer classes (and qualifications, such as ECDL) that focus on word processing and spreadsheets?</p>
<h2 id="cloud-learning-with-google-apps">Cloud Learning with Google Apps</h2>
<p>My first parallel session was about Google Apps in education. I had high hopes of this, but to be honest, I didn’t feel I learnt very much from it.</p>
<p>The guy from Google did wave a Chromebook around, which looks like a very useful device, but possibly a bit hamstrung without a network connection until HTML5 offline web apps become a bit more commonplace. There were also rumours of being able to run virtualised desktop apps in the browser thanks to a partnership with Citrix, but no demonstration of how at might work.</p>
<p>The one thing that did show some promise was the brief mention of Manish Malik’s work to use Google App Engine to start building a <a href="http://edublend.blogspot.com/">VLE integrated with Google Apps</a>, which he calls a Cloud Learning Environment. I’ll be looking into that in a bit more detail when I get a chance.</p>
<h2 id="collaborative-technology">Collaborative technology</h2>
<p>After lunch it was three short papers on the general theme of collaboration with technology. Jill Fresen of the University of Oxford gave a nice overview of the mobile interface, <a href="http://m.ox.ac.uk">Mobile Oxford</a>, to their Sakai-based VLE, WebLearn. They’ve done some really interesting work with it, especially integrating with the Sakai Polls tool to make a cheap, mobile audience response system.</p>
<p>Jak Radice and Maureen Readle had some interesting stories to tell about<br>
digital story telling. They’ve done some really interesting work (with their<br>
colleague at the University of Bradford, Caroline Plews) bringing the stories<br>
of real health service users into the classroom. If you’re interested in<br>
learning more about that, take a look at their fictional town of<br>
<a href="http://bradton.pbworks.com/">Bradton</a>.</p>
<p>Finally, Chris Turnock talked about his work with Erik Bohemia at Northumbria<br>
University setting up tools to help students collaborate with each other and<br>
with external partners. I really like they way they focused on open source<br>
solutions and managed to ensure they were as integrated as possible into the<br>
university systems.</p>
<h2 id="pecha-kucha">Pecha Kucha!</h2>
<p>Next up, I’m afraid I wasn’t paying as much attention as it was my turn to<br>
speak. You can see my <a href="../altc2011-poster-and-slides">poster and slides about our Virtual Research Environment<br>
in my earlier post</a>, and if I get round to it<br>
I’ll add some words to the slideshare presentation so you can all understand<br>
what it was all about!</p>
<p>Also in the same session, <a href="http://twitter.com/ajcann">Alan Cann</a> from the<br>
University of Leicester asked some interesting questions about reading lists<br>
for students, which came out of his attempts to get his own students <a href="http://scireadr.com/">reading<br>
around the subject more</a>.</p>
<p>Finally, Philip Wane from Nottingham Trent University had some useful thoughts<br>
on his experiments providing feedback to his students via video. Not only did<br>
most students watch their own feedback, they also watched each others, and<br>
watching the videos made them much more likely to collect the paper versions of<br>
their assignments from the office and read the feedback in the margins too.<br>
Great work!</p>
<h2 id="dinner">Dinner!</h2>
<p>I suppose I should mention that the dinner tonight was pretty impressive. I’m<br>
sure <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com">James Clay</a> will have tweeted<br>
photos of it, but it’s a bit late at night to go searching for the link now so<br>
I’ll leave it there.</p>
<p>Looking forward to tomorrows session, especially Anne-Marie Cunningham’s<br>
invited talk on professional identity and some intriguing-sounding banjo<br>
playing from Dave Kernohan in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmN_zdnrQFc">“Are we in open<br>
country?”</a>. Bye for now…</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2011-day-2/">Wednesday 7 September 2011</a>
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<p><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6210/6123669460_c6a81e8d3e_m.jpg" alt="Home on the range" id="post-image" class="alignright"><br>
Continuing with the task I began yesterday, here are my initial thoughts on<br>
today’s talks and workshops at ALT-C 2011.</p>
<h2 id="social-media-and-professional-identity">Social media and professional identity</h2>
<p>I began the day with <a href="http://wishfulthinkinginmedicaleducation.blogspot.com/">Anne-Marie<br>
Cunningham’s</a> talk on<br>
professional identity in the context of medical education. Anne-Marie herself<br>
has a complex identity, as practitioner, educator, researcher and student, and<br>
when she began blogging and tweeting in order to combat the isolation she<br>
sometimes felt as a GP she found that identity challenged in some interesting<br>
ways.</p>
<p>Following Anne-Marie’s talk was a poorly disguised sales pitch from some guy<br>
who works for Blackboard — the least said about that the better, I think.</p>
<h2 id="led-by-the-knows">Led by the “Knows”</h2>
<p>Next up, <a href="http://about.me/dajbelshaw">Doug Belshaw</a> and <a href="http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1990/">John<br>
Traxler</a> gave me a refreshing change: a<br>
workshop which was actually a workshop. They’d chosen a couple of collections<br>
of elearning-related case-studies, and split us into groups to critically<br>
analyse the case-studies therein. We got a really good debate going, trying to<br>
decide what the purpose of a case study should be and what it should contain to<br>
be valid/useful.</p>
<p>For my part, I think that a lot of the weaknesses we identified could be<br>
mitigated by the inclusion of references to the sources of the data quoted, so<br>
that if you choose you can verify the conclusions for yourself.</p>
<p>I did like John Traxler’s comment that we need to be wary of policy-based<br>
evidence replacing evidence-based policy.</p>
<h2 id="are-we-in-open-country">Are we in Open Country?</h2>
<p>The last session before lunch was a bit of fun, but with a serious message too.<br>
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/ambrouk">Amber Thomas</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/daveowhite">David<br>
White</a>, <a href="http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/">David<br>
Kernohan</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/Helenbeetham">Helen<br>
Beetham</a> got dressed up as characters from<br>
the Wild West to talk about issues related to OER. There was even bonus banjo<br>
music from Dave Kernohan!</p>
<p>Some of the most interesting points for me came up in the extended discussion<br>
that followed their introductory presentation. In particular, it’s very<br>
important when thinking about OER to not get sidetracked by the content. Making<br>
content open has some value, but it does not democratise access to education<br>
<em>per se</em>; in some ways it can have the opposite effect. It’s important to<br>
be able to associate the pedagogical context with a given open resource.<br>
Similar arguments seem to apply to other forms of openness as well.</p>
<h2 id="transforming-american-education">Transforming American Education</h2>
<p>After lunch we had a keynote speech from <a href="http://www2.ed.gov/news/staff/bios/cator.html">Karen<br>
Cator</a>, Director of the Office<br>
of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. She told us a<br>
bit about the Obama government’s plans for educational technology, which does<br>
indeed sound quite impressive!</p>
<p>She described technology as a “force multiplier” — not a replacement for<br>
teachers but a way of making teachers more effective, which I think is the<br>
only attitude that can work in the long term. As part of that, they’re making<br>
an effort to make educational research more transparent and accessible to<br>
educators so that they have more opportunities to learn about<br>
evidence-supported good practice.</p>
<p>She also talked about making learning more like a game, something which I’m<br>
currently a bit sceptical about. I can see the advantages, but there’s always<br>
the danger that as you incentivise one group you end up disincentivising or<br>
even alienating another. It has to be implemented in a sufficiently fool-proof<br>
way to avoid that situation occurring.</p>
<h2 id="effective-web-conferencing">Effective web conferencing</h2>
<p>My final session of the day was a workshop on web conferencing with a guy from<br>
<a href="http://www.collab8.com/">collaborATE</a>, who provide support for Adobe Connect<br>
in the UK. I’ll admit, I was a bit wary of this after the earlier Blackboard<br>
sales pitch, but actually the presenter did a great job of providing us with<br>
some useful tips for running a successful webcast.</p>
<p>I took a lot of notes from this session, so I’ll probably save them for another<br>
post, perhaps when I’ve had chance to try them out. The key message, though,<br>
was this: <em>preparation, preparation, preparation</em>. Like all forms of<br>
communication, webcasting works best when you’re confident, well practiced and<br>
in control of your environment.</p>
<p>In a little bit it will be time to relax a bit and have a good old chinwag with<br>
some old and new friends at the gala buffet, so I’ll wrap it up for now.</p>
<hr class="colruler">
<p>PS. If you’re wondering where all my tweets about the conference have gone, I’m<br>
experimenting with a separate conference account,<br>
<a href="http://twitter.com/jezconf">@jezconf</a> to avoid spamming my regular followers<br>
with lots of ALT-C tweets. If you’re interested, please follow that account, or<br>
you can just follow the conference hashtag,<br>
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23altc2011">#altc2011</a>.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2011-day-3/">Thursday 8 September 2011</a>
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<p>And so ALT-C 2011 draws to a close. I followed online last year and the year before, but it’s been my first chance to attend in person, which has been a great experience. I’ve met lots of people who I’ve been following online for some time, and plenty more who are completely new to me. I also seem to have come up with a new job title and a bit of a mission, on which more at some future time. For now, here are my first thoughts on this final day of the conference.</p>
<h2 id="project-results">Project results</h2>
<p>I was up bright and early again, this time to hear some of the results from three small learning technology projects.</p>
<p>Lyn Greaves (UWL) and Claire Bradley (London Met) told us about their development of open educational resources to support students’ digital literacy and general academic practice.</p>
<p>Cheryl Middleton and Steve Brierley (Sheffield Hallam) presented their experiences in using enquiry-based learning methods instead of conventional lectures to deliver a course to their Information Systems undergraduates. They were inspired by Donald Clark’s keynote at last year’s ALT-C, and it’s great to see lecturers attending the conference and sharing their own practice from the front lines.</p>
<p>Finally, Vicki McGarvey and Anna Armstrong (Nottingham Trent University) shared with us their project to encourage lecturers to share their learning objects with each other.</p>
<p>Great work all three groups!</p>
<h2 id="making-the-case">Making the case</h2>
<p>My next session of the morning was run by freelancer Sarah Chesney, who recently carried out research commissioned by PebblePad to find how individuals and small teams were convincing senior management to roll out successfully concluded small-scale projects on a wider basis.</p>
<p>Sarah did a good job of getting us talking together over a couple of example scenarios, and gave us some useful pointers. For example, she pointed us towards the <a href="http://sloanconsortium.org/5pillars">Sloan-C Quality Framework</a> as a useful tool to help structure thinking around the quality of a initiative.</p>
<p>I think my main takeaway from this session will be to always be paying attention to data on costs of particular ways of doing things, especially for the period <em>before</em> and after making a change. Gathering data to convince management is not always at the front of your mind when you’re not sure yourself whether a particular change will work.</p>
<h2 id="the-elusive-technological-future">The elusive technological future</h2>
<p>Invited speaker <a href="http://memex.naughtons.org/">John Naughton</a> closed the conference with a thought-provoking talk on the impossibility of predicting the pace and direction of technological change. This is another talk that I doubt I can do justice with a summary, so I encourage you to take a look at the online recording when it becomes available on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/clipsfromalt">ALT YouTube channel</a>.</p>
<p>One aspect which caused a bit of a stir, on Twitter at least, was Naughton’s presentation style: just him, a microphone and a script on his iPad. It sounds like a recipe for all that is bad about the lecture as a format, but in fact it was riveting.</p>
<p>There was a certain amount of frustration that he wouldn’t be drawn on what the implications were for education, but my own feeling is that he was quite sensibly avoiding speaking about something when he didn’t feel qualified to do so — the whole gist of his argument was that it is futile to try and predict what technology will do to our society in the future.</p>
<p>Anyway, I hope you’ve found my small slice of ALT-C useful and interesting. I certainly enjoyed it! It’s sparked off a few different trains of thought which may well develop into blog posts in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space!</p>
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<p>Well, I’ve arrived in Manchester for ALT-C 2012, registered and checked into my room. Tomorrow Cathy Pink and I will be talking about <a href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/news/get/2012/09/10/exploiting-research-data-for-teaching-at-alt-c-2012/">using research data for teaching</a>.</p>
<p>Leave a comment here or contact me via Twitter if you’d like to meet up — I’m here for the whole conference, and hopefully blogging as I go along.</p>
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<p>So today was day 1 of ALT-C 2012. Here are a few thoughts from the day.</p>
<p>The conference kicked off with an inspiring keynote from Eric Mazur. Eric is a physicist at Harvard, and when he’s not doing photonics research, he brings the scientific method to bear on his teaching practice.</p>
<p>He gave three examples that were interesting in their own right, but the key takeaway message was this: <strong>data is essential to improving teaching practice</strong>. Rather than coming up with anecdotes that go “well, my students seem to like it when I blah blah blah”, why not set up a simple experiment to actually test what helps those students learn.</p>
<p>After lunch, Cathy and I did a workshop on using research data for teaching, as part of the <a href="http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/research360">Research360 project</a>. I won’t go into too much detail (it did what it said on the tin), other than to say that I felt like it went pretty well — all the attendees got into the exercises and some really productive discussions took place.</p>
<p><a href="http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/27974">Take a look at the session page to see the slides and exercises</a>.</p>
<p>After that, I saw a couple of demonstrations of some cool stuff (<a href="http://blogs.kingston.ac.uk/ltrg/category/nooblab/">NoobLab</a>, <a href="http://curatr.co.uk/">curatr</a>), and caught up with a few of the JISC digital literacy projects.</p>
<p>So far, then, another interesting conference. The catering’s been pretty good too. A lot of carbohydrate, though: lunch was served with cous cous, chips and boiled potatoes (and bread rolls if you wanted) and dinner was equally carbalicious. Perhaps it’ll help me run faster in the morning.</p>
<p>It’s late. I’m wittering. Bye for now!</p>
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<p><em>It’s been a little while since ALT-C 2012 now, so I thought I’d better write up the rest of my notes. Here’s day 2 in all it’s glory.</em></p>
<p>My day started off with James Clay’s workshop entitled “A few of my favourite things” — just an opportunity for gadget lovers to share some of their favourite apps (mostly iPad/iPhone, but a few Androids in there too).</p>
<p>There were a lot of popular apps in there, like the ever-present <a href="http://evernote.com/">Evernote</a> and <a href="http://instagram.com/">Instagram</a>, but there were a few interesting ones I hadn’t come across, or was able to see in a new light:</p>
<dl>
<dt><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JotNot!_Scan">JotNot</a></dt>
<dd>Lets you take a photo of a page and semi-automatically straightens it and enhances it so you get a flat, high-contrast version — a scanner in your pocket. Looks like this is abandonware, but instead I discovered <a href="http://www.thegrizzlylabs.com/genius-scan/">Genius Scan</a>, which has many more features.</dd>
<dt><a href="http://tunepal.org/">TunePal</a></dt>
<dd>One for lovers of traditional music: search for info on and dots for a traditional tune by playing a bit of it into your phone.</dd>
</dl>
<p>Next followed an interesting session introducing some tools from projects on the JISC Digital Literacies programme. I particularly liked the digital literacies lens on the <a href="https://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html">SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy</a>. There’s a lot of (perhaps true but not very helpful) talk going round at the moment about “everyone having a different definition of digital literacy”, so it’s good to see a fairly concise high-level view of what we’re actually talking about on that subject.</p>
<p>As a recovering mathematician, I found Natasa Milic-Frayling’s keynote on network analysis fascinating. Her team at Microsoft Research have developed an Excel plugin, <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/nodexl/">NodeXL</a> for analysing networks (and obtaining data from social networks to analyse).</p>
<p>She described some interesting work analysing voting patterns of US senators, and correlating connections in social networks with geographic distribution.</p>
<p>Students introduced to NodeXL were able to get straight into playing with network data, and quickly took on board the basic concepts (various ideas of the importance of a network node) without needing to grasp the underlying maths (such as the various equations for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality">centrality</a>).</p>
<p>My last session of the day was from Clive Young of University College London, talking about “blended” roles in e-learning. These are typically those people who provide general admin support to lecturers, and are increasingly being expected to managed VLE modules and other online elements of courses on behalf of the lecturers.</p>
<p>At UCL, these teaching administrators with blended roles had self-organised into a support network, as they were getting no targeted support on how to use Moodle from the e-learning team. This was, of course, rectified, and in the end 10% of the staff identified in blended roles went on to achieve <a href="http://www.alt.ac.uk/get-involved/certified-membership">CMALT</a> status.</p>
<p>All interesting stuff, and I’ll be back to post my thoughts on day 3 soon.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/altc2012-part-3/">Saturday 6 October 2012</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">ALT-C 2012</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Change management</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">JISC</span></li>
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<p><em>Finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: day 3 of ALT-C 2012!</em></p>
<p>First up, Professor Mark Stubbs (Head of Learning and Research Technologies at Manchester Metropolitan University) gave an interesting talk on the MMU curriculum redesign. This isn’t my primary interest, but there were some useful nuggets in there about change management. The key lessons they learned from a complete redesign of the undergraduate curriculum in a very short time were:</p>
<ol>
<li>Engage people; and</li>
<li>Keep it simple.</li>
</ol>
<p>I particularly liked how they revamped the forms for approving new modules to keep them short, focused and aligned with the desired outcomes of the project (rather than gathering huge amounts of spurious info and getting loads of irrelevant people to sign off). This approach has important lessons for us at Bath as we introduce Data Management Planning to our researchers.</p>
<p>Next up was JISC Head of Innovation <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/contactus/staff/sarahporter">Sarah Porter</a>, talking about the ongoing reshaping of JISC in the wake of the <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/hefcereview.aspx">HEFCE review</a>.</p>
<p>My second session of the day was James Clay’s “<a href="http://elearningstuff.net/2012/02/29/alt-c-2012-pilot-mentality/">Pilot mentality</a>” symposium. This was based on James’s observation that although “pilot” usually implies something that will be tried out then reported on and scaled up, there seem to be a lot of so-called “pilots” which end up being one-offs. More worryingly, we see the same “pilots” being run across the sector.</p>
<p>I actually ended up writing a whole lot about this session here originally, without feeling like I’d done the topic justice, so I’ve scooped all of that out into its own post, to appear in the near future.</p>
<p>So, onto the final session of the conference, entitled “TEL<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> Research: Who needs it?” from the London Knowledge Lab’s <a href="http://elearningstuff.net/2012/02/29/alt-c-2012-pilot-mentality/">Richard Noss</a>. My reaction to this was mixed, I have to say, but overall there some good points.</p>
<p>80 years after the invention of the printing press, it was still only being used to print the bible, and we’ve been using computers in education for fewer than 50 years, so I agree that we probably don’t have a clue what ed. tech. will eventually end up looking like. We’re very good at using new technology to reproduce existing practices and processes, but it takes a while to realise its true potential.</p>
<p>He also wheeled out the old argument that you have to understand how a technology works to use it effectively. Agreed, his examples of senior managers in investment banks failing to understand basic statistics is compelling, but I don’t think it’s fully generalisable. After all, people have been making pretty good bread and cheese for centuries without understanding microbiology.</p>
<p>Understanding a technology means we can be <em>more</em> effective (and more subtle) about its use, but I don’t think complete understanding is a requirement for some level of effectiveness: part of being human is being very good at getting by.</p>
<p>I did like his comments about studying extremes of human behaviour to learn about the norm: I find in my work, sometimes, that I’m drawn to techies and luddites!</p>
<p>Anyway, it was quite a thought provoking conference again, the more so because I’m more focused on research technology at the moment and attending helped me cross-fertilise a bit. I’m not sure if I’ll be going again next year: <a href="http://digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk/">Digital Research</a> is looking very interesting and tends to clash, so we’ll see.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>For those not involved in this area, <em>TEL</em> is the acronym for technology-enhanced learning. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/annotating-the-web-diigo-vs-google-sidewiki/">Saturday 31 October 2009</a>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/plindberg/32809925/"><img alt="Margin Notes by Peter Lindberg" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/21/32809925_6b27ccbda6_m.jpg" title="Margin Notes" width="180" height="240"></a><p>Margin Notes by Peter Lindberg</p>
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<p>For a long time, I’ve been the sort of person who tends to read and absorb information, without really wanting or needing to scribble notes down. This is probably because my background has been maths and computing, and the elegance of mathematics as a language is in its ability to express big ideas and small in a concise way: no annotation needed if everything you need is there.</p>
<p>More recently, though, I’ve been reading things with, well, more words in them.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>Learning how to teach has been an education (pun fully intended) — I’ve started reading a much broader range of material, and a lot of it is quite social-sciencey. This stuff is necessarily quite verbose, and I find I need to take notes and rephrase things in my own way to get the most out of them.</p>
<p>Now, with library books, people seem to get a bit upset if you start scribbling in the margins. I have to keep a notebook in which to jot down thoughts.</p>
<p>Out on the web, the situation used to be much the same: unless a web page specifically included features for commenting, any annotation had to be kept in a notebook or a separate file, leaving you searching through to find what notes go with which page or dreaming up an ingenious indexing system.</p>
<p><strong>No longer!</strong></p>
<p>A while back, <a href="http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/">Mark Morley</a> pointed me in the direction of <a href="http://diigo.com/">Diigo</a>. I’d variously been using <a href="http://delicious.com/">Delicious</a> and Magnolia (now defunct, but replaced by the intriguing <a href="http://gnolia.com/">gnolia</a>) for storing bookmarks, so I thought I’d give this rival service a try.</p>
<p>For a while, I used it just as a bookmarking service, but it wasn’t long before I cottoned on to the real power of Diigo: highlighting and sticky notes.</p>
<p>Using the Diigo plugin for Firefox, or the diigolet (a rather clever little bookmarklet) you can:</p>
<ul>
<li>highlight any part of any web page, in a variety of colours;</li>
<li>add comments to your highlightings;</li>
<li>add sticky notes to the page.</li>
</ul>
<p>Now, I can take all the notes I want, and keep them right next to the page they refer to. Great for getting the most learning out of what I read.</p>
<p>But the really exciting thing is that I can choose to make my comments public. And so can other people. And when we do that, it becomes a conversation. I can talk and debate with people all over the world on any website, whether or not that site allows it or not.</p>
<p>And that’s <em>pretty cool</em>. If you want to learn more, check out this <a href="http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/video-guide-to-diigo-annotations/">video guide</a> or take a look at an <a href="http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.copyblogger.com%2Fbad-writing-habits?tab=comment">annotated blog post</a>.</p>
<p>Now, a few weeks ago, Google got in on the act with their new <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/help-and-learn-from-others-as-you.html">Sidewiki</a> project, and it’s <a href="http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/google-sidewiki-the-web-just-changed-again/">caused</a> <a href="http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/surfacing-google-sidewiki-comments-within-a-web-page/">a bit</a> <a href="http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2009/09/25/google-force-feeds-social-media-on-the-world/">of a</a> <a href="http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/09/24/googles-sidewiki-shifts-power-to-consumers-away-from-corporate-web-teams/">stir</a>. It’s not as flexible as as Diigo — it’s a very simple sidebar-type affair — but it does a similar job in terms of turning the web into a conversation.</p>
<p>The big advantage it has is the Google brand behind it. It’s built into a special version of the Google Toolbar and I think we can expect it to make it into the standard version before long; it’ll also be working its way into Google’s new browser, Chrome. There’s an open API too, which means that if you don’t want to use Google Toolbar, there’s <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46311">this standalone client for Firefox</a>.</p>
<p>So now, I can scribble all over your web page. What are you going to do about it?</p>
<p><em>On a semi-related note, I’m still looking for ideas and opinions about <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/10/21/ask-the-readers-do-you-keep-a-portfolio/">using a portfolio to record professional development</a>, so please drop by that post and join in the conversation.</em></p>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/917press/3539927781/"><img alt="Room 800: Police Evidence Room by Sam Teigen" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3332/3539927781_d81fb910b2_m_d.jpg" title="Room 800: Police Evidence Room" width="240" height="178"></a><p>Room 800: Police Evidence Room by Sam Teigen</p>
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<p>One of my favourite posts so far has been my <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/05/30/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">first Ask the Readers post</a>, so I’ve decided it’s time to continue the series with another request for ideas. I’ve written before about how I kept a <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/07/22/portfolio-assessment-age-computer/">digital portfolio</a> as part of my Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education qualification. It’s something that I learned a lot from, particularly in conjunction with learning about learning, and I’ve continued the reflective ethos of that portfolio here on the blog.</p>
<p>But as I’ve come to the end of my current stint of volunteering at the National Trust (on which more in a later post), I’ve been feeling that I want something a bit more than just the shouting into the void that I do here.<br>
<!--more--></p>
<p>I have two difficult tasks ahead:</p>
<ol>
<li>Find a challenging and rewarding job in a very competitive marketplace;</li>
<li>Continue to learn and grow outside the structures of formal education.</li>
</ol>
<p>What I really want, then, is somewhere I can:</p>
<ul>
<li>Continue to reflect and learn, even when said reflections aren’t suitable for public consumption;</li>
<li>Gather a base of evidence for my skills, to draw on when applying for jobs, and to identify gaps for me to work on;</li>
<li>Access online, from work, home, conferences, etc.;</li>
<li>Keep private but make available to individuals for PDRs, professional qualifications, etc.;</li>
<li>Retain control of and keep regular backups of (this stuff’s valuable).</li>
</ul>
<p>It seems to me like it’s time to resurrect a full portfolio, but as I’m new to this I thought I’d ask for some advice. My question to you is this: <strong>Do you keep a professional portfolio and if so, what are your top tips for doing so?</strong></p>
<p>To get the ball rolling, this is where I am at the moment:</p>
<ul>
<li>I’ve set up a new blog on my trusty self-hosted <a href="http://mu.wordpress.org/">Wordpress MU</a> installation;</li>
<li>For advice I have <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/careers/students/advice/wep.html">this advice</a> from the University of Sheffield careers service, the <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lets/lt-supp/pche-info.html">course guide</a> from the PCHE and my other half’s copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Your-Portfolio-CILIP-Guide/dp/1856046125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1256154507&amp;sr=8-1">Building Your Portfolio</a> (aimed at qualified librarians seeking chartership).</li>
</ul>
<p>I look forward to reading your comments and I’ll be sure to summarise them in a blog post next month and continue to keep you informed about my progress.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Saturday 30 May 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
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<p>Today I have a challenge for you, dear reader; but first a little context.</p>
<p>Each year, the PCHE course has a couple of special interest sessions: optional workshops to look at issues related to learning and teaching in HE.</p>
<p>For a number of years this has included a session on blended learning, run by previous PCHE graduate AC. This year I offered him my assistance, little knowing that he would soon be offered a new job leaving me with an opportunity to lead the whole session.</p>
<p>So, that session is next Wednesday, and as well as selling the use of technology in teaching, I’d also like to demonstrate it’s use for professional development; this ties in nicely with themes of reflective practice and social learning.</p>
<p>To that end, I would like to ask you, the readers, to take a few seconds to answer the following question:</p>
<blockquote>What is your top reason for using technology in teaching?</blockquote>
<p>To start the ball rolling, here’s one from me:</p>
<blockquote>To make courses interesting, we should make use of a wide variety of different media, particularly those with which our students are fluent.</blockquote>
<p>Please leave your answer in the comment section, or <a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">tweet me</a>. I’ll summarise the responses on the blog next week, and they’ll also help me persuade a group of keen, talented new teachers to make more use of elearning.</p>
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<p>I heard an interesting anecdote a while back. I don’t know how true it is, but bear with me because it serves to illustrate a point. The story goes that when the first motion-picture camera was invented, it was intended to be used to create photographs in which the people could move, smile, wave, whatever; think wizard photos from Harry Potter. People made, sold and used these things for years before eventually, some bright spark came up with an idea: don’t just capture a single static scene, but several scenes in succession.</p>
<p>Suddenly, the landscape changed. This new medium wasn’t for helping you remember what Auntie Doris looked like. It could do that, but that wasn’t what it was for: it was for telling stories! And now, it’s used for teaching, disseminating information and even for <a href="http://www.skype.com/">two-way communication</a>. The rest, as they say is history.</p>
<p>The point of the story is that when new technologies emerge, we tend to interpret them in terms of what we already know. It generally takes us a while to figure out how to use new tools that we’ve not seen before; sometimes the problem that the new tool solves doesn’t even exist yet.</p>
<p>So when you come across a new tool (and this applies to all walks of life, not just the web), don’t just think about it in terms of things you already know. Have a play, try a few things out, then ask yourself:</p>
<blockquote><strong>What is this for?</strong></blockquote>
<p>Then keep asking until you’ve figured it out. Then tell everyone your idea and ask again. With any luck, your eventual answer will surprise even the clever folks who made the tool in the first place.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching</h1>
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<img class="size-medium wp-image-153" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/twitterhomepage.png?w=300" alt="Twitter home page" width="300" height="194"><p>Twitter home page</p>
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<p>I’ve recently signed up to <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a>. It’s not a new thing; it’s been around for a few years and it’s probably safe to say that I’m way behind the curve on this one. For those who haven’t come across it yet, it’s a very, <em>very</em> simple social networking site which allows you to broadcast 140-character messages. However, in spite of this simplicity, it’s a very powerful tool, and can be quite off-putting for new users.</p>
<p>Since I’m a bit techie and tend to pick these things up quite quickly, a few friends have suggested that I lay down some words on how to get to grips with Twitter. I’ve ended up breaking it into three to make it a bit more digestible:</p>
<ol>
<li>Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching;</li>
<li><a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs;</a></li>
<li><a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-iii/">Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier.</a></li>
</ol>
<p>I’ll spread them out by publishing them over a period of three days. So, without further ado, here’s the first part of my guide to making this very cool tool work for you.</p>
<!--more-->
<h1>How does it work?</h1>
<p>When I said it was simple, I wasn’t kidding. Once you’ve signed up on the Twitter website, you do one of three things: send and receive messages, follow people (more on what this means in a bit), or search through the archive of old messages. That’s it. Let’s have a look at those components in more detail.</p>
<h2>Messages</h2>
<p>The core of Twitter is the status update or tweet; that’s a brief message, broadcast to every other user, taking up no more than 140 characters (letters, digits, punctuation, spaces). By and large, this will be some form of answer to the question “What are you doing?” You can send as many of these as you like, whenever you like. You can even split a longer message across several tweets (manually), but if you need to do this, you might want to question whether another medium might be more appropriate.</p>
<p>You can also send direct messages to specific users: these are completely private one-to-one communications. If you’re having a conversation publicly with another user and it’s starting to ramble on, think about switching to direct messages to avoid subjecting everyone else to a conversation that doesn’t concern them. You can only send direct messages to users who are following you: more on what this means next.</p>
<h2>Followers</h2>
<p>Wading through the tweets of every other twitterer on the planet is going to take some time. The answer to this problem is ‘following’. You’ll notice that, to begin with, your home page shows only your own tweets. No, Twitter isn’t broken: this page will only show the tweets of people you’re following.</p>
<p>This hands control over what you read back to you: you don’t have to follow anyone you don’t want to. I can’t emphasise enough how important this is: <em>don’t follow anyone whose tweets aren’t worth reading</em>. By all means follow someone for a while before you make this decision, and change your mind all you want. Just remember that if you’re not interested in updates on userxyz’s cat at 90-second intervals, no-one says you have to follow them.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<img class="size-full wp-image-155" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/followbutton.png" alt="Follow button" width="157" height="129"><p>Follow button</p>
</div>
<p>You can follow someone by visiting their profile page, which will have the form “http://twitter.com/<em>username</em>”. This page lists their most recent tweets, newest first. Right at the top, underneath their picture, there’s a button marked “Follow”: click this and it’ll change to a message telling you that you’re now following them. To stop following someone, click this message and it’ll reveal a “Remove” button for you to press. Twitter will send them an email when you start following them, but not when you stop.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<img class="size-full wp-image-156" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/following.png" alt="Following info" width="500" height="200"><p>Following info</p>
</div>
<p>On the left of your home page, there are links entitled “Following” and “Followers” which take you to a list of people you follow and people who follow you, respectively. On your followers list, you’ll see a tick next to anyone you’re also following, and a follow button next to anyone you’re not. Following people who follow you is good for at least three reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>It allows you to hold a conversation, and to receive direct messages from them;</li>
<li>It's a great way to build your network;</li>
<li>It's considered polite.</li>
</ol>
<p>That said, my previous advice still stands: you don’t have to follow anyone you don’t want to.</p>
<p>So how do you find people to follow? You’ve got a few options here. The best way to get started is to follow people you know in real life: try searching for them. As I’ve already mentioned you can follow people who follow you. You can wade through the global list of tweets and follow people with similar interests (searching will help here: see the next section). You could have a look at the <a href="http://wefollow.com/">we follow directory</a> to find people. Finally, you can explore your network by looking at your followers’ followers and so on.</p>
<p>It’s worth reiterating at this point that all your tweets are visible, ultimately, to anyone on the network. If you’re not happy with this, you can restrict access, which means that only your followers can read your tweets. It’ll also mean that you have to give your approval before someone can follow you. This might work for you, but openness has it’s benefits: you’ll find it a lot more people will follow you if you keep your account open. You’ll get a lot more out of Twitter if you stay open and simply avoid saying anything that you don’t want the whole world to know.</p>
<h2>Search</h2>
<p>So, you’ve got to grips with sending and reading tweets, you’ve chosen a few people to follow and started to join in the global conversation that is Twitter. You’re already getting a lot out of this great tool. But what about all the tweets you’re missing?</p>
<p>Perhaps you represent a company and want to know who’s talking about your brand. Maybe you’re going to attend a conference and want to connect with other delegates. Maybe you just want the answer to a question and want to see if someone’s already mentioned it.</p>
<p>For these, and many more, problems, Twitter search is the answer. Try searching for a brand, a conference or anything else you’re interested in, and you’ll quickly and easily discover what twitterers the world over are saying about it. You might even want to follow some of them.</p>
<p>Well, that’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at some of the initially confusing but massively useful conventions that have grown up within Twitter: @replies, #hashtags and retweeting.</p>
<p><em>Did you find this post useful? Is there something I’ve totally missed that you think should really be in there? Perhaps you just think I’m great (well, it might happen). I want to bring you really high quality stuff, and the only way I do that is if you (yes, you with the web browser) tell me how I’m doing. Please leave a comment below or link to me from your own blog (that’ll appear here as a comment too, with a link back to you: free publicity!). I’ll do my best to respond to feedback, correct inaccuracies in the text and write more about things that interest both me and you. Finally, if you find this post useful please tell your friends and colleagues. Thanks for stopping by!</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Beginner's guide to Twitter Part II: @s, #s and RTs</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">Monday 16 March 2009</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
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<h1><span style="font-weight:normal;font-size:13px">So, here's the second part of what's become a three-part introduction for new Twitterers. Here's where we are so far:</span></h1>
<ol>
<li>
<a href="../../2009/03/15/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i">Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching (yesterday)</a>;</li>
<li>Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs (this post);</li>
<li><a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-iii/">Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier (coming tomorrow).</a></li>
</ol>
<p>Let’s get on with the second part, on some of the conventions that are commonly seen on Twitter.</p>
<!--more-->
<h1>Conventions</h1>
<p>In my previous post, I introduced you to the basic tools of the Twitter trade: messages, followers and searches. But it doesn’t end there. Since its inception, a number of conventions have sprung up which make it much more powerful, but they can be quite confusing to the beginner. You’ll probably have noticed lots of “@this” and “#that” and “RT the other”. This post attempts to explain what all these actually mean.</p>
<h2>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<a href="http://twitter.com/replies"><img class="size-medium wp-image-168 " src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/twitterreplies.png?w=300" alt="Some replies on Twitter" width="300" height="190"></a><p>Some replies on Twitter</p>
</div>
@replies</h2>
<p>This is the most common convention: you can refer to another twitterer in a tweet (and by extension, it seems, anywhere else) by preceding their username with an ‘@’ sign. So in my case, that would be ‘@jezcope’. This is so common, in fact, that it’s been absorbed into Twitter itself. Each mention of @<em>username</em> will be turned into a link to that user’s profile page: this is a very easy way to follow new people.</p>
<p>An extension to this is that any tweet which <em>begins</em> with @<em>username</em> is interpreted as being a reply to something said by that user, or at least a comment aimed primarily at them. Unlike direct messages, these are still public, but are treated slightly differently by Twitter. In particular, you’ll see a link on the left-hand side of your Twitter home page: this will take you to a list showing only tweets starting ‘@<em>yourname</em>’. Also, if you click the reply button next to a tweet (the little curvy arrow), Twitter automatically inserts ‘@<em>theirname</em>’ at the start of the text box into which you type your tweets.</p>
<p>It’s worth paying attention to messages aimed at you in this way, because someone might be expecting a response! However, bear in mind that these messages will be visible to everyone following you, so if it looks like your conversation is likely to drag on and it’s not going to be interesting to the rest of the community, consider switching to direct messages.</p>
<h2>Retweeting</h2>
<p>Another convention that you’ll come across is retweeting. Quite simply, this entails re-posting a tweet previously posted by someone else. As is the case elsewhere, it’s important to attribute tweets to their original source, and the most common way to do this is to start the tweet with ‘RT @username’, replacing username with the originator, and then copy and paste the message in afterwards. If someone says something that you think would be interesting to people in your own network, you can pass it on with minimal effort by retweeting it.</p>
<p>So if, for example, my pal @fred posts:</p>
<blockquote>Take a look at this really cool link</blockquote>
<p>and I think it’s interesting enough to pass on to those of my followers not already following him, I would post the following message:</p>
<blockquote>RT @fred Take a look at this really cool link</blockquote>
<p>Many Twitter clients (see tomorrow’s post) allow you to do this with a single click.</p>
<h2>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ngtip09"><img class="size-medium wp-image-169 " src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/ngtip.png?w=300" alt="Search results for #ngtip" width="300" height="251"></a><p>Search results for #ngtip</p>
</div>
#hashtags</h2>
<p>Tagging is a way of describing an item on the internet, such as a blog post, using single-word descriptions. Someone had the bright idea of tagging tweets using the form #word: it’s then trivial to find everything with this tag using Twitter search. Remember that this is just a convention, and it works simply because putting # on the start of a word makes a unique string of characters that you can search for.</p>
<p>The cool thing about hashtags is that if you combine them with search tools you can separate particular threads of conversation out of the vast mélange of the twitterverse. It’s quite common for a hashtag to be prearranged for tweets discussing a conference or other event; for example, the recent JISC <a href="http://ngtip.pbwiki.com/">Next Generation Technologies in Practice</a> conference used used <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ngtip09">#ngtip09</a> to mark discussions related to the conference. Try searching for <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23rednoseday">#rednoseday</a> to find out what people have been up to for <a href="http://www.rednoseday.com/">Comic Relief</a>. If someone’s using a hashtag you don’t recognise, try looking it up on <a href="http://wthashtag.com/wiki/Main_Page">What the hashtag?!</a>, an online directory of hashtags.</p>
<p><em>That’s all for today. In tomorrow’s blog post, I’ll describe some useful tools for making Twitter work for you, including a few which make use of the power of hashtags.</em></p>
<p><em>Agree? Disagree? Leave me a comment below or contact me through Twitter at <a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">@jezcope</a>.</em></p>
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<h1><span style="font-weight:normal;font-size:13px">Time for the third part of my beginners guide to Twitter. Here's how far we've got:</span></h1>
<ol>
<li>
<a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i/">Twitter basics: messages, followers and searching</a>;</li>
<li>
<a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">Confusing conventions: @s, #s and RTs</a>;</li>
<li>Useful tools to make your Twittering life easier (this post).</li>
</ol>
<p>Today, I’ll be making a whistle-stop tour of some of the tools and websites that can take your twittering to a whole new level. There are far too many of these to include here, so I’ll just try to give you an overview of some of the ones I’ve come across so far. As I come across more, I’ll certainly tweet about them (<a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">follow me on Twitter here</a>) and I’ll blog in more depth about some of them too.</p>
<!--more-->
<h1>Useful tools</h1>
<p>First, an aside. One of the things that makes Twitter so powerful is its Application Programmer Interface or API. An API is a well defined standard which allows direct communication between a service, such as Twitter, and another piece of computer code. Because Twitter has a well-documented public API, anyone with the requisite know-how can write a software tool to add new capabilities. Not all of the tools we’ll be looking at today make use of the API, and you don’t need to know anything about how it works to use them, but I just wanted to mention another great design feature of Twitter.</p>
<h2>URL shrinking</h2>
<p>If you’ve been using Twitter for any length of time, you’ve probably used it to pass on the URL (web address) of a web page to your network. In that case, you might have noticed that since URLs can be pretty long, you don’t get much space left to describe what it is you’re actually passing on. This is where URL shrinkers come in.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<img class="size-full wp-image-174" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/shrunkurl.png" alt="A shrunk URL" width="178" height="53"><p>A shrunk URL</p>
</div>
<p>Quite simply, a URL shrinker takes your long, unwieldy URL and spits out a nice, short URL which points to the same web page. You can copy-and-paste a URL from your browser’s location bar into the URL shrinker, but most of these services will give you a bookmarklet; a link which you can drag to your browser’s bookmarks/favourites bar which becomes a button to automatically grab the URL, shrink it and copy it to the clipboard ready for use. Look this up in the online help for your URL shrinker, or look for links with titles like “Trim this”.</p>
<p>There are loads of URL shrinkers out there, but here’s a few that I’ve come across:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://snipr.com">snipr.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://bit.ly/">bit.ly</a></li>
<li><a href="http://is.gd/">is.gd</a></li>
<li><a href="http://tinyurl.com/">TinyURL</a></li>
<li><a href="http://tr.im/">tr.im</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Of these, my favourite is <a href="http://snipr.com">snipr.com</a> because of the options it provides, but I encourage you to try a few until you find one you like.</p>
<p>This class of tools are, by and large, completely independent of Twitter: you can use them to shrink any URL for any reason whatsoever. For example, I’ve used them to make URLs more manageable to distribute in print, since readers will have to type these in by hand. There are a few, though, which will allow you to shrink a URL and automatically post it straight on Twitter (yes, using the Twitter API). My favourite of these is <a href="http://twitthis.com/">TwitThis</a>.</p>
<h2>Searching, trends and hashtags</h2>
<p>As I mentioned in the previous posts, searching and hashtags provide a great way to follow specific conversations or trends on Twitter. However, Twitter’s built-in search isn’t ideal for this, particularly if there are keywords or hashtags that you search for on a regular basis. There are a whole range of search-based websites out there which allow you to track specific words or hashtags more easily.</p>
<p>The first group simply provide you with an automatically-updating stream of tweets matching a specific search. Some of these allow you to save searches that you perform regularly or display several searches onscreen at once. Here are a few to try:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://tweetgrid.com/">TweetGrid</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitterfall.com/">TwitterFall</a></li>
</ul>
<p>The second group actually allow you to interact with the conversation you’re interested in by turning the hashtag of your choice into a modern version of the old-fashioned chat rooms: they display a live log of tweets with a particular hashtag and allow you to post your own tweets which will have the hashtag in question automagically appended. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://tweetgrid.com/irc">twIRC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://tweetchat.com/">TweetChat</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Twitterfeed</h2>
<p>The next tool, <a href="http://twitterfeed.com">TwitterFeed</a> helps to combine your online offerings: it takes any RSS feed (typically a list of blog posts or news items) and checks it on a regular basis, posting any new items automatically to Twitter. So, for example, my Twitter followers will have received a brief message with a link to this blog post, which happened completely automatically a short time after it was published.</p>
<p>A word of warning: it’s easy to overdo this. Some people use Twitter and Twitterfeed purely as another outlet for their blog or news site. Your view may differ, but I find this quite annoying, particularly if there’s a high volume of traffic. If I notice a user doing this, I generally subscribe to there RSS feed elsewhere if it interests me and then stop following them: I prefer to keep my news and blogs in a separate place. However, I think for low-volume, infrequent, personal blogs such as this one it’s a great way to let people know what you’ve written, as well as a legitimate answer to the question “What are you doing?”</p>
<h2>Twitter clients</h2>
<p>If you’re becoming a regular Twitter user, you might be finding it a bit of a pain to log in to the Twitter website every time you want to get up to date. This is where clients come in. These bring Twitter right to your desktop in a dedicated application. Many of them incorporate features of other tools, such as URL shrinking and searching. Most of them have an option to check automatically for new tweets and pop up an alert to tell you when there’s something you haven’t read yet: make up your own mind about whether that’s good or bad! All of them, though, let you read your latest incoming tweets and post new ones. There are far too many to list them here, so after pointing out that I currently use <a href="http://www.nambu.com/">Nambu</a> on my laptop and <a href="http://www.atebits.com/software/tweetie/">Tweetie</a> on my iPod Touch, I’ll send you in the direction of <a href="http://twitter.com/downloads">this list on the Twitter website</a> and <a href="http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps">this more comprehensive list</a>. Download one and give it a go.</p>
<h2>Analytics</h2>
<p>If you’re really interested in that kind of thing, you might want to look at some statistics about your Twitter account and network. I won’t go into much detail on this, as I’ve not used them very much, but here are the ones I’ve come across so far:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://twitter.grader.com/">Twitter Grader</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitteranalyzer.com/">Twitter Analyzer</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twittercounter.com/">Twitter Counter</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>
<div class="wp-caption alignright">
<img class="size-full wp-image-175" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/twitter-on-facebook.png" alt="Twitter on Facebook" width="200" height="197"><p>Twitter on Facebook</p>
</div>
Other social networks</h2>
<p>There are, of course, other social networks out there, and there are a number of ways to get them to play nicely with Twitter. There’s a <a href="http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/">Twitter app</a> for Facebook, which allows you to tweet from within Facebook, and even offers to post each tweet as a status update in your Facebook profile. I don’t use Facebook much these days, but this is an easy way for me to keep it updated.</p>
<p><a href="http://friendfeed.com/">FriendFeed</a> is a kind of meta-social-network. It aims to tie a number of other networks together in one place, so that you can read and post without having to visit a dozen different websites. I haven’t found it that useful yet, but give it a try.</p>
<p><a href="http://ping.fm">Ping.fm</a> is slightly different again. This one allows you to update your status, micro-blog, post full-length blog posts and save bookmarks in a huge variety of different social media websites simultaneously. It also gives you a wide variety of ways of doing this: through the website, by SMS (in the US only at the moment, I think), by email, by instant message (Jabber/GTalk, Yahoo!, MSN/Windows Live, AIM) and many more. An increasing number of Twitter clients are also supporting it, so you can transparently update your status on a number of different sites as you tweet.</p>
<h2>More tools</h2>
<p>There are plenty of tools that I haven’t had space or time to mention. I’ll try to blog about some of them in the future, but for now, you might want to have a look at <a href="http://twitter.pbwiki.com/">this wiki</a> — there are plenty listed under Apps, plus lots more useful information about Twitter.</p>
<p>Have you got a favourite tool that I’ve missed? Share it by posting a comment below: it’ll be great to hear from you.</p>
<p><em>That’s it for this series. If you’ve found these posts helpful, you can find out when I write new stuff by signing up for email updates or subscribing to my RSS feed: just click on the appropriate link at the top left of this page.</em></p>
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<p>Hello loyal readers! I thought you might like to know where this blog will be going over the next few years, so I’m announcing that I’ve taken a decision to pursue a career in training and development, with a focus on e-learning. I’ll continue to blog about the bluecloud project, but I’ll also be writing about more general e-learning topics that I think you might find interesting and reflecting on my experience of making the transition to my new career. I’ve updated the about page on this site to give a bit more professional info about myself.</p>
<p>If you’ve got any advice for a new e-learning professional, or would like to contact me for any other reason, please leave a comment here or follow me on Twitter (<a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">@jezcope</a>).</p>
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<p>Well, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, but I’ve finally got the hosting sorted out and got on with it. The site is based on <a href="http://mu.wordpress.org/">Wordpress MU</a> and the theme is a customised version of the <a href="http://themehybrid.com/themes/hybrid">Hybrid</a> framework. All of the content from my old site is here, so update your links. I’m still not entirely happy with everything yet, so it’ll probably change a bit over the next few weeks, but I’m learning to accept when things are good enough and override my perfectionist instincts. I’ll probably blog some more about the process of setting up the site.</p>
<p>Any feedback would be very welcome: just leave a comment below. I’ve installed the <a href="http://comluv.com/download/commentluv-wordpress/">Comment Luv</a> plugin, so if you enter a blog URL when you leave a comment it’ll show a link to your latest blog post. How’s that for generosity!</p>
<p>Also, for the benefit of Technorati, my verification code for this blog: pe7ajbxvfz</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/blogging-for-perfectionists/">Tuesday 19 July 2011</a>
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<p>I had an idea for a post. I could feel it growing in some ill-defined region inside my skull. I’ll just bash it out in half and hour and hit publish — I could do with getting a few more posts up. So I started to write.</p>
<p>Half an hour came and went. And still it grew.</p>
<p>I wanted to be able to do my thoughts justice, to bring the world some insight. It wanted to be lucid, well-researched, a valid contribution to society that could hold it’s head up high.</p>
<p>So I kept writing for a while, but it still wasn’t ready. I had to take a break. I’ll get back to it tomorrow.</p>
<p>And so I did, for a few days at least. Then other things became important and I couldn’t quite remember what my point was and the whole thing lay half-finished like some simile I can’t quite think of right now.</p>
<p>Sorry for inflicting that lump of stream of consciousness on you — I wanted, for reasons which are probably apparent, to get in some practice writing what I thought and then publishing it. A lot of my posts seem to go that way</p>
<p>It’s tricky overcoming perfectionism. It feels like everything I do should be a work of unmitigated genius before I can expect anyone to read it but it also feels like sheer arrogance to think that <em>anything</em> I do might be considered genius!</p>
<p>There’s a balance to be found between expressing your ideas with clarity and wit and grace and just getting them out there. We all get the balance wrong some of the time, but it’s by recognising this and correcting it that we get better at it.</p>
<p>I’m glad I got that out of my system. If you’re still here, congratulations for making it this far.</p>
<p>Here’s to having faith that my ideas will stand on their own. I’m not an idiot you know. :)</p>
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<p>The time has come to release bluecloud (formerly known as the <a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/">Student Learning Community 2.0</a>) on an unsuspecting public. We’ve created a space for the community on the University’s new uSpace social networking platform and seeded it with a few interesting ideas, but what we’d really love is to get more students in reading, writing, chatting and generally making themselves at home. Any suggestions how to do that?</p>
<p>Because uSpace is still in its pilot phase and CICS would like to keep the numbers down for now, we’ve only officially made an announcement to the postgraduate research student mailing list, but hopefully the news will gradually trickle out. Particularly, if you already know where to access uSpace (it’s available to anyone with a UoS login), feel free to drop by the bluecloud space and see how it’s going. As soon as possible we’ll announce it to undergrads and taught postgrads as well.</p>
<p>The launch is accompanied by a questionnaire on the use of social web tools to get some intelligence on how best to develop the project. The data will also contribute to my second assignment for the University of Sheffield’s <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lets/lt-supp/pche.html">Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education</a>. I’ll make a link to that questionnaire available here in due course. If anyone would like to give us their views, feel free to leave a comment here. You can also now follow bluecloud on Twitter as <a href="http://twitter.com/bluecloud_uos">@bluecloud_uos</a> (and if you like, follow me: <a href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">@jezcope</a>).</p>
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<p>In a classic example of the human tendency to weave everything we see into our own narrative, I recently found myself looking at the 18th century research data of botanist John Sibthorp, embodied in his <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_Graeca">Flora Graeca</a></em>.</p>
<p><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Hellebores_officinalis_%28Bauer%29.jpg/362px-Hellebores_officinalis_%28Bauer%29.jpg" alt="Hellebores officinalis" class="main-illustration"></p>
<p>It all came about through a visit to Oxford, organised as part of the CPD programme organised by the M25 group of libraries. We first had a tour of the famous <a href="http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/">Bodleian Library</a>’s reading rooms — quite a revelation for a very STEM-focussed non-librarian like me!</p>
<p>After finishing at the Bodleian, we dutifully trooped up Parks Road to the Department of Botany and its pride and joy the <a href="http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/science/resources/sherardian-library">Sherardian Library and Herbaria</a>. The Sherardian includes, alongside many classic botanical reference books, an impressive collection of original botanical sketches and specimens dating back centuries (and still used by researchers today).</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sibthorp" title="John Sibthorp --- Wikipedia">John Sibthorp</a> was a English botanist, and was Sherardian Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford, a chair he inherited from his father Dr Humphry Sibthorp in 1784. In the late 1780’s he took a botanical tour of Greece and Cyprus to collect material for a flora of the region, eventually published as the <em>Flora Graeca Sibthorpiana</em>.</p>
<p>The lovely staff at the Sherardian had laid out several original volumes of Sibthorp’s <em>Flora Graeca</em> to inspect, alongside the various source materials:</p>
<ul>
<li>Sibthorp’s diary of his trip to the Mediterranean</li>
<li>Original pencil sketches of the flora, painstakingly labelled by Sibthorp’s artist, Ferdinand Bauer, to indicate the precise shade of each part (he used only graphite pencil in the field)</li>
<li>The actual specimens collected by Sibthorp, carefully pressed and preserved with mercury</li>
<li>The watercolours developed by Bauer on their return to Oxford, based only on the sketches, the fast-fading specimens and his memory (he produced around 900 of these at a rate of roughly one every 1 1/4 days!)</li>
</ul>
<p>What’s interesting about all this is that Sibthorp was, in reality, a lousy field biologist. His diary, while beginning fairly well, became less and less legible as the trip went on. Most of the specimens, along with Bauer’s sketches, were unlabelled. In fact, the vast majority of the material collected by Sibthorp remained only in his head.</p>
<p>Before publishing, Sibthorp felt he had to return to the Mediterranean for a second time to collect more material, which he duly did. He never returned to Oxford: instead he died of consumption in Bath in 1796, and his work was published posthumously by the University of Oxford only because of some clever manoeuvring by his lawyer and a close friend.</p>
<p>Of course, all of that knowledge, much of his “research data” died with him. The <em>Flora Graeca Sibthorpiana</em> was eventually published, but only after a lot of work to decode his diary and figure out which specimens, sketches and watercolours went together.</p>
<p>There are a number of errors in the final version which would easily have been caught had Sibthorp been alive to edit it. A spider’s web on one of the specimens, lovingly reproduced by Bauer in his watercolour, was misinterpreted by one of the artists producing the plates for printing, and was rendered as fine, downy hairs on the leaf; of course, the actual plant has no such hairs. Reading between the lines, I suspect that the final published work is much poorer for the loss of the information locked up in Sibthorp’s brain.</p>
<p>Would he have been allowed to get away with this in the modern world? Today his trip would have been funded not by the university at the insistence of his professor father, but probably by the BBSRC. That funding would come with a number of conditions, including an expectation that the work be documented, preserved and made available to other researchers to study. Now, though, we’ll never know what we lost when John Sibthorp died.</p>
<p>The <em>Flora Graeca</em> and its associated material still provide valuable information to this day. New analytical techniques allow us to obtain new data from the specimens, many of which are type specimens for their species. All of the associated artwork has been digitised, and low-resolution versions of the watercolours and colour plates are available to use under a Creative Commons license. Although the physical books are no longer routinely used for reference, the high-resolution scans are consulted quite regularly by modern researchers, and work is currently in progress to link together all of the digitised material so it can be searched by species, family, geographical area or a number of other aspects.</p>
<p>It was fascinating to see such rare materials first-hand, and to have them brought to life by such a knowledgeable speaker, and I feel privileged to have had the chance. For anyone interested, you can <a href="http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/science/resources/sherardian-library/flora_graeca" title="Digital Flora Graeca --- Bodleian Libraries">browse a digital version of the <em>Flora Graeca</em> online</a>.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/briefly-brushing-away-the-cobwebs/">Thursday 17 June 2010</a>
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<p>So, in case any of my regular readers (do I have any?) have been wondering why there hasn’t been a lot to read regularly, I thought I’d post a short update to let you all know what I’ve been up to: planning a wedding and starting a business, in between commuting to my part-time job tutoring kids. It’s all been <em>loads</em> of fun (and will continue to be) and I’ve not really had time to make blog posts.</p>
<p>More posts, when I get back from the honeymoon. Bye for now!</p>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jezcope/3971274879/"><img alt="Down House (Darwins House) by yours truly" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3511/3971274879_003b7d1fcc_m.jpg" title="Down House (Darwins House)" width="240" height="180"></a><p>Down House (Darwin's House) by yours truly</p>
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<p>Today’s blog post was inspired by a trip to <a href="http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.14922">Down House</a> in Kent, where Charles Darwin spent the latter years of his life with his wife and family, and where he wrote, amongst many other works, <em>On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection</em>.</p>
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<p>It was a fascinating day out, and I thoroughly recommend it, but what prompted me to write was their wonderful new multimedia guides. On arrival we (my mum, my fiancée and myself) were each handed a fairly ruggedly built little PDA with headphones attached. Having arrived too early to see the house (the gardens open at 10am, but the house doesn’t open until 11) we set off into the garden, shown around by our multimedia guides.</p>
<p>Audio guides to exhibitions and historical sites aren’t particularly new, and I have vague recollections of having been using them for some years, but it seems that the people responsible for setting these things up are getting a lot more creative. Additionally, the technology is becoming better and cheaper: not long ago handing every visitor a PDA would have been out of the question, but English Heritage have found funding from somewhere and I think it’s worth every penny.</p>
<p>Although the guide is set up to take you round in a specified order by default, you can also bring up a map, labelled with all the locations that have audio content so that you can skip bits out or make up your own tour of the grounds. After the main narration for each location, given by Andrew Marr in the garden and Sir David Attenborough in the house, there is a menu of other short bits of relevant information, taken from interviews with various experts. We were each able to customise our tour and include only the information we were interested in: very useful when we moved onto the house and time was starting to run a bit short. There is also a small interactive game for each section, which should help to keep the kids entertained.</p>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dalbera/550975041/"><img alt="Laudioguidage de lexposition Anselm Kiefer au Grand Palais by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/248/550975041_0b97c86d01_m.jpg" title="Laudioguidage de lexposition Anselm Kiefer au Grand Palais" width="240" height="180"></a><p>L'audioguidage de l'exposition Anselm Kiefer au Grand Palais by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra</p>
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<p>It’s very freeing having a well-written audio guide to an English Heritage property. The best part is that you can look around at whatever is being described without having to constantly shift attention between it and an information plaque. Also having the full-colour screen on the device meant that photos and videos could be shown, which added an extra dimension to the tour.</p>
<p>There were a few minor shortcomings with the guides. The headphone cables were very long and got caught up occasionally. The visual aspects of the guide occasionally felt like they were needlessly distracting from what I was looking at. Also, having an audio guide did dampen down conversation within our little group, but reading text on displays often has the same effect so there probably wasn’t much lost. All in all though, it was a very well designed package.</p>
<p>The whole thing put me in mind of another, very different but equally enjoyable, audio tour. This one was at the <a href="http://www.worcestercitymuseums.org.uk/comm/commind.htm">Commandery</a> in Worcester. The Commandery is a very old building indeed and has been repurposed many times through its history. It’s recently been refurbished, and it’s been done in quite a wonderful way.</p>
<p>The whole place has been fully redecorated but left almost empty. On arrival you’re given an audio guide and you then choose one of the periods of history (I think there were five). You then take a tour of the whole building from the perspective of that period. Because the decoration is so sparse, it’s necessary to imagine how it would have been in days gone by, and the narration, dramatisation and atmospheric sounds on the audio guide really bring the period to life. Because we chose different periods for our tours, we were able to compare notes and it turns out that there are some nice links between the different narrations.</p>
<p>I really enjoyed both of these audio tours. The Commandery, in particular, I would love to revisit and spend the whole day doing the tours for each of the different periods of history. But the experience has really reminded me that putting control of learning into the learner’s hands can sometimes quite literally mean just that, and that it can work very well indeed. I felt that I was able to really get a handle on Darwin’s life and work in a way that wouldn’t have been possible by just walking round the garden or reading a display: the experience made use of all of my senses.</p>
<p><em>What’s your take on audio/multimedia guides? When do they work and when do they detract from the experience? Leave me a comment below.</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">#cfhe12: another attempt at MOOCing</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/cfhe12-mooc/">Friday 5 October 2012</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">CFHE12</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">MOOC</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Admin</span></li>
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<p>It’s October, which means the autumn TV season has started, which means that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strictly_come_dancing">Strictly Come Dancing</a> is back on for another year, which means it’s time for a flurry of blog posts as I leave my wonderful other half to shout at the TV on weekend evenings.</p>
<p>I’ve decided to have another go at joining in with another <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooc">MOOC</a> to give me some blog fuel, and this time round it’s <a href="http://edfuture.mooc.ca/">Current &amp; Future State of Higher Education 2012</a>.</p>
<p>My last MOOC attempt, <a href="http://openeducation.us/">IOE12</a>, sort of fizzled out (my participation, not the course itself) as I didn’t really have the time to keep it going. Hopefully I’ll do better this time, but if not I’m sure I’ll learn something anyway.</p>
<p>So, hello fellow MOOCers and watch this space!</p>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Programming</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Chrome</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Extension</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">JavaScript</span></li>
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<p>One of the best ways of getting started developing open source software is to “scratch your own itch”: when you have a problem, get coding and solve it. So it is with this little bit of code.</p>
<p>Scroll Back is a very simple Chrome extension that replicates a little-known feature of Firefox: if you hold down the <kbd>Shift</kbd> key and use the mouse wheel, you can go forward and backward in your browser history. The idea came from <a href="https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=927#c18">issue 927 on the Chromium bug tracker</a>, which is a request for this very feature.</p>
<p>You can <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scroll-back/bhhdgkdmcbgoecgmdgbkabdbjcihafgc?hl=en-GB&amp;gl=GB">install the extension from the Chrome Web Store</a> if you use Chrome (or <a href="http://www.chromium.org/">Chromium</a>).</p>
<p>The code is so simple I can reproduce it here in full:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge">
<pre class="highlight"><code><span class="nb">document</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="nx">addEventListener</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="s2">"wheel"</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="kd">function</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="nx">e</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="k">if</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="nx">e</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="nx">shiftKey</span> <span class="o">&amp;&amp;</span> <span class="nx">e</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="nx">deltaX</span> <span class="o">!=</span> <span class="mi">0</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="nb">window</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="nx">history</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="nx">go</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="nb">Math</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="nx">sign</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="nx">e</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="nx">deltaX</span><span class="p">));</span>
<span class="k">return</span> <span class="nx">e</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="nx">preventDefault</span><span class="p">();</span>
<span class="p">}</span>
<span class="p">});</span>
</code></pre>
</div>
<ul>
<li>Line 1 adds an event listener which is executed every time the user uses the scroll wheel.</li>
<li>If the <kbd>Shift</kbd> key is held down and the user has scrolled (line 2), line 3 goes backward or forward in the history according to whether the user scrolled down or up respectively (<code class="highlighter-rouge">e.deltaX</code> is positive for down, negative for up)</li>
<li>Line 4 prevents any unwanted side-effects of scrolling.</li>
</ul>
<p>The code is automatically executed every time a page is loaded, so has the effect of enabling this behaviour in all pages.</p>
<p>It’s open source (licensed under the <a href="LICENSE.txt">MIT License</a>), so you can <a href="https://github.com/jezcope/chrome-scroll-back">check out the full source code on github</a>.</p>
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Tagged with
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">BathCR</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Researcher development</span></li>
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<p>It’s been available for a few weeks now, but I just thought I’d draw some<br>
attention to the fact that my <a href="http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/cope-jones/">article with Geraldine Jones from Humanities &amp;<br>
Social Sciences about our Connected Researcher at Bath project</a> has<br>
now been published in <a href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/">UKOLN</a>’s web magazine for information professionals,<br>
<a href="http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/">Ariadne</a>.</p>
<p>In case you haven’t read my <a href="../connected-researcher-at-bath/">earlier post</a><br>
on the subject, this was a series of workshops we’ve run (and are hoping to run<br>
again next year) encouraging postgraduate research students to try out new<br>
media tools and think about how they could support their research and careers.<br>
We ran workshops on:</p>
<ul>
<li>Twitter;</li>
<li>Feed readers;</li>
<li>Blogging; and</li>
<li>Social bookmarking.</li>
</ul>
<p>Printable versions (Word and PDF) are available from <a href="http://opus.bath.ac.uk/24302/">our institutional repository,<br>
Opus</a>.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/connected-researcher-at-bath/">Thursday 14 April 2011</a>
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<p><img alt="Shoots by Gemma Garner" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4077/5414162854_2eba8151a7_m.jpg" title="Shoots" width="240" height="175" class="alignright"> How often do you try something new? Not sure? Well today a whole bunch of research students at the University of Bath gamely had a go at signing up for Twitter and investigating the power of RSS feeds.</p>
<p>This was the first of a series of events under the banner of “The Connected Researcher @ Bath” (a title shamelessly stolen from Cardiff University’s <a href="http://cardiff.academia.edu/SusanSmith">Susan Smith</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/SarahNicholas">Sarah Nicholas</a>; I hope they don’t mind!). The whole thing came about when <a href="http://twitter.com/edsgmj">Geraldine Jones</a> (E-learning Officer for Humanities &amp; Social Sciences) and I got our heads together. We’d both been wondering how to get more research students to try out social media and found that together we were in a position to make it happen.</p>
<p><a href="http://adventuresincareerdevelopment.posterous.com/">Tristram Hooley</a> very kindly travelled down from Derby to explain to our students why he feels social media are an important tool for modern academics. He also led the first of our two workshops, getting students to sign up to Twitter and take their first hesitant Twittering steps. Geraldine led the second workshop, introducing the students to RSS and iGoogle, and I finished off that session with a brief introduction</p>
<p>The main thing I learned from today’s event? If you’d like your Twitter followers to join in with a real-world activity by tweeting at a particular time, give them plenty of notice. I’d tried this before without the notice and it was something of a flop, but today Twitterers all over campus were primed and didn’t disappoint! Having chosen a hashtag (<a href="http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/Bathcr">#bathcr</a>) and started using it a couple of days ago, there was a real buzz going on by this morning, which really added to the atmosphere when the participants saw it on Twitter for the first time.</p>
<p>So my thanks to Bath’s Twitterers, to the students who took part and to Tristram, Geraldine and everyone else who contributed to making today work.</p>
<p>Initial feedback from today has been great, and we’re going to be running several more (smaller) events over the next few months, starting with a panel discussion and workshop on blogging on 11 May. I’m looking forward to it already!</p>
<p><em>Image credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/3fold/5414162854/in/photostream/">Shoots by Gemmer Garner</a></em></p>
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<p><a href="http://openrefine.org/">OpenRefine</a> has a pretty cool feature. You can export a project’s entire edit history in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;search=JSON">JSON</a> format, and subsequently paste it back to exactly repeat what you did. This is great for transparency: if someone asks what you did in cleaning up your data, you can tell them exactly instead of giving them a vague, general description of what you think you remember you did. It also means that if you get a new, slightly-updated version of the raw data, you can clean it up in exactly the same way very quickly.</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge">
<pre class="highlight"><code><span class="p">[</span>
<span class="p">{</span>
<span class="s2">"op"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s2">"core/column-rename"</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="s2">"description"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s2">"Rename column Column to Funder"</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="s2">"oldColumnName"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s2">"Column"</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="s2">"newColumnName"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s2">"Funder"</span>
<span class="p">},</span>
<span class="p">{</span>
<span class="s2">"op"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s2">"core/row-removal"</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="s2">"description"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s2">"Remove rows"</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="s2">"engineConfig"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="p">{</span>
<span class="s2">"mode"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s2">"row-based"</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="c1">// etc…</span>
</code></pre>
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<p>Now this is great, but it could be better. I’ve been playing with <a href="http://python.org/">Python</a> for data wrangling, and it would be amazing if you could load up an OpenRefine history script in Python and execute it over an arbitrary dataset. You’d be able to reproduce the analysis without having to load up a whole Java stack and muck around with a web browser, and you could integrate it much more tightly with any pre- or post-processing.</p>
<p>Going a stage further, it would be even better to be able to convert the OpenRefine history JSON to an actual Python script. That would be a great learning tool for anyone wanting to go from OpenRefine to writing their own code.</p>
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<pre class="highlight"><code><span class="kn">import</span> <span class="nn">pandas</span> <span class="kn">as</span> <span class="nn">pd</span>
<span class="n">data</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">pd</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">read_csv</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="s">"funder_info.csv"</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="n">data</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">data</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">rename</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">columns</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="p">{</span><span class="s">"Column"</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s">"Funder"</span><span class="p">})</span>
<span class="n">data</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">data</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">drop</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">data</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">index</span><span class="p">[</span><span class="mi">6</span><span class="p">:</span><span class="mi">9</span><span class="p">])</span>
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>This seems like it could be fairly straightforward to implement: it just requires a bit of digging to understand the semantics of the JSON thot OpenRefine produces, and then the implementation of each operation in Python. The latter part shouldn’t be much of a stretch with so many existing tools like <a href="http://pandas.pydata.org/">pandas</a>.</p>
<p>It’s just an idea right now, but I’d be willing to have a crack at implementing something if there was any interest — let me know in the comments or <a href="https://twitter.com/jezcope" title="Twitter: @jezcope">on Twitter</a> if you think it’s worth doing, or if you fancy contributing.</p>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open data</span></li>
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<p><em>Funders, publishers, research institutions and many other groups are increasingly keen that researchers make more of their data more open. There are some very good reasons for doing this, but many researchers have legitimate concerns that must be dealt with before they can be convinced. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts exploring arguments against sharing data.</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We really want to share our data more widely, but we’re worried that it’s going to give the crackpots more opportunity to pick holes in our findings.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A PhD student asked me something like this recently, and it’s representative of some very real concerns for a lot of researchers. While I answered the question, I didn’t feel satisfied with my response, so I wanted to unpack it a bit more in preparation for next time.</p>
<p>It seems to me that there are three parts to this. No-one likes to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Have their time wasted</li>
<li>Be wrongfully and unfairly discredited</li>
<li>Have genuine flaws found in their work</li>
</ul>
<p>Having genuine errors challenged is a very useful thing, but spurious challenges (i.e. those with no valid basis) can be a stressful time-sink. Such challenges may be made by someone with an interest in seeing you (or your results) discredited; they may also be made by someone who simply fails to understand a key concept of your research<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. Either way, they’re a nuisance and rightly to be avoided.</p>
<p>Perhaps the scariest aspect of this is the possibility that your critics might actually be on to something. No-one really enjoys finding out that they’ve made a mistake, and we naturally tend to avoid situations where an error we didn’t know was there might be brought to light.</p>
<p>If all this is so, why should you share your data? Ultimately, there will always be crackpots, or at least people with an ax to grind. Publishing your data won’t change this, but it will add weight to your own arguments. Firstly it says that you’re confident enough in your work to put it out there. But secondly it gives impartial readers the opportunity to verify your claims independently and come to their own judgement about any potential criticism. It’s much harder for the “crackpots” to pick holes in your work when your supporting evidence is available and the validity of your argument can be easily demonstrated.</p>
<p>There’s also a need to accept, and indeed seek out, valid criticism. None of us is perfect and everyone makes mistakes from time to time. When that happens it’s important to find out sooner rather than later and be ready to make corrections, learn and move on.</p>
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<p>Don’t forget <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor">Hanlon’s razor</a>: “Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.” <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Scraping for gold at the Olympics</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/data-scraping-olympics/">Tuesday 7 August 2012</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Olympics</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">London 2012</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Medals</span></li>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Ruby</span></li>
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<p>What if it wasn’t all about the gold medals? The Olympic medal table is always ranked in order of gold medals first, then silver, then bronze.</p>
<p>That seems reasonable, but if you looked at the table at the end of 6 August, for example, you’d have seen that Germany had an impressive 22 medals, including 5 golds, but ranked one place behind Kazakhstan, who had only 7 medals, but 6 of which were gold.</p>
<p>So I thought it was time to do a few things I’ve wanted to try for a while: scrape some publicly available data, do something interesting with it, and write and deploy a Ruby webapp beyond my desktop.</p>
<h2 id="finding-the-data">Finding the data</h2>
<p>It just so happens that the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/medals/countries">BBC’s medal table</a> is marked up with some nice semantic attributes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Each <code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;tr&gt;</code> tag has two attributes: <code class="highlighter-rouge">data-country-name</code> and <code class="highlighter-rouge">data-country-code</code>;</li>
<li>Each <code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;td&gt;</code> tag uses the class <code class="highlighter-rouge">gold</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">silver</code> or <code class="highlighter-rouge">bronze</code> and contains <em>only</em> the number of medals of that type for that country.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="just-scraping-by">Just scraping by</h2>
<p>I could have just scraped that data from within the webapp, but I wanted a) to have a bit more robustness if the source page changed format or disappeared; and b) to make the data easily available to others.</p>
<p>So I wrote this <a href="https://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/london_2012_medal_table/">London 2012 medal table scraper</a> in <a href="http://scraperwiki.com/">ScraperWiki</a>. ScraperWiki lets you write scrapers in Ruby, Python or PHP using their API and some standard parsing modules to scrape data and store it in an SQLite table. The data is then available as JSON via a REST API, and remains so even if the source page vanishes (it just sends you a notification so you can fix your scraper).</p>
<h2 id="lets-go-camping">Let’s go Camping</h2>
<p>I briefly thought about using <a href="http://rubyonrails.org/">Ruby on Rails</a>, but that’s a pretty heavy solution to a very small problem, so instead I turned to <a href="http://camping.rubyforge.org/">Camping</a>, a “web framework which consistently stays at less than 4kB of code.”</p>
<p>Camping is very <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller">MVC</a>-based, but your whole app can live in a single file, like a simple CGI script.</p>
<h2 id="putting-it-all-together">Putting it all together</h2>
<p>So, <a href="http://altmedals2012.herokuapp.com/">here’s my alternative Olympic medal table app</a>, and <a href="http://github.com/jezcope/altmedals2012">here’s the code on GitHub</a>.</p>
<p>What are the effects? Well, if you sort by total medals, there’s quite a big shake up. Russia with 41 medals (only 7 gold) shoot up from 6th to 3rd place, pushing Britain down to 4th. North Korea, on the other hand, drop down from 8th to 24th.</p>
<p>Using a weighted sum of the medals (with a gold worth 3 points, silver 2 and bronze 1) yields a similar but less dramatic upheaval, with Russia still up and North Korea still down, but GB restored to 3rd place.</p>
<p>Can you think of a different way to sort the medals? <a href="https://github.com/jezcope/altmedals2012/issues/new">Stick a feature request on the GitHub tracker</a>, or fork it and have a go yourself.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/dealing-with-rsi/">Tuesday 6 May 2014</a>
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<p>You might have noticed that my latest spurt of blogging has been interrupted again. This time, it’s due to a recurrence of an old enemy of mine, repetitive strain injury (RSI). It’s coming back under control now and I thought I’d share what’s worked for me, but before we go any further, heed my warning:</p>
<p><strong>If you have any sort of pain or numbness <em>at all</em> when using a computer, even if it’s momentary, take the time to evaluate your setup and see if there is anything you can change</strong>.</p>
<p>I can’t over-stress how important this is — RSI is a serious medical problem if allowed to get out of hand (potentially as career-ending as a sports injury can be for a professional athlete), and it can be prevented entirely by ensuring your workspace is appropriate to the way you do your work. If in doubt, seek expert and/or medical advice: many larger employers have occupational health advisors, and your GP will be able to advise or refer you to an appropriate specialist.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.html">a lot of intensive computer-users do</a>, I’ve had numerous bouts of computer-related pain over the years, and at one point even had to switch to voice recognition software for several months. If you’ve ever tried to use voice recognition, especially to do any programming, you’ll understand how frustrating that can be.</p>
<p>Previously, I’ve had pain associated with using the mouse, so these days I tend to drive my computer primarily by keyboard. I use apps (like Emacs) that are very keyboard-friendly, and when on Linux I even use a <a href="http://awesome.naquadah.org/">keyboard friendly window manager</a> to minimise my need to use the mouse at all. I also have a regular mouse at work and a trackball at home, so I’m varying the set of muscles I use to mouse with.</p>
<p>As a result, I use a lot of key combinations involving the Control, Alt and Windows/Command keys, and recently I’ve started having pain in my thumbs (particularly the left) from curling them under to hit the Alt and Win keys. Note: emacs users more commonly suffer from the problem known as “<a href="http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_pinky.html">Emacs pinky</a>”, but I headed that one off at the pass early on by <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MovingTheCtrlKey">remapping my caps-lock key as another Control key</a>.</p>
<p>I’m very lucky: my workplace has a dedicated assistive technologies advisor, who has a collection of alternative keyboards, mice and other input devices, so I was able to have a chat with him, get some expert advice and try out several possible options before committing to buying anything.</p>
<p>Here’s what I’ve ended up with:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/freestyle2-for-pc-us/">Kinesis Freestyle II USB keyboard</a>: This keyboard is split down the middle, and allows the halves to be positioned and tilted independently to reduce the unnatural bend in my wrist, as well as putting less strain on my shoulders. Through some experimentation with this and similar keyboards, I’ve found that having the two halves parallel but about 15–20cm apart is more comfortable for me than having them close together and angled (like the <a href="http://goldtouch.com/ergonomic-keyboards/">keyboards made by Goldtouch</a>).</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/FS3-M-Triple-Switch-Control-Keyboard/dp/B00G3TMCRG/">Programmable USB foot pedals</a>: These are such simple devices they can be picked up for cheap almost anywhere on the net, or even <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5670747/introduce-a-foot-pedal-into-your-computing-setup">hacked together using the controller from an old USB keyboard</a>. I have three pedals set up, with Control under my left foot, Alt under my right and Windows/Command inside Alt so I can reach it with my right foot easily. Initially, I found that I was getting some back pain after starting to use the pedals, but I’ve since realised that this was because I had them positioned awkwardly — I started over by looking at where my feet fell naturally while working and then moving the pedals into position accordingly.</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.posturite.co.uk/mice-keyboard-devices/vertical-mice/penguin-mouse.html">Posturite Penguin mouse</a>: This also helps to reduce the unnatural bend in my wrist, as well as dealing with my tendency to “anchor” or rest my forearm on the desk while moving the mouse only with my fingers and wrist. It comes in three sizes to fit your hand, and has a switch to swap the scroll wheel direction so you can swap it to your other hand from time to time. Plus it’s made by a British company!</li>
</ul>
<p>This combination straightens my wrists out completely while typing, and is slowly eliminating (as I train myself to use the pedals) my use of the left thumb for anything other than the space bar.</p>
<p>I hope this is of some use to a few people out there suffering needlessly from similar problems.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/digital-curation-centre-roadshow-day-1/">Tuesday 2 November 2010</a>
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<p>Today saw the first day of the Digital Curation Centre’s (DCC) 3-day workshop on data management here in Bath. Today was just a half-day and gave a general overview of the data management landscape.</p>
<p>My aims for the event are to better understand how I can teach our doctoral students about good data management, and provide them with the right tools to do it in practice.</p>
<p>I’ll be looking out for:</p>
<ul>
<li>Examples of good practice from people who are already doing this with their students;</li>
<li>Ways of making data management easy (nay even attractive) for researchers who would not otherwise be interested;</li>
<li>Advice on how to assess the data needs of researchers and select appropriate methods of storing and archiving that data.</li>
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<p>We had an excellent strategic overview from Liz Lyon (Director of <a href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/">UKOLN</a>), followed by three case studies presented by Chris McMahon (University of Bath), Gregory Tourte (University of Bristol) and Kenji Takeda (University of Southampton). The afternoon closed with a short talk from the DCC’s director, Kevin Ashley, on what <a href="http://www.dcc.ac.uk/">resources the DCC provides to support people in rolling out good data management practice</a>.</p>
<p>I’ve been promised that the slides will be available on the web soon, so I’ll post those as soon as I know where they are. There also seem to be a few twitterers there so I’ve saved the <a href="http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/dccsw10">twitter stream from the event</a> for future reference, and if you want to follow it live the hashtag is #dccsw10.</p>
<p>Tomorrow’s session is a little bit high-level for me, being aimed at senior management and similar roles, but I’ll be attending both of the more practical workshops on Thursday.</p>
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<p>Like it or loath it, people use <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>. Some use it as a quick reference for unimportant matters, or as a jumping-off point for more detailed research. Some use it, inappropriately, as a source in its own right: English Heritage was recently <a href="http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=426&amp;storycode=3136686&amp;c=1">criticised by Building Design magazine</a> for citing a Wikipedia article as evidence in a buildings listing case. When I mentioned on Twitter recently that I was in a discussion about using wikis (though not Wikipedia itself) as an aid to research student supervision, one of my contacts replied, referring to Wikipedia as “kinda… dodgy”. <!--more--></p>
<p>As a publicly-editable wiki, Wikipedia works by and large as a repository for human knowledge, which is great. The problem is that some of the people who edit it choose to wilfully present incorrect information. For example, the birthday of the artist Titian was <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7884121.stm">recently falsified</a> in Wikipedia following an exchange in the British House of Commons; the edit was quickly traced back to the headquarters of the Conservative Party. Other users vandalise the site, while others still are simply wrong.</p>
<p>What about the case in Wikipedia’s favour? Four years ago, an <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html">article</a> (subscription required, <a href="http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69844">report in Wired here</a>) published in Nature compared 42 articles between Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. The authors reported “eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, […] four from each encyclopaedia.” In minor errors, Britannica still had the edge, but not by much.</p>
<p>Whichever way you fall on the issue, an understanding of Wikipedia is an important element of information literacy which cannot be ignored. As such, it needs to be considered by educators. So what are people doing already?</p>
<p>On the one hand, we have Prof. Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton, who <a href="http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/1961862.lecturer_bans_students_from_using_google_and_wikipedia/">bans her first year students</a> (found via <a href="http://cicsdir.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-and-future-of-thinking.html">Christine Sexton’s blog post</a>) from using Wikipedia or Google. Her aim in doing so is to force them to use and understand conventional scholarly literature so that they know what to look for in a reliable source.</p>
<p>On the other hand, we have Jeremy Boggs of George Mason University in America. His tactic is to have <a href="http://clioweb.org/2009/04/05/assigning-wikipedia-in-a-us-history-survey/">students actually contribute a well-researched article to Wikipedia</a>, and then observe how it grows and changes over the remainder of the term. This time, the aim is to give students a direct insight into the workings of Wikipedia to inform future use.</p>
<p>It is this second approach that I think we, as educators, should be taking. The constructionist view of learning, which I find useful, suggests that learners will tend to stick with their existing beliefs until these are rendered untenable through experience. Since many university students have now grown up with Wikipedia, I feel that some may need to be shown the flaws in this model of publishing before they will engage with more conventional scholarly resources. Forcing them to use these resources without a reason (and “telling them” is not sufficient reason) could result in them learning simply that books are difficult to use because of the lack of search capabilities (Google Book Search notwithstanding).</p>
<p>And it’s not just students in school and university who need to be taught these skills. There are many professionals who don’t understand this amazingly useful resource. Either they regard it with suspicion and miss out on its benefits, or fail to understand its shortcomings and treat it as more reliable than it is. Either way, all educators must engage with Wikipedia and its flaws to ensure that our learners make the best that they can of it.</p>
<p><em>Do you actively engage with your learners about Wikipedia? What tactics do you use to help them learn to use it effectively? Or do you feel that it has no place in the classroom at all? Leave me a comment below.</em></p>
<p><em>By the way, if you’re interested in this debate, I can strongly recommend listening to the <a href="http://digitalcampus.tv/">Digital Campus</a> podcast, which has covered the issue right from the <a href="http://digitalcampus.tv/2007/03/06/episode-01-wikipedia-friend-or-foe/">first episode</a>. The <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/e-learning-stuff-podcast-019-w-w-w-w-wikipedia/">most recent episode</a> of <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/">James Clay’s e-Learning stuff</a> podcast also covers Wikipedia in some detail.</em></p>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">DOI</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open access</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open scholarship</span></li>
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<p>So, as you’ll have seen from my last post, I’ve been putting together an <a href="http://doi2oa.erambler.co.uk/">alternative DOI resolver that points to open access copies in institutional repositories</a>. I’m enjoying learning some new tools and the challenge of cleaning up some not-quite-ideal data, but if it’s to grow into a useful service, it needs several several things:</p>
<h2 id="a-better-name">A better name</h2>
<p>Seriously. “Open Access DOI Resolver” is descriptive but not very distinctive. Sadly, the only name I’ve come up with so far is “Duh-DOI!” (see the YouTube video below), which doesn’t quite convey the right impression.</p>
<h2 id="a-new-home">A new home</h2>
<p>I’ve grabbed a list of DOI endpoints for British institutional repositories — well over 100. Having tested the code on my iMac, I can confirm it happily harvests DOIs from most <a href="http://eprints.org/">EPrints</a>-based repositories. But I’ve hit 10,000 database rows (the free limit on <a href="http://heroku.com/">Heroku</a>, the current host) with just the DOIs from a single repository, which means the public version won’t be able to resolve anything from outside Bath until the situation changes.</p>
<h2 id="better-standards-compliance">Better standards compliance</h2>
<p>It’s a fact of life that everyone implements a standard differently. OAI-PMH and Dublin Core are no exception. Some repositories report both the DOI and the open access URL in <code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;dc:identifier&gt;</code> elements; others use <code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;dc:relation&gt;</code> for both while using <code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;dc:identifier&gt;</code> for something totally different, like the title. Some don’t report a URL for the items repository entry at all, only the publisher’s (usually paywalled) official URL.</p>
<p>There are efforts under way to improve the situation (like <a href="http://www.rioxx.net/about/">RIOXX</a>), but until then, the best I can do is to implement gradually better heuristics to standardise the diverse data available. To do that, I’m gradually collecting examples of repositories that break my harvesting algorithm and fixing them, but that’s a fairly slow process since I’m only working on this in my free time.</p>
<p><a href="http://xkcd.com/927/"><em>xkcd: Standards</em></a></p>
<h2 id="better-data">Better data</h2>
<p>Even with better standards compliance, the tool can only be as good as the available data. I can only resolve a DOI if it’s actually been associated with its article in an institutional repository, but not every record that should have a DOI has one. It’s possible that a side benefit of this tool is that it will flag up the proportion of IR records that have DOIs assigned.</p>
<p>Then there’s the fact that most repository front ends seem not to do any validation on DOIs. As they’re entered by humans, there’s always going to be scope for error, which there should be some validation in place to at least try and detect. Here are just a few of the “DOIs” from an anonymous sample of British repositories:</p>
<ul>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">+10.1063/1.3247966</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">/10.1016/S0921-4526(98)01208-3</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">0.1111/j.1467-8322.2006.00410.x</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">07510210.1088/0953-8984/21/7/075102</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">10.2436 / 20.2500.01.93</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">235109 10.1103/PhysRevB.71.235109</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">DOI: 10.1109/TSP.2012.2212434</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">ShowEdit 10.1074/jbc.274.22.15678</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/989863.989893</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00191-008-0096-6</code></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;U+200B&gt;10.&lt;U+200B&gt;1104/&lt;U+200B&gt;pp.&lt;U+200B&gt;111.&lt;U+200B&gt;186957</code></li>
</ul>
<p>In some cases it’s clear what the error is and how to correct it programmatically. In other cases any attempt to correct it is guesswork at best and could introduce as many problems as it solves.</p>
<p>That last one is particularly interesting: the <code class="highlighter-rouge">&lt;U+200B&gt;</code> codes are “zero width spaces”. They don’t show on screen but are still there to trip up computers trying to read the DOI. I’m not sure how they would get there other than by a deliberate attempt on the part of the publisher to obfuscate the identifier.</p>
<p>It’s also only really useful where the repository record we’re pointing to actually has the open access full text, rather than just linking to the publisher version, which many do.</p>
<h2 id="a-license">A license</h2>
<p>Ok, this one’s pretty easy to solve. I’m releasing the code under the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html">GNU General Public License</a>. <a href="http://github.com/jezcope/doi2oa">It’s on github so go fork it</a>.</p>
<p><em>And here’s the video I promised:</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Don't force it, feel it</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/dont-force-it-feel-it/">Wednesday 1 December 2010</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Marketing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Matlab</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">LabVIEW</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
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<p>Part of my role in the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies is to provide advice on how our students and researchers can make the best use of ICT in their work, and that includes software. Recently I’ve attended a couple of “free workshops” covering first Matlab and then LabVIEW, both of which the University has a site license for.</p>
<p>They were both run for free by the vendors of the software in question: the Matlab workshop by Mathworks and the LabVIEW one by National Instruments. The experiences couldn’t have been more different.</p>
<p>The Matlab workshop was a whole-day affair, gathering several hundred researchers from across the university. A succession of Mathworks employees whizzed through feature after impressive feature, clearly caught up in the shining brilliance of their own product.</p>
<p>Because of the diversity of the audience, the examples chosen to illustrate different features could only really appeal to a fraction of those watching at any one time. The presenters each chose to focus on developing a small number of examples in detail, and rushed head-over-heels to try and show off as many features as possible.</p>
<p>The net effect was leave much of the audience somewhat non-plussed. I know Matlab to be an excellent piece of software even for very basic analysis such as plotting a graph or two (though it can be a little annoying to a certain type of snobbish coding geek; i.e. me). The chemistry PhD students I was sitting with, though, were left with the strong impression that it was a very complicated piece of software, only useful for engineers and financial analysts.</p>
<p>The LabVIEW session was quite different. National Instruments had planned several shorter workshops to keep audience sizes small. They’d put together a workbook with some tasks and provided enough laptops with LabVIEW installed for every two people to have one.</p>
<p>A little bit of standard marketing speak was followed by an interesting session of putting together a ‘virtual instrument’ to analyse data from an interesting little USB thingy with an LED, a microphone and some other bits and bobs soldered to it.</p>
<p>We had complete freedom to experiment, so we were soon taking the task in interesting directions related to our own backgrounds. Much more engaging, and I had soon got to understand some of the power of an application that I’d never really even heard of before.</p>
<p>So, it seems it applies as much to selling as teaching: you can’t “just tell ‘em”.</p>
<p>Please, please, please. If you’ve got a great product that you’re proud of, let it speak for itself and don’t ram it down my throat.</p>
<p>And that goes for teaching too.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Equity in education: giving everyone a fair chance</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/equity-education-giving-everyone-fair-chance/">Monday 18 May 2009</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Equality</span></li>
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<p>There’s no denying it, it’s a tricky concept. How do we make sure that you offer everyone a fair chance? How do we define fair? Who is ‘everyone’ and what chance are we going to give them? One of the more recent <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lets/lt-supp/pche.html">PCHE</a> workshops had us discussing these very questions, so here are my thoughts on what I’ve learned.<!--more--></p>
<p>I used to think that to treat people fairly meant to disregard their race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability and all those other things which make them unique. After all, equality is touted as being a central value of modern society, and my copy of Chambers Dictionary gives the following definition:</p>
<blockquote>
<strong>equality</strong> <em>n </em>the condition of being equal; sameness; evenness.</blockquote>
<p>Looking back, though, that interpretation seems a trifle naive. No two people are identical, so treating them in the same way is always going to be a compromise; doing so blindly seems particularly insensitive.</p>
<p>For example, under that original assumption, the ideal way to interact with a person who is disabled is to treat them as though they were completely able-bodied. But think about that a bit more. I’m fortunate enough never to have been considered disabled, but I have sprained my ankle in the past, and even being so minimally-hobbled it would have seemed wrong for someone to be expecting me to carry heavy boxes up and down stairs. Treating someone in a wheelchair like that just seems downright offensive, if not just plain dim.</p>
<p>And yet neither can we jump to conclusions. Staying with the disability theme, take <a title="Wikipedia page for Evelyn Glennie" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_glennie">Evelyn Glennie</a>, who has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12. It would be easy to assume that music wouldn’t be an ideal career for her. Amazingly, she is a world-class percussionist and composer. If you’d like to see her in action, take a look at <a title="TED talks: Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen" href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html">this talk in which she teaches her audience how to listen</a>. It’s about half an hour long, so make yourself a nice cup of tea and I’ll wait for you to come back.</p>
<p>So fairness means more than just equality: we have to take people’s differences into account. However, we can’t jump to conclusions either. Not only do people differ in their natural capabilities, they also differ in how they relate to them. When you get right down to it, the only person who can tell you how I want to be treated is me.</p>
<p>But that still isn’t an end to it. If I lose my sight in an accident, I’m guessing that you probably won’t want me flying passenger aeroplanes (although check out <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/08/raf-pilot-stroke-blinded">this story about a pilot who was guided to safety after being blinded by a stroke in mid-air</a>). Even making all reasonable effort to give everyone the same opportunities, there are still cases where we just can’t.</p>
<p>When it comes down to it, we have to be sensitive to the capabilities of everyone around us. If you had a team-member who was amazing at customer service but lacked a little in the time-management department, you’d make allowances. Dealing with disability, cultural differences or whatever is no difference.</p>
<p>One person who’s really helped me learn this is a colleague of mine. Her English is good; so good that it’s easy to forget that it’s not her native language. But every now and then I’ll use a word or idiomatic phrase that I take for granted and she’ll stop me and ask what on earth I’m talking about it. Thanks to her patience, I now try to be aware of those I’m talking to, whether I’m teaching or not, and whether they’ve understood me. If not, I try to rephrase what I’ve just said or explain myself without being patronising. I’m still learning, but I’m getting there.</p>
<p><em>Have you ever run into difficulty dealing with someone who’s different to you? How do you cope with the natural diversity of the people you meet every day? Leave a comment below to share your experience.</em></p>
<p><strong>Related links:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a title="Wikipedia page for Evelyn Glennie" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_glennie">Evelyn Glennie's page on Wikipedia</a></li>
<li><a title="TED talks: Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen" href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html">TED talks: Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/08/raf-pilot-stroke-blinded">Pilot struck blind in flight shepherded to safe landing by RAF</a></li>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/eurosakai11-slides/">Monday 26 September 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">EuroSakai 2011</span></li>
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<p>On Wednesday 8 September I’ll be presenting at <a href="http://eurosakai.nl">EuroSakai<br>
2011</a> in Amsterdam. For those who are interested, here are<br>
my slides.</p>
<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_9421872"> <strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope/isuslab-a-sakaibased-virtual-research-environment-for-scientists" title="iSusLab: a Sakai-based Virtual Research Environment for scientists" target="_blank">iSusLab: a Sakai-based Virtual Research Environment for scientists</a></strong> <iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/9421872" width="425" height="355" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> <div style="padding:5px 0 12px"> View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/" target="_blank">presentations</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope" target="_blank">Jez Cope</a> </div> </div>
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<p>I’ve <a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/staff-driven-student-owned/">written recently</a> about why it’s important that we find out what students want and get them involved in the SLC project as early as possible. Sadly, none of us already involved in the project were blessed with the ability to read minds. We need more effective ways of engaging students, and our foray into this area will be to run a focus group.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>First and foremost, a focus group is about communication. It will allow us to learn from the students how this project would work for them. It will also be an opportunity for us to get some students excited about the project: maybe they’ll mention it to their friends, paving the way for when it’s finally launched; maybe they’ll even be inspired to get involved themselves.</p>
<p>Now, it’s very easy for us to get carried away with that second part; we’re excited, and when you’re excited about something you just want to pass on the excitement. A useful piece of advice to remember here (one of Stephen R. Covey’s <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/7-Habits-Highly-Effective-People/dp/0684858398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1225292081&amp;sr=8-1">7 Habits</a>) is “seek first to understand, then to be understood”. In other words, the best way to convince people to listen to you is to listen to them first.</p>
<p>Bearing this in mind, I propose to break down the focus group into the following three parts:</p>
<ol>
<li>Brief motivating discussion, leading directly into a discussion of what would make a student learning community effective;</li>
<li>Students getting their hands dirty and playing with some examples of what the SLC might look like;</li>
<li>Back together to share impressions of the examples and how they relate to ideas generated in 1.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Initial discussion</h2>
<p>The introduction should be as minimal as possible: just enough to motivate the discussion without prejudicing it. The point of this initial discussion should be to prompt the participants to ask useful questions in the second, hands-on part. A useful tool here might be to split the participants into groups and ask each group to write, on a large piece of paper, a list of ways they feel the web could help to support their learning and university life in general. This could lead on to a list of questions which it’s useful to ask about these ideas to decide how useful they are. The end result would then be usable directly by the participants to aid in part 2.</p>
<h2>Hands-on examples</h2>
<p>Having generated their lists of questions, the participants will be suitably armed to investigate the examples we’ve provided. I’ve already set up three different examples: one on an installation of <a href="http://elgg.org/">Elgg</a>, an open-source social networking platform; one on the university’s test installation of <a href="http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/clearspace">Clearspace</a>, a commercial collaboration, platform; and one on the free wiki site <a href="http://www.wetpaint.com/">Wetpaint</a>. I’ll be asking other members of the project to contribute to these examples between now and then, and if you’d like to have a look round or add something, leave me a comment below and I’ll get back to you.</p>
<h2>Final discussion</h2>
<p>The final part of the focus group will be to bring the participants back together for a discussion on what the different groups thought was important and how they found the examples. It might be helpful at this point for a facilitator to put suggestions from the floor up on a flip chart for the participants to argue over.</p>
<h2>What can we take away?</h2>
<p>The main point of the exercise will be information gathering, and by the end of the focus group we’ll potentially have three valuable sets of artifacts:</p>
<ol>
<li>The lists of ideas and questions from the first part;</li>
<li>Any content added to the examples sites by participants;</li>
<li>The ideas and conclusions agreed by the group as dictated to the facilitator with the flipchart.</li>
</ol>
<p>Hopefully, we’ll also have at least one or two people who are interested in getting involved further, or who know people who know people who might be interested. If we’ve done our job right, we will have earned the right to pass on some of our enthusiasm! The next step will be to look at what we’ve got, and I’ll write more here about that as soon as I can.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>If you’ve got any thoughts on the focus group plan or disagree with what I’ve said, I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment on this article. Thanks!</em></p>
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<p>Some while ago, now, I asked for answers to the question <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/05/30/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Why use technology in teaching?</a> I was preparing to run an afternoon workshop for some fellow students on a HE teaching course and wanted to present them with some convincing reasons to consider technology in their teaching, so I turned to twitter and the blogosphere. At the time I promised a follow-up post summarising the discussion, so here it is.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>I put together the slides for the initial presentation using <a href="http://sliderocket.com/">SlideRocket</a>, and you can flip through them here:</p>
<embed src="http://data.sliderocket.com/SlideRocketPlayer.swf" flashvars="id=C2A0613E-357C-9C91-9A93-A272D250341D" width="400" height="300" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/beckacurrant">Becka Currant</a> kicked off the discussion by pointing out that “too many assumptions are made about digital fluency.” This is something that I’ve since come to agree with: it’s all too easy to assume that because young people appear comfortable with technology, they are completely turned on to the consequences of its use. Becka also pointed me in the direction of <a href="http://www.elp.ac.uk/downloads/Defining%20Generation%20Y%20Bradford.pdf">this typology</a> from <a href="http://www.elp.ac.uk/">JISC’s Enhancing Learner Progression project</a> which does a great job of explaining the separation between students’ level of technological experience and its contribution to education.</p>
<p><a href="http://dougbelshaw.com/blog">Doug Belshaw</a> pointed out <a href="http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/20444">Ben Grey’s post</a> from <a href="http://www.techlearning.com/">Tech &amp; Learning</a> and his <a href="http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/20664">crowdsourced followup</a>, along with <a href="http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2009/05/13/why-educational-technology/">Doug’s own response</a>. All three are worth a read, so go ahead and check them out.</p>
<p><a href="http://human.edublogs.org/">Tomaz Lasic</a> made an insightful comment that many the skills we were looking to achieve with technology (or education in general) are far from new:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“2nd century BC” skills that even some of the old Greek wise heads were talking about — democracy, participation, freedom of expression &amp; thought, active citizenship — you know those pesky old things that never seemed to go out of fashion with thoughtful people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tomaz followed up with a <a href="http://human.edublogs.org/2009/06/03/4th-century-skills/">thought-provoking post</a> on his own blog, which underscored the point that I was trying to make originally: that it’s vital to consider what we want to achieve with technology, not just how cool it is.</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/cat8canary">Catherine Werst</a> suggested that one of the best reasons for using technology to teach is that it pushes us out of our comfort zones, forcing us to question our assumptions about what it means to teach:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Technology presents opportunities and challenges that stretch us to become better teachers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://bookishbrunette.wordpress.com/">Jenny Evans</a> drew on her work with Wolverhampton City Council interviewing kids for an <a href="https://www.wolverhampton-engage.net/sites/anonymous/BSF/Shared%20Documents/Focus.aspx">e-learning promotional video</a> (the site seems to have some odd certificate problems, but you can view the video there). She summarised her experience thus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We got loads of interviews with kids about what they got from from technology — a really strong theme of improving life chances emerged.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Finally, <a href="http://learningunlearning.blogspot.com/">Paul Jinks</a> suggested that teachers tend to use technology when it makes their lives easier and students use it when it’s necessary for their assessments: a paraphrasing of his <a href="http://learningunlearning.blogspot.com/2009/06/technology-for-learning-technology-for.html">earlier blog post</a>. Although I agree with this in part, I think this overgeneralises a complex situation. I also live in hope that some, if not all, teachers can be persuaded that improving their own teaching practice and using technology is one (though not the only) way to do this.</p>
<p>In summary, this post turned up some really useful opinions on why we use technology in teaching. Indeed, it’s worked so well that I’m going to try to keep up the theme of “Ask the Readers”, as it fits in well with my desire to learn from this blog and help others to do the same. I hope you’ve found the responses as interesting as I did, and encourage you to continually ask the question “Why use technology?”</p>
<p><em>This is the first time I’ve summarised a discussion from a previous post. Did it work? Did I add enough value to justify the new post? What could I have done better? Please let me know in the comments below.</em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/from-doi-to-open-access/">Thursday 7 March 2013</a>
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<p>The other week I was at a <a href="http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2013/02/27/ckan-for-rdm-workshop/">gathering of developers, librarians and researchers with an interest in institutional data repositories</a>. Amongst other things, we spent some time brainstorming the requirements for such a repository, but there was one minor-sounding one that caught my imagination.</p>
<p>It boiled down to this question: given only the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier">DOI</a> for a published article (or other artefact), how do you find an open access copy archived in an institutional repository? Some (rather cursory) Googling didn’t come up with an obvious solution, so I thought “How hard can it be to implement?”.</p>
<p>All that’s required is a database mapping DOIs onto URLs, and a spot of glue to make it accessible over the web. The data that you need is freely available in machine-readable format from most repositories via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archives_Initiative_Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesting">OAI-PMH</a>, so you can fill up the database using that as a data source.</p>
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<li><a href="http://doi2oa.erambler.co.uk">Open Access DOI resolver</a></li>
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<p>A few caveats:</p>
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<li>I don’t get much chance to write code at work at the moment, so this was an opportunity to exercise under-used brain muscles and learn some new stuff. It could probably be done better (and the <a href="http://github.com/jezcope/doi2oa">source code</a> is on github, so feel free to fork it and add improvements). It’s written in <a href="http://ruby-lang.org/">Ruby</a> using the awesome <a href="http://sinatrarb.com/">Sinatra</a> web framework.</li>
<li>It’s currently hosted on <a href="http://heroku.com/">Heroku</a>’s free starter-level service, so there’s very little capacity. It therefore only includes DOI’s from the University of Bath’s <a href="http://opus.bath.ac.uk">Opus</a> repository, and the database is full.</li>
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<p>Go try it out and let me know what you think. If it’s useful, I’ll look into how I can make it more robust and resolve more DOIs.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/further-video-conferencing-thoughts/">Wednesday 26 January 2011</a>
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<p>The other day, I blogged about my <a href="../../2011/01/24/simple-video-conferencing-with-bigbluebutton/">experiences using BigBlueButton for video-conferencing</a>. It occurs to me though, that getting the technology right is only half the battle, or even less: the rest is about people’s familiarity with the concept.</p>
<p>Several times over the last few months I’ve been using Skype a bit more to communicate with friends and family. With people who are used to using Skype or similar technologies, it’s a pretty seamless extension of the phonecall. For inexperienced users, however, there’s a lot of awkward silence and waving and repeating “Hello? Can you hear me?”, especially when there’s a bit of a delay on the line.</p>
<p>Then there’s The Feedback Issue. Unlike analogue audio systems there’s no squeaking or whining. Instead, everything that comes out of the speakers is retransmitted through the microphone on a slight delay, which is offputting for the person speaking and downright confusing for everyone else listening. And when more than one participant is causing feedback it just gets worse.</p>
<p>Feedback can be mitigated by turning down the volume on speakers and gain on microphones, but it can only really be eliminated by the use of headphones or echo cancellation hardware/software. Yes, the solution to this is so simple it bears repeating: <strong>use headphones</strong>.</p>
<h1 id="how-to-fix-this">How to fix this</h1>
<p>Getting the user interface right can help. This is where Elluminate falls down: the window is covered in buttons, none of which are labelled and many of which have icons which only vaguely represent their purpose.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> BigBlueButton is better: it has very few buttons. There was a minor issue that one of the buttons didn’t do exactly what was expected (you had to click the microphone button to be able to hear the sound). This stuff is important and worth spending time to get right.</p>
<p>Training can help too, and I think the best form of training in this case is just to give people a safe place to try things out and get used to them. We’ve lived with phones for so long now that we know exactly how they work, but there are a lot of people who just aren’t familiar with video-conferencing.</p>
<p>Anyway, that’ll do for now, though it feels like I’ll probably be visiting this again in the future. Let me know what you think.</p>
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<li id="fn:1">
<p>I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the developers to make it too easy to use, as Elluminate makes part of its money from training. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/groundhog-day-resolutions/">Wednesday 2 February 2011</a>
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<p>As I’ve grown older, I’ve gradually made more conscious attempts to think about what I want my life to be like. Like most people, I’m typically rubbish at either making or keeping New Year’s resolutions, so this year I’m following David Seah’s <a href="http://davidseah.com/2007/02/groundhog-day-resolutions/">Groundhog Day Resolutions</a> pattern.</p>
<p>The idea is to start thinking about the resolutions around Christmas and actually commit to them on the 2nd of February (2/2) and then review them on 3rd March (3/3), 4th April (4/4) etc. I’m not making these solid commitments, but things that I want to track my progress against. It’s ok to let one or two go if I don’t have the time — I’m not Superman after all.</p>
<p>I hope that by publishing this that I’m more likely to follow through on the process, and that it will prompt others to do the same.</p>
<h1 id="do-more">Do more</h1>
<ul>
<li>Blogging;
<ul>
<li>My strategy here is to write shorter posts — this one is an example;</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Playing <a href="http://www.bathgo.org/">Go</a>;</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jezcope">Photography</a>;</li>
<li>Running (10k target time 50 minutes);</li>
<li>Walking with Elly and friends;</li>
<li>Playing music, at home and socially.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="do-less">Do less</h1>
<ul>
<li>Watching crap telly;</li>
<li>Avoiding things that are important but not urgent (housework, taxes, etc.).</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="keep-the-same">Keep the same</h1>
<ul>
<li>Kicking ass at work;</li>
<li>Meeting new and interesting people;</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.bathampton-morris-men.org.uk/">Morris dancing</a>.</li>
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<p><img src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2588/3872158703_cdb8e3aacf.jpg" alt="Gnu" class="main-illustration"></p>
<p>As I’ve <a href="../gtd-things-vs-omnifocus">mentioned previously</a>, I periodically try out new task management software. The latest in that story is Emacs and Org-mode.</p>
<h2 id="what-is-org">What is Org?</h2>
<p>In its creator’s own words, <a href="http://orgmode.org">Org</a> is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It started as an Emacs extension for authoring documents with some neat outlining features, then went mad with power and became a complete personal information organiser.</p>
<h3 id="but-wait-what-the--is-emacs">But wait, what the **** is Emacs?</h3>
<p><a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs">Emacs</a> is the mother of all text editors. It’s one of the oldest pieces of free software, having been around since the <del>dawn of time</del> 1970’s, and is still under active development. Being so venerable, it still cleaves to the conventions of the 70’s and is entirely keyboard-controllable (though it now has excellent support for your favourite rodent as well).</p>
<p>“Text editor” is actually a pretty loose term in this instance: it’s completely programmable, in a slightly odd language called Elisp (which appeals to my computer scientist side). Because many of the people who use it are programmers, it’s been extended to do almost anything that you might want, from transparently editing encrypted or remote (or both) files to browsing the web and checking your email.</p>
<h2 id="my-needs-for-an-organisational-system">My needs for an organisational system</h2>
<p>In my <a href="../gtd-things-vs-omnifocus/">last productivity-related post</a> I mentioned that the key properties of a task management system were:</p>
<ul>
<li>One system for everything</li>
<li>Multiple ways of structuring and viewing tasks</li>
</ul>
<p>I would now probably add a third property: the ability to “shrink-wrap”, or be as simple as possible for the current situation while keeping extra features hidden until needed.</p>
<p>And Org very much fits the bill.</p>
<h3 id="one-system-for-everything">One system for everything</h3>
<p>Emacs has been ported to pretty much every operating system under the sun, so I know I can use it on my Linux desktop at work, my iMac at home plus whatever I end up with in the future. Because the files are all plain text, they’re trivial to keep synchronised between multiple machines.</p>
<p>There are also <a href="http://orgmode.org/manual/MobileOrg.html">apps for iOS and Android</a>, and while they’re not perfect, they’re good enough for when I want to take my todo list on the road.</p>
<h3 id="multiple-ways-of-structuring-and-viewing-tasks">Multiple ways of structuring and viewing tasks</h3>
<p>Whatever I’m doing in Emacs, an instant agenda with all my current tasks is only two keystrokes away. That’s programmable too, so I have it customised to view my tasks in the way that makes most sense to me.</p>
<h3 id="shrink-wrapping">Shrink wrapping</h3>
<p>Org has a lot of very clever features added by its user community over its 10+ years, but you don’t have to use them, or even know they exist, until you need them. As an illustration, a simple task list in Org looks like this:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge">
<pre class="highlight"><code>* TODO Project 1
** TODO Task one
** TODO Task two
* TODO Project 2
** DONE Another task
** TODO A further task
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>And changing <code class="highlighter-rouge">TODO</code> to <code class="highlighter-rouge">DONE</code> is a single keystroke. Simplicity itself.</p>
<p>Here’s <a href="http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/6224">Carsten Dominik on the subject</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>”[Org-mode] is a zero-setup, totally simple TODO manager that works with plain files, files that can be edited on pretty much any system out there, either as plain text in <strong>any</strong> editor …</p>
<p>Of course, Org-mode allows you to do more, but I would hope in a non-imposing way! It has lots of features under the hood that you can pull in when you are ready, when you find out that there is something more you’d like to do.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="wow-what-else-can-it-do">Wow, what else can it do?</h3>
<p><a href="HTTP://youtu.be/8uF4W29dGLk">“I didn’t know I could do <em>that</em>!”</a></p>
<p>If that’s not enough, here are a few more reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li>Keyboard shortcuts for quick outline editing</li>
<li>Lots of detailed organisational tools (but only when you need them):
<ul>
<li>Schedule and deadline dates for tasks</li>
<li>Flexible system for repeating tasks/projects</li>
<li>Complete tasks in series or parallel</li>
<li>Arbitrary properties, notes and tags for tasks and projects</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Use the same tools for <a href="http://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html">authoring HTML/LaTeX documents</a> or even <a href="http://orgmode.org/manual/Working-With-Source-Code.html#Working-With-Source-Code">literate programming</a>
</li>
<li>It’s programmable! If it doesn’t have the functionality you want just write it, from adding keyboard shortcuts to whole new use cases (such as a <a href="http://julien.danjou.info/projects/emacs-packages#org-contacts">contact manager</a> or <a href="http://orgmode.org/manual/Tracking-your-habits.html">habit tracker</a>)</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="give-it-a-try">Give it a try</h2>
<p>Emacs is worth trying on its own, especially if you do a lot of programming, web design or anything else that involves a lot of time editing text files. A recent version of Org is bundled with the latest GNU Emacs, and can easily be updated to the current version.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/">GNU Emacs</a></li>
<li><a href="http://orgmode.org/">Org-mode</a></li>
</ul>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/gtd-things-vs-omnifocus/">Monday 11 February 2013</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">OmniFocus</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Things</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Task management</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Productivity</span></li>
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<p>It’s taken a while for me to realise it, but I’m a bit of a list-maker. Some years ago I read David Allen’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done">Getting Things Done</a> (often abbreviated as GTD) and found some useful tips that have had a big impact in how I manage my tasks and my time.</p>
<p>There are <em>heaps</em> of apps to help you Get your Things Done, but I generally seem to oscillate between two: Omni Group’s <a href="http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/">OmniFocus</a> and Cultured Code’s <a href="http://culturedcode.com/things/">Things</a>. The choice between the two is closely balanced in my head, and I seem to end up switching every 12-18 months. Until recently, Things’ lightning-fast cloud sync had be, but now OmniFocus has tempted me back with its general feature-richness.</p>
<p>Some key factors for me:</p>
<ul>
<li>One system for everything:
<ul>
<li>One system that syncs across computers and mobile devices, so I always have it with me;</li>
<li>One system for work stuff and personal stuff, because sometimes I need phone my bank while at work and sometimes the solution to a work problem comes to me while watching TV;</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Multiple ways of structuring and viewing tasks:
<ul>
<li>When I need to check that I’ve captured all my tasks, I need to view them by project to see what’s missing;</li>
<li>When I need to actually do things, I need to see my tasks by context, i.e. what equipment/location is required to do them.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="aside-switching-is-not-inefficient">Aside: switching is not inefficient</h2>
<p>You might think that it’s a waste of time laboriously transferring all my projects and tasks from one system to another, but it’s really not. This only happens once every 12-18 months, and it’s a great way to do a full audit of everything I want to achieve, spot what’s missing and cull the dead wood.</p>
<p>Even if you have one task management system that works for you, I suggest you try occasionally printing the whole lot off (on real dead trees) and re-entering the important stuff. Because it takes more effort, it makes you more ruthless in what stuff you allow onto your todo list and sharpens your focus on what’s important.</p>
<h2 id="omnifocus-vs-things">OmniFocus vs. Things</h2>
<p>OmniFocus’ strength is it’s flexibility. Each task has not only a title and a checkbox, but a project, a context, a start date, a due date, an expected amount of effort and, if that’s not enough, a freeform note field. It has a rich, hierarchical structure for projects and tasks, and the ability to create customised views of the system or “perspectives”.</p>
<p>Things, on the other hand, strives for simplicity. It lacks much of the complexity of OmniFocus and replaces it with tags. Tags can be hierarchical, which is handy, and because you can assign more than one to a task, you can actually use them to replicate a number of OmniFocus’ detail fields.</p>
<h2 id="things-is-pretty-good">Things is pretty good…</h2>
<p>That simplicity means that there’s very little effort involved in using Things — just throw in your tasks and get started. You can assign one or more tags to each task and then filter on those, and that allows you replicate quite a lot of what OmniFocus allows.</p>
<p>The other area where Things beats OmniFocus is in synchronisation. Every time you make a change in Things it’s synced up to the cloud, and updating another app takes moments. There’s no need to manually initiate a sync, so everything is always available everywhere.</p>
<h2 id="but-omnifocus-is-winning">…but OmniFocus is winning</h2>
<p>Sooner or later, though, the lack of expressiveness in Things gets to me. OmniFocus panders to my desire for structure: I can have tasks from any project (or any part of a project) appear one at a time or all at once. That all takes a little more time to set up (though it soon becomes second nature), but it means when I actually want to get on with work I see only the tasks I need to see and no more.</p>
<p>OmniFocus’ perspectives are another example of where the extra power is useful. It’s trivial to set up one-click views that only show a certain set of projects (such as work stuff) or a particular set of tasks (such as things I can do offline), or even just group tasks differently (such as by due date or age).</p>
<p>Finally, the iPad app for OmniFocus has a killer feature: Review mode. This makes it trivial for me to sit down at the end of each week with a cup of tea and go through the entire system, finishing off loose ends and capturing next actions. This is central to the GTD way, and is the part of my routine that guarantees everything is in order and nothing gets missed.</p>
<p>Of course there are plenty of situations where you don’t need all of this complexity, and that’s fine too. It doesn’t force you into using all of the features to have a functioning system: you only have to use what you need for the current situation.</p>
<h2 id="what-about-you">What about you?</h2>
<p>So there you have it. I’d be interested in finding out how you use OmniFocus or Things, or if you have your own preferred system. There are even people who implement <a href="http://www.diyplanner.com/templates/official/hpda">GTD using a biro, a binder clip and a stack of 6x4” index cards</a>.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Two techniques to help teachers make the most of technology</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/help-teachers-make-most-of-technology/">Friday 16 October 2009</a>
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<p>Someone recently asked me a very interesting question: what two techniques would you use to enable academic staff to make the most of new technology for teaching?</p>
<p>A number of thoughts ran through my mind at this point:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ooh, interesting question…</li>
<li>Hmm, that depends…</li>
<li>That sounds like a blog post in the making…</li>
<li>What! Only two?!</li>
</ul>
<p>But I like the idea of narrowing it down to just the two most important; a bit like some weird and geeky version of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr">Desert Island Discs</a>. Plus, to keep my analytical side happy, there’s plenty of scope for categorising loads of specific ideas under two broad techniques.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>So, on with the game. After some thought, I think that my two favourite techniques are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Talking to people; and</li>
<li>Leading by example.</li>
</ol>
<p>Let’s take them one at a time.</p>
<h1 id="talking-to-people">Talking to people</h1>
<p>Well, when I say talking to people, I don’t really mean talking all the time so much as listening. I may not know everything there is to know about technology, but I know more than a little about how it can support teaching; I know plenty about how it’s useful for teaching <em>for me</em>.</p>
<p>But I’m not you. I’m not him over there. And I’m certainly not a busy academic with half a dozen research grants on the go trying to teach my students as best I can alongside the myriad other commitments of life in HE.</p>
<p>And when I say listening, it’s not just about listening. It’s about <em>caring</em>. If I knew the right techniques, I could probably convince you that I was listening, but if I didn’t actually care what you were saying, you’d probably guess pretty quickly.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about neurolinguistic programming or anything like that, but what I do know is that when I take a genuine interest in what someone’s saying then I really get a lot out of it. That’s not something you can fake, but I’ve found that you can actively take an interest in pretty much anything or anyone if you make a bit of effort.</p>
<p>Why is this important? The only way I can help you (or him over there) to make the best of technology is to get a clear picture of what your needs are. I need to <em>understand</em> you. It’s no use me patronising you with information you already know; neither is it helpful to force-feed you information that you just have no use for.</p>
<p>Only if I understand your unique situation can I provide the advice that will help you improve your teaching, or leave well alone if that’s the best option.</p>
<h1 id="teaching-by-example">Teaching by example</h1>
<p>This is something I try to do all the time, in everything I do. I won’t claim that I succeed all of the time, but I’m getting better at it the more I do.</p>
<p>A little while back I read Postman &amp; Weingartner’s <em>Teaching as a Subversive Activity</em> (and I recommend you do to if you’re interested in improving the quality of education). One of the big messages I took away from it was that <em>we learn what we do</em>.</p>
<p>In other words, <em>how</em> we teach (and thus how students learn) is just as important, if not more so, than <em>what</em> we teach.</p>
<p>So, if I want to help you understand how technology can improve your teaching and make life easier for both you and your students (“Why should we make life easy on our students?” I hear them cry) it won’t help if I stand up in front you and your colleagues and give a 45 minute death-by-Powerpoint presentation on how to use Facebook.</p>
<p>Instead (and having listened to you I’ll have an idea of what fits the way you work) I’ll use a whole range of techniques. By giving you a 2-minute online video of tips on how to facilitate online discussions, I can show you how effective YouTube is for teaching. By encouraging you to take part in an online discussion about teaching with video, I can help you see what does and doesn’t help people learn from forums. I might even give you a 45-minute presentation on the theoretical pedagogies of Facebook, if that’s what works for you.</p>
<p>This technique does at least two useful things. First, it gives you an opportunity to get first-hand experience of what tools are out there and what they’re like to use. Secondly, it demonstrates that when it comes to e-learning I have a good enough idea of what’s going on to give you advice that you can trust.</p>
<h1 id="in-the-end">In the end…</h1>
<p>…it mostly comes down to trust. If you trust that I both care about you (and your students) and know what I’m talking about, how much more likely are you to consider listening to me?</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/how-do-you-protect-yourself-online/">Tuesday 27 April 2010</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Twitter</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web 2.0</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Identity</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Privacy</span></li>
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<p>In my last post, <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2010/04/15/privacy-identity-and-control-on-the-web/">Privacy, identity and control on the web</a>, I talked about about how important it can be to take control of your online presence.</p>
<p>But I got to thinking: <strong>What do you do to protect your privacy and/or identity on Facebook, Twitter or the rest of the web?</strong></p>
<p>Please share your thoughts by posting a comment below, or by writing a post on your own blog and linking to this one — a link will automagically appear below.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Introduction to SLC 2.0: Part I</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/">Wednesday 3 September 2008</a>
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<p>I’ve recently become involved in a new project, under the University of Sheffield’s <a title="SeeChange 2008" href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/seechange/">SeeChange</a> initiative, going by the name of “Student Learning Community 2.0”. What’s this all about? Well, it’s to do with using social networking and other Web 2.0 ideas to support student learning at the university, but that sounds more fuzzily defined to me every time I read it. It’s quite a blue-skies project, so I guess a certain amount of fuzziness is to be expected, but I think it will be helpful in the coming months to have some more concrete aims. I’ll be using the rest of this post to try and clarify the project goals, or at least how they look here at the outset of the project.<br>
<!--more--></p>
<h1>What's in a name?</h1>
<p>First and foremost, we wish to benefit our <em>students</em>. With any project involving new teaching methods, and particularly those involving new technology, it is easy to get excited about the techniques, but less easy to see how they are relevant to the learners. If this project is to be successful, we must have a positive impact on students.</p>
<p>Second, it focuses on student <em>learning</em>. Children learn “how to learn” from a very early age, and it is a sad fact that the current school system fosters learning behaviours which are far from optimal. Learning “ability” has a direct impact not only on academic achievement but on life generally; it is therefore in the University’s best interests to ensure that its students are the best learners possible, despite the poor training they may have received previously.</p>
<p>Third, we aim to do that by fostering a <em>community</em>. Encouraging students to collaborate in learning has two major benefits:</p>
<ol>
<li>It will leverage peer pressure, increasing the impact of the project;</li>
<li>It will avoid re-inventing the wheel by many independent students, increasing the efficiency of the project.</li>
</ol>
<p>Finally, there is an expectation that <em>Web 2.0</em> will play a role. The focus of most of the new technologies which come under the heading “Web 2.0” has been on social networking in various forms. There are now web-based communities with memberships ranging in size from a handful to over 100 million (source: <a title="Facebook | Statistics" href="http://www.new.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics=">Facebook statistics</a>), and many young people use such social networking sites daily. We therefore anticipate that this will be a key factor in developing the student learning community.</p>
<h1>Pictures of success</h1>
<p>So, how can we say whether the project has been a success? For me, I think the key aim will be an improvement in student learning behaviour, particularly an increase in deep learning and a more collaborative approach to learning. In addition to this, I think the project has potential to do some or all of the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Improve quality of life for students and graduates;</li>
<li>Provide students with new skills;</li>
<li>Make students more employable;</li>
<li>Encourage trust (in all directions) between students, staff and the university;</li>
<li>Make teaching a more enjoyable occupation; and, of course,</li>
<li>Make the university more attractive to potential students.</li>
</ul>
<p>These are, naturally, difficult to measure objectively. However, I feel that by keeping these aims in mind it will not just be possible for the project to succeed; it will be impossible for it to fail. Call me idealistic if you like — I’ve got a good feeling about this.</p>
<p><em>That’s all for now. In my next post on this subject, I’ll start to address the following:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><em>How might we go about this?</em></li>
<li><em>Where are we now?</em></li>
</ul>
<p><em>I’ll also be elaborating on the issues I’ve touched on in this first post soon. Until then, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.</em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/introduction-to-slc-20-part-ii/">Wednesday 10 September 2008</a>
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<p>In hindsight, my <a title="Part I" href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/introduction-to-slc-20-part-i/">previous post</a> on the subject of SLC 2.0 seems rather vague. It’s definitely a worthwhile description of the motivation behind the project (or at least my motivation) but it doesn’t really describe what we’re actually doing. I’ll seek to remedy that a little with this, part II of my introduction to SLC 2.0.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>To start us off, here are a couple of quotes which sum up the ethos of the project. First, one from the original SLC 2.0 project proposal (emphasis mine):</p>
<blockquote>This project aims to develop <strong>partnerships between <a title="Corporate Information and Computing Services" href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/cics/">CICS</a>, students
and departments</strong> to encourage the <strong>use of Web 2.0 tools</strong> in
<strong>student learning and research</strong>.</blockquote>
<p>Second, one from the Theory of Change document put together at the very start of the project:</p>
<blockquote>Students creating a sustainable way of sharing tools, processes and
ideas, and knowedge on how to best use and adapt them for their
learning and research.</blockquote>
<p>I think between them, these summarise what we’re about pretty succinctly. Recent student feedback suggests that students are genuinely surprised that we don’t support this. The reasons that we’re not currently doing this are quite clear:</p>
<ol>
<li>It spans departmental boundaries, so no individual department sees it as a priority;</li>
<li>There is no central support for this type of personal development, either from the University or the Students' Union (other than the Careers Service, which is tightly focussed on the job application process).</li>
</ol>
<p>Bearing in mind that, as in any large institution, there is a great deal of inertia in this state of affairs, the most effective approach will therefore be a grassroots one.</p>
<h1>Involving students</h1>
<p>We believe that we are most likely to be successful if the project is run both by students and for students. For this reason, we will be involving students heavily in the planning process, and aiming to pass overall control of the project to the student body as soon as possible. The role of CICS and LeTS will be to provide support and advice where requested.</p>
<p>We will be running focus groups in the upcoming (Autumn 2008) term, to find out:</p>
<ol>
<li>What students <em>want</em> from the SLC;</li>
<li>What students are already doing which can be adopted by the SLC; and</li>
<li>What support students are prepared to give to the SLC.</li>
</ol>
<p>At the same time, we will be recruiting student volunteers to fulfil roles in the project as they become necessary. In particular, we’ll probably need a network of ambassadors to represent the project to the students and the university, most likely on a departmental basis. The existing student course representatives may be a useful starting point.</p>
<p>There are also several groups of students who will be worth involving, both because they have appropriate insight and expertise, and because they have an interest in the outcome. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Students' Union</li>
<li>CILASS Student Ambassador Network</li>
<li>PGRC/Progress</li>
<li>Departmental societies (particularly Computer Science, Education)</li>
<li>Other relevant societies (e.g. Free Software)</li>
</ul>
<h1>Likely directions</h1>
<p>Although we have yet to begin polling the students, we’ve already started coming up with ideas for how to proceed with the project. Here are some of them.</p>
<h2>Online home for the community</h2>
<p>This will provide a central point of contact for students; it will be a place to share and discuss tools, processes and ideas for students actively contributing to the project, and a work of reference for many others. Discussion forums and a wiki of some description will be required for this. Some social networking features may also be useful.</p>
<h2>Student-led seminars</h2>
<p>A lunchtime seminar series (with free cake) will help to further disseminate the ideas being developed by the project. It will also give participants a chance to discuss, challenge and improve these ideas in an informal, face-to-face setting.</p>
<h2>Raising awareness</h2>
<p>There are a wide range of ways in which the community can be publicised to the student body. These may include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Taster sessions (e.g. <a title="Students' Union Give It A Go" href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/union/activities-and-sport/give-it-a-go.php">Give It A Go</a>)</li>
<li>Union stall</li>
<li>Intro week booklet</li>
<li>Posters around campus</li>
<li>Leaflets in strategic places (e.g. libraries)</li>
<li>Word-of-mouth/viral marketing</li>
<li><a title="Sheffield Graduate Award" href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/thesheffieldgraduateaward/">Sheffield Graduate Award</a></li>
</ul>
<p><em>So, that’s what the SLC 2.0 project is all about, and what we’re doing so far. What do you think? Share your opinion in the comments section below, and subscribe to the <a href="http://allacademic.wordpress.com/feed/">RSS feed</a> for updates as they come.</em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/ipad-first-thoughts/">Tuesday 21 June 2011</a>
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<p>A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get a new iPad at work. Now that I’ve had it for a little while, I thought it was time I shared my first impressions.</p>
<h1 id="the-device">The device</h1>
<p>It’s a good size with plenty of screen real-estate — I’ve never found myself wishing that I had a little bit of extra space, something I often do when browsing the web on my iPhone. That size also makes browsing much less effort: the buttons and links on most websites provide a big enough target to hit with a finger.</p>
<p>It feels very thin, although that’s partly the illusion given by the bevelled edge, but also nicely substantial. In fact, if I have one criticism in this area it’s that it’s a bit too heavy to hold in one hand and type with the other for more than a minute or so, but then trying to type on QWERTY with one hand is a pain at the best of times.</p>
<p>I expected typing to be quite difficult, but it’s actually pretty painless, especially with a flat surface to set it down on. Because you only have to touch the screen, rather than pushing down a physical key, very little effort is required to type, which seems for me to cancel out the disadvantage of not having any haptic feedback.</p>
<h1 id="useful-apps">Useful apps</h1>
<p>There are loads of really good apps for iPad, but a few really stand out. <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/twitter/id333903271?mt=8">Twitter for iPad</a> is beautifully designed, making perfect use of the extra screen space to pop up profiles, hashtag searches and conversations without hiding the main feed. Because you can scroll to the left and right with a swipe, you can explore many levels deep without getting lost.</p>
<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/omnifocus-for-ipad/id383804552?mt=8">OmniFocus</a> is another excellent app, syncing well with the desktop and iPhone versions. It lets me view my tasks in a number of different ways, including syncing custom perspectives (combinations of filters and sorts) from the desktop. You can turn it to portrait mode to hide everything but the list of tasks, which is also nice. Easily my favourite feature, though, is the new Review mode, which makes doing a GTD-style review on a Friday afternoon with a cuppa a doddle and keeps my todo list complete and focused.</p>
<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/goodreader-for-ipad/id363448914?mt=8">GoodReader</a> is a recent discovery for me, though it’s been available on iPhone for some time. It’s a very well designed PDF-reading app, with some very cool features: sync with DropBox and SFTP; download documents from email; and highlight and annotate documents as you read. The ability to both read and annotate documents on a decent-sized screen has pretty much reduced my printing to almost zero.</p>
<p>It’s great that you can connect a projector via the VGA adaptor to the iPad and use it to present, but since I use LaTeX and beamer.sty quite a lot for this I need to be able to project PDF files. <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/pdf-presenter-for-ipad/id376809625?mt=8">PDF Presenter</a> is a very simple app which does just that, displaying next and previous slides on the iPad itself and giving you a selection of simple transitions to boot. Keynote eat your heart out.</p>
<h1 id="cool-stuff">Cool stuff</h1>
<p>I have a fairly recent iMac at home with one of the new Apple wireless keyboards — imagine my delight at discovering that I can disconnect it from the iMac, pair it with the iPad and start typing away! I can even set it to use my preferred Dvorak keyboard layout.</p>
<p>When I took a look at the “official” iPad Smart Cover, I was pretty underwhelmed — they’re pretty expensive (though coming down in price) and even the leather version just looks cheap and tacky. Thankfully, there’s an alternative in the <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/TeckNet-Leather-Generation-Magnetic-Feature/dp/B000MPNIZW/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1310919045&amp;sr=8-5">TeckNet folio case</a> which is both cheaper and nicer.</p>
<h1 id="niggles">Niggles</h1>
<p>Support for images in the CMYK colour space is lousy, which is unusual for Apple, since they tend to think things like that through quite carefully. I can’t imagine it’ll affect many people, but it’s been a real pain because the background we use for our slides at CSCT turns out to be in CMYK and the luminous green it became on iPad put me off using it for presentations until I finally figured out how to fix it using ColorSync on Mac.</p>
<p>As I mentioned above, I prefer to use the Dvorak keyboard layout, so it would be nice if it was possible to switch layout on the on-screen keyboard, but that isn’t currently possible.</p>
<h1 id="overall">Overall</h1>
<p>I can see how it wouldn’t make a big difference for everyone, but for me the iPad has really made a big change to the way I work. I’ve stopped printing things to read (and my annotated reading material is now backed up). My todo list is looking a lot leaner because I can do many of the little bitty jobs on the go instead of needing to sit down at a desk or open up a laptop.</p>
<p>I’m still learning how to make it a seamless part of my workflow, but I’m pretty happy so far!</p>
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<p>I use a lot of the ideas of David Allen’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_things_done">Getting Things Done</a> as the basis for my system of capturing, organising and checking off projects and tasks. I like it; it helps make sure that I’m not missing anything.</p>
<p>I do, however, find it somewhat lacking in the area of giving me a day-to-day tactical feel of what I need to get done. Recently I’ve been trying to fill that gap with a simple tool called <em>personal kanban</em>.</p>
<h2 id="what-is-personal-kanban">What is personal kanban?</h2>
<p><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/Simple-kanban-board-.jpg/640px-Simple-kanban-board-.jpg" alt="Kanban board" class="main-illustration"><br>
<a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban">Kanban</a> (看板 — literally “billboard”) is a scheduling system developed by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota to direct the manufacture of vehicles to minimise work-in-progress. <a href="http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/">Personal Kanban (PK)</a> is an adaptation of the ideas behind the original kanban system for the type of knowledge work done by the majority of typical office workers.</p>
<p>PK has two key principles:</p>
<ol>
<li>Visualise your work</li>
<li>Limit your work in progress</li>
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<p>The idea is that if you can see what you’re doing (and not doing <em>yet</em>) you’ll feel more in control, which will give you the confidence to make a conscious decision to focus on just a small number of things at once. That in turn helps to alleviate that nagging feeling of being overloaded, while still letting you get work done.</p>
<p>The implementation involves moving cards or sticky notes between columns on a wall or whiteboard, a concept which is probably easier to understand with an example.</p>
<h2 id="pk-and-web-publishing">PK and web publishing</h2>
<p>A piece of content (blog post, news article, whatever) typically moves through a fairly fixed workflow. It starts life as an <strong>idea</strong>, then the time comes when it’s <strong>ready</strong> to write, after which you might <strong>outline</strong> it, <strong>draft</strong> it, send it round for <strong>review</strong> and finally <strong>publish</strong> it.</p>
<p>On your whiteboard, draw up a column for each of the stages highlighted in bold in the previous paragraph, and assign each article its own sticky note. Then simply move the sticky notes from column to column as you work and experience the satisfaction of watching the system flow and <em>seeing</em> work get done.</p>
<p>It’s a great way to ensure a sensible flow of content without either working yourself to death or running out of things to publish. I’ve used a variation of this system at work for a while now to get news items and blog posts published, and I’m just starting to implement it for this blog too.</p>
<p>It works very well with teams too, as everyone can see the whole team’s workload. I use this to assist in coordinating a small team of PhD students who contribute stuff to our website, using the excellent <a href="https://trello.com/">Trello</a> in place of a physical board.</p>
<h2 id="pk-and-generic-tasks">PK and generic tasks</h2>
<p>Once you’ve understood the basic concept, you can basically use it however works for you. You’re encouraged to experiment and adapt the basic idea in whatever way seems to make sense, in a <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen">kaizen</a>-like continual improvement fashion.</p>
<p>While it’s useful for sets of similar tasks like blog posts, you can also adapt it to a generic task workflow. I use the following:</p>
<dl>
<dt>Ready</dt>
<dd>Tasks which could potentially be done now<br>
Doing</dd>
<dd>Tasks actually in progress<br>
Waiting</dd>
<dd>Tasks which can’t be acted on yet because they’re waiting for input from someone else<br>
Done</dd>
<dd>Completed tasks</dd>
</dl>
<p>I have this up on a whiteboard in my office, with each task on a post-it note, which allows me to see at a glance everything that I’ve got going on at the moment, and thus make sure that I’m balancing my priorities correctly — in accordance with PK principle 1 (“Visualise your work”). I also have a limit on the number of tasks that can be in “Doing” and “Waiting” at any one time (PK principle 2: “Limit your work in progress”), which helps me to make sure I’m not feeling overloaded.</p>
<p>I try to keep this as simple as possible, but occasionally introduce little codes like coloured stickers to help with visualising the balance when I need to. The whole point is to use the basic ideas to make a system that works for you, rather than anything that’s too prescriptive.</p>
<p>Of course, I can’t carry a whiteboard around with me, so when I’m out of the office for a while I’ll transfer everything to <a href="https://trello.com/">Trello</a>, which I can access via the web and on my phone and iPad, or even just take a photo of the board.</p>
<h2 id="combining-pk-with-gtd">Combining PK with GTD</h2>
<p>GTD is a great system for making sure you’re capturing all the work that needs to be done, but I’ve always been dissatisfied with its ideas about prioritising, which are based on:</p>
<ol>
<li>Context (where you are/what facilities you have access to)</li>
<li>Time available</li>
<li>Energy (how tired/refreshed you are)</li>
</ol>
<p>Organising tasks by context has always felt like unnecessary detail, while worrying too much about time and energy on a task-by-task basis seems like a recipe for procrastination (though managing time/energy on a more general level can be useful).</p>
<p>I’ve ended up with a two-level system. GTD is for strategic purposes: tracking projects, balancing long-term priorities and making sure nothing slips through the cracks. Kanban is a much more tactical tool, to help see what needs to be done right now, this week, or later on.</p>
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<p><a id="post-image" class="alignright" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/43602175@N06/4070018686/" title="Amazon Kindle PDF by goXunuReviews, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2605/4070018686_b8febdd20a_m.jpg" width="185" height="240" alt="Amazon Kindle PDF"></a><br>
I’ve now had my <a href="http://amazon.com/kindle">Kindle</a> for just over 12 months — it<br>
was last year’s Christmas gift from my wonderful wife — and I can quite<br>
honestly say that it’s completely changed the way I read.</p>
<p>I’ve always been a keen reader, but sometimes found it difficult to find time<br>
to read while also having a book available. I also tended only to buy books one<br>
at a time when I was in a physical bookshop. As a consequence, most of my<br>
reading happened at home, either in bed or in the bath, and I would get through<br>
books at around one a month.</p>
<p>Since getting my Kindle (well, since first getting the Kindle app for iPhone 14<br>
months ago) I have read 45 books. I never used to read non-fiction books, but<br>
have just finished my third of the last few months. My decision on what to read<br>
next would generally wait until I’d finished my last book, but now I have 14<br>
books waiting to be read and about another 20 on an Amazon wishlist waiting to<br>
be purchased.</p>
<p>What’s caused this change? As you might guess, it’s a combination of several<br>
things. Compared to a paper book, my Kindle weighs almost nothing, so I can<br>
slip it in a bag or a pocket. I can hold it in one hand while drinking tea, or<br>
lie on my back and read, both of which I found too tiring to do with paper<br>
books.</p>
<p>I also have iPhone and desktop Kindle apps, which are always in sync. I always<br>
have my current book with me, so I have many more opportunities to read.</p>
<p>When I finish a book, I can immediately start the next, whether I have one<br>
already lined up or I need to go online and buy one. I’ve basically turned into<br>
a chain-reader, going from book to book without pause.</p>
<p>Irritatingly, the prices do not reflect the near-zero marginal cost of<br>
distributing digital content — if you shift content in the volume that Amazon<br>
can, your income is almost pure profit.</p>
<p>However, digital books are still cheaper than the print editions. The<br>
difference for popular fiction is pretty small, but I appreciate it<br>
nonetheless. For specialist non-fiction, on the other hand, where low volumes<br>
make print copies prohibitively expensive, digital editions come at a<br>
significant discount — often half price or better in my experience.</p>
<p>I actually wrote the entire first draft of this post without mentioning either<br>
screen quality or battery life. Both are so good that it didn’t even occur to<br>
me to mention them.</p>
<p>There are downsides too. Because I’m locked into Amazon’s infrastructure, I<br>
can’t lend books to friends or family (this feature <em>still</em> hasn’t been enabled<br>
outside the US). I also can’t donate books to charity shops once I’ve finished<br>
them.</p>
<p>Both of these facts still make me uneasy, and I’m not sure that I want all my<br>
books to be controlled by a single company for the rest of my life. And I<br>
haven’t even started on the problem of how many books I need to read on Kindle<br>
to break even on the carbon footprint, or even whether that’s possible.</p>
<p>That said, my pragmatic side is winning at the moment. Reading on Kindle just<br>
works, and it seems to suit my lifestyle much better than books made of dead<br>
tree.</p>
<p>I know a lot of people have been given Kindles this Christmas, so I’d love to<br>
know if any of my readers have thoughts on this.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Kindles for researchers and students</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/kindles-for-researchers-and-students/">Tuesday 7 December 2010</a>
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Tagged with
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Mobile</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">E-reader</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Kindle</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Sustainability</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Printing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eScience</span></li>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/orb9220/4794069185/"><img alt="Nook Storytelling A New Way 2 of 2" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4135/4794069185_bde57cedd6_m.jpg" title="Nook Storytelling A New Way 2 of 2" width="240" height="161"></a><p>Photo by orb9220</p>
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<p>Last week, in conversation over a cup of tea with a handful of PhD students and the <abbr title="Doctoral Training Centre">DTC</abbr> Co-ordinator, someone remarked on the large quantity of printing that PhD students (and researchers in general) do. It’s common to end up with piles and piles of printed articles which have been read only a few times before being “archived”.</p>
<p>Not only is this wasteful, both environmentally and economically, it also means carrying all of those dead-tree documents around if you want to read them out of the office (which most people do).</p>
<p>One alternative is to read on-screen, but I’ve never found this very satisfactory, either on desktop or laptop. I don’t mind reading on an iPhone/iPod touch, so I think the key for me is being able to hold what I’m reading in my hand — perhaps something to do with fine control of focal distance, or taking advantage of hand-eye coordination reflexes. There’s also the fact that I don’t always want to carry a laptop around with me.</p>
<h1 id="a-possible-solution">A possible solution</h1>
<p>So that led us on to thinking about e-readers such as <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/kindle">Amazon’s Kindle</a> and <a href="http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/ebook-reader">Sony’s Reader</a>. Perhaps one of these devices could solve the problems of printing on dead trees <em>and</em> reading on screen.</p>
<p>We can’t just buy a batch of these things on a whim for our students and staff though. We’ll want to know:</p>
<ul>
<li>Are they cost effective compared with paper?</li>
<li>Are they more sustainable, environmentally?</li>
<li>Will people actually find them useful?</li>
</ul>
<p>The first question should be fairly easy to estimate, especially since the university is moving to a centrally-managed print service with fixed costs per page. The second is tricky, since it still seems unclear <a href="http://blog.sustainablog.org/new-report-finds-kindle-greener-than-physical-books-is-that-really-so/">what the lifetime environmental impact of a Kindle actually is</a>. The third is probably going to generate the most discussion, since it’s going to vary widely from person to person.</p>
<h1 id="but-will-it-work">But will it work…?</h1>
<p>I’d be really interested to know if any of my readers have any relevant thoughts or experience.</p>
<p>Issues that we’ve come up with so far include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Most scientific articles come in PDF format. It needs to be possible either to view PDFs easily on a 6” e-reader screen or to reformat them consistently to make them readable. Images, diagrams and equations need to be preserved;</li>
<li>One of the key reasons for printing off articles is to annotate them, by highlighting or scribbling notes in the margin. This has to be possible in an effective e-reader as well;</li>
<li>One early question was whether this is something that the students would actually want/use. Currently about 80% are in favour (22 out of 26 having voted in a quick poll), but there’s a difference between thinking something’s cool and actually using it.</li>
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<p>Let me know what you think.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Problems with connection dropping with RTL8723BE wifi card on Linux</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/linux-rtl8723be-wifi-dropping-out/">Monday 20 April 2015</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Linux</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Wifi</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Troubleshooting</span></li>
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<p>I run Linux on my laptop, and I’ve had some problems with the wifi intermittently dropping out. I think I’ve found the solution to this, so I just wanted to record it here so I don’t forget, and in case anyone else finds it useful.</p>
<p>What I found was that any time the wifi was idle for too long it just stopped working and the connection needed to be manually restarted. Worse, after a while even that didn’t work and I had to reboot to fix it.</p>
<p>The problem seems to be with the power-saving features of the wifi card, which is identified by <code class="highlighter-rouge">lspci</code> as:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge">
<pre class="highlight"><code>01:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>What appears to happen is that the card goes into power-saving mode, goes to sleep and never wakes up again.</p>
<p>It makes use of the <code class="highlighter-rouge">rtl8723be</code> driver, and the solution appears to be to disable the power-saving features by passing some parameters to the relevant kernel module. You can do this by passing the parameters on the command line if manually loading the module with <code class="highlighter-rouge">modprobe</code>, but the easiest thing is to create a file in <code class="highlighter-rouge">/etc/modprobe.d</code> (which can be called anything) with the following contents:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge">
<pre class="highlight"><code><span class="c"># Prevents the WiFi card from automatically sleeping and halting connection
</span><span class="n">options</span> <span class="n">rtl8723be</span> <span class="n">fwlps</span>=<span class="m">0</span> <span class="n">swlps</span>=<span class="m">0</span>
</code></pre>
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<p>This seems to be working for me now. It’s possible that only one out of the parameters <code class="highlighter-rouge">fwlps</code> and <code class="highlighter-rouge">swlps</code> are needed, but I haven’t had chance to test this yet.</p>
<p>The following pages helped me figure this out:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2243978">Thread: RTL8723BE wifi dropping connection on Ubuntu 14.04</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723be/issues/1">Github: lwfinger/rtl8723be - Occasional Connection Drops #1 </a></li>
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<p>Looking at the date of my last post, it’s been almost exactly two months since I last posted. I suppose that’s not surprising, since those two months contained an awful lot of stuff happening elsewhere in my life, such as moving house and Christmas.</p>
<p>However, it does mean that I’ve so far missed out on the traditional ritual of looking back on one’s year to date and using it as blog-fodder. So here we are then. Time to have a look back and see what I’ve learned from the experience so far.</p>
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<p>2009 has been my first full year of blogging. It took me a while to get going, and to begin finding my voice (I’m still working on that), but then I made some <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/03/06/blog-career-news/">decisions about my future career</a> and suddenly this blog had a purpose: to give me a way to join in the e-learning community, reflect and learn. Since then, I’ve posted on pretty much whatever’s seemed appropriate, and started getting to grips with what makes this medium tick.</p>
<h1 id="what-did-people-read">What did people read?</h1>
<p>My most popular (i.e. most viewed) posts seem to fit into one or both of two categories: “hot topics” and conversations.</p>
<p>By “hot topics”, I mean subjects which interest a large portion of the online community enough to see what I’ve got to say. Examples of this type of post include:</p>
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<li>My <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/03/15/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-i/">three part</a> <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/03/16/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-ii/">beginners guide</a> <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/03/17/beginners-guide-to-twitter-part-iii/">to Twitter</a>;</li>
<li>A brief note on the <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/05/27/university-sheffield-google-mail/">University of Sheffield’s decision to use Google Mail</a>.</li>
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<p>By “conversations”, I refer to posts which are actively trying to engage with my audience. My favourite of these (and my favourite post of the year) has to be:</p>
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<li><a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/05/30/ask-the-readers-why-use-technology-in-teaching/">Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?</a></li>
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<p>I think its success lies in the fact that it was a question broad enough for everyone to have an opinion on and important enough for many people to <em>want</em> to comment on. I intentionally kept the original post quite short, and ensured that the question I was asking stood out.</p>
<p>Then, of course, there are posts which fall into both categories, such as my <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/08/19/moving-to-a-more-agile-vle/">contribution to the debate on the death or otherwise of the VLE</a>.</p>
<h1 id="what-didnt-work">What didn’t work?</h1>
<p>I tried a couple of different things to keep things interesting, such as posting a weekly summary of links that I’d found around the internet and trying monthly themes, but neither of these really caught on as I didn’t have the motivation to keep on with them.</p>
<p>I think perhaps the monthly theme idea would work better for a blog which was consciously aimed at being educational resource for the reader, forming part of the ongoing story which keeps learners engaged. For this blog, though, which is more reflective and tends to be a reaction to my own thoughts and experiences, it feels unnecessarily prescriptive.</p>
<h1 id="other-highlights">Other highlights</h1>
<p>In August, I moved from Wordpress.com to my own self-hosted blog, thanks to the generosity of a friend with a server to host it. I wanted to have scope to experiment and expand, so I went with <a href="http://mu.wordpress.org/">Wordpress MU</a>, the multi-user version of Wordpress which allows multiple blogs to run off a single installation.</p>
<p>I also tried my hand at writing some <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2009/08/16/something-a-little-different/">fiction</a> in response to a challenge on Joanna Young’s <a href="http://confidentwriting.com/">Confident Writing</a> blog. I really enjoyed it, but decided that it didn’t really fit into my plan for this blog, so I took advantage of Wordpress MU and started a <a href="http://personal.erambler.co.uk/">separate non-work-related blog</a> to keep all of the random writings and photos that I wanted to share.</p>
<h1 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h1>
<p>I’ve found blogging to be valuable. It lets me reflect and organise my thoughts in a form suitable for consumption by other human beings; it lets me connect to the e-learning community and build a useful professional network; it lets me take part in a global conversation.</p>
<p>Enough cliches.</p>
<p>Here’s looking forward to the next twelve months.</p>
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<p>I’m coming up to the end of the PCHE course, so I thought I’d give over this month’s blog posts to some reflection on what I’ve learnt over the two years I’ve been studying it. I’ll be mixing up some shorter and longer posts and aiming to prompt some discussion about the wide variety of issues affecting modern education, incorporating as much of my own experience as I can shoehorn in. I expect to get at least as many things wrong as I get right: I hope you’ll join us for a good argument! <br> <br>I’ll also be experimenting with some different methods of posting — I’m posting this, for example, by email via my Posterous account (<a href="http://jezcope.posterous.com/)">http://jezcope.posterous.com/)</a>. I’ll let you know how that gets on too. <br> <br>Have any topics you’d particularly like to read my opinion on? Please let me know in the comments below.</p>
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<p>I’ve just discovered a great piece of reference management software called <a href="http://www.mendeley.com/">Mendeley</a>. I’ve heard it mentioned a bit recently, by people like <a href="http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/">Brian Kelly</a>, <a href="http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/">Peter Murray-Rust</a> and <a href="http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/">Jean-Claude Bradley</a>, but when my wife mentioned it after her recent visit to the <a href="http://www.internet-librarian.com/2010/">ILI2010 (Internet Library International)</a> conference I finally thought I’d give it a go.</p>
<p>Keeping your references together is an ongoing problem for any researcher. For years the standard software has been Endnote, though I’ve never used it much myself<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. <a href="http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/">BibDesk</a> has been my tool of choice for the last few years, but I can’t recommend it to many people because it’s Mac-only, as is the beautifully-designed but paid-for <a href="http://mekentosj.com/papers/">Papers</a>. More recently, I’ve found <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a> very useful, but it’s only available as a plugin for Firefox.</p>
<p>And whatever tool you use, keeping it in sync between multiple computers is a pain for anyone who doesn’t have a good grasp of version control software. There have been some online tools like <a href="http://connotea.org/">Connotea</a>, but mostly they felt a bit clunky, and had no integration with any kind of word processing tool.</p>
<p>I’ve not played with Mendeley for long yet, but it feels different: <del>it’s open-source</del> <ins cite="http://erambler.co.uk/2010/10/17/mendeley-open-bibliography-for-everyone/comment-page-1/#comment-222">(<strong>Correction</strong>: it’s free, has an open API and the catalog is Creative-Commons licensed)</ins>; it’s cross-platform; it’s a desktop app but syncs between computers via a web tool.</p>
<p>The online version isn’t just for syncing though: it adds real value. There are social networking features, so you can discover new references based on what your contacts are reading. It’s also building up a free and open bibliographic database, like <a href="http://www.isiknowledge.com/">Web of Knowledge</a> or <a href="http://www.scopus.com/home.url">Scopus</a> but without the price-tag, and with statistics on how many people are reading the articles.</p>
<p>I’ll certainly be using it myself for a while and recommending it to our students to try. Anyone else tried it out yet?</p>
<div class="footnotes">
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<li id="fn:1">
<p>Mostly because I used <a href="http://www.latex-project.org/">LaTeX</a>, <a href="http://www.bibtex.org/">BibTeX</a> and <a href="http://pybliographer.org/">Pybliographer</a> as an undergraduate, and endlessly exporting BibTeX files from another system seemed a bit klunky. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/mobile-blogging-with-posterous/">Thursday 3 September 2009</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Blogging</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Email</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Posterous</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Photos</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Video</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Audio</span></li>
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<img src="http://erambler.co.uk/files/2009/09/Posterous-welcome-email-300x266.png" alt="Posterous welcome email" title="Posterous welcome email" width="300" height="266" class="size-medium wp-image-341"><p>Posterous welcome email</p>
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<p>Followers of my <a id="aptureLink_SHsCcXosIT" href="http://twitter.com/jezcope">twitter stream</a> will have noticed that over the last few days I’ve been posting to my <a id="aptureLink_jmqLVqzSiT" href="http://jezcope.posterous.com/">Posterous account</a> from <a id="aptureLink_0eDRxEDYCY" href="http://www.shrewsburyfolkfestival.co.uk/">Shrewsbury Folk Festival</a>.<br>
<!--more--></p>
<p>I first signed up for <a id="aptureLink_26avr2rs1K" href="http://posterous.com/">Posterous</a> after seeing <a id="aptureLink_B9R8eTaLB9" href="http://twitter.com/tamegoeswild">Joseph Tame</a> using it to post photos (though I don’t think he has recently). I played briefly then left it alone for a while because, already having a blog, I didn’t really see a place for it for me. Then a few months ago I finally got email working properly on my (now fairly dated) Sony-Ericsson phone. Last week, I remembered about Posterous again and thought I’d try it out.</p>
<p>I had two reasons for testing it out in more detail. First, I have a relative whose views I admire and want to get blogging; being able to blog by email might lower the barrier to entry for him. Second, I wanted to see whether mobile blogging worked for me and in what way. So, I set to work trying out what features I could from my mobile, using the festival to provide a motive for posting.</p>
<h1 id="features">Features</h1>
<p>The first thing you notice about Posterous is how easy it is to set up. And I mean <em>really</em> easy. You send an email with your first post to <a href="mailto:post@posterous.com">post@posterous.com</a>, and you get an almost immediate response with a link to your new blog. That’s all you need to do to have a presence on the web. No forms to fill in, no special software, nothing.</p>
<p>Now, of course, you probably won’t leave it there. To start off with, you’re assigned a randomly-generated subdomain of posterous.com (mine was originally jeremy-jfjyk.posterous.com) which isn’t too easy to tell people about. Although an indecipherable blog address might have its uses, most people will want to customise this, which you can do by logging into your new Posterous through the link in the welcome email. This also provides you with the opportunity to set a password for your account, which I thoroughly recommend even if you do nothing else.</p>
<p>You can also customise a number of other aspects, such as the title and subtitle and privacy settings. You can use your own domain name for your blog instead of a posterous.com subdomain. You can even integrate <a href="http://blog.posterous.com/add-google-analytics-to-your-p">Google Analytics</a> and a <a href="http://blog.posterous.com/posterous-now-supports-using-feedburner-to-tr">Feedburner feed</a> to track traffic to your new blog.</p>
<p>Now, being able to set up a blog so easily is all very well, but where Posterous really comes into its own is in its handling of the content of your emails. Rich text formatted emails keep their formatting, and any URLs are automatically turned into links. If you include the URL of a video in a supported service, the <a href="http://jezcope.posterous.com/bonus-post-hoven-droven-video">video itself is embedded</a>. If you attach a file that Posterous knows how to handle, that too will be embedded in the post. Over the course of the weekend I’ve posted photos, video and audio content; multiple photos are turned into a clever <a href="http://jezcope.posterous.com/morris-dancing-isnt-all-just-fun-and-games-yo">gallery</a>.</p>
<p>Last, but by no means least, is the AutoPost feature. This allows you to link in accounts from a whole load of social networking sites so that every time you post to Posterous, it gets sent out to them as well. It currently supports Facebook and Twitter, will post your photos to Flickr or Picasa, can send videos to YouTube or Vimeo and will save URLs to Delicious. You can also set it up to post to most major blog platforms, so even if your own blog doesn’t have a post-by-email option, you can use Posterous to replicate that feature.</p>
<h1 id="thoughts">Thoughts</h1>
<p>My overwhelming impression of Posterous is how easy it is to use. Being based on email meant that I could post almost as easily from the middle of a field as I can from my desk at home (though my poor aching thumbs might beg to differ). Knowing that it could take pretty much any media I threw at it and do something useful with it made the experience even more pleasing. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to start blogging but has so far been put off by a lack of familiarity with the technology: if you can send email you can start a blog.</p>
<p>I quite enjoyed being able to blog while out and about: it was a good way of recording my thoughts on the day and sharing them with others at the same time. The material was probably of minimal interest to most of my followers (although Google Analytics shows that a surprising number of my Twitter and Facebook followers clicked through to view my posts), but it would make a good tool for covering, say, a conference in which many of my followers had an interest. I will note that my fianceé did complain once or twice that she was becoming a social media widow, but she didn’t really seem to mind and I didn’t actually spend more than a few minutes each day blogging.</p>
<p>Will I carry on using it? You bet. It’s instantly replaced <a id="aptureLink_JigHYeiPmh" href="http://twitter.com/TwitPic">TwitPic</a> as my photo-tweeting tool of choice, especially as I can use it to post video, audio and text as well. Just the ticket when I want to post a thought that’s more than 140 characters but doesn’t fit on my main blog here. I suspect that my Posterous will turn into a bit of a scrapbook, but I’m OK with that and it’ll be interesting to be able to look back in a few years time and see what I’ve been posting. I probably won’t be posting as regularly as I have done over the bank holiday weekend though!</p>
<p>I’m also tempted to set up a second Posterous (yes, you can set up a second, third or more through the website once you’ve set up your first) to use purely as a conduit for posting to this blog. If I give that a go I’ll let you know how well it works.</p>
<p>For more info, and lots of useful tips and tricks, check out the <br>
<a id="aptureLink_XKQle7TJm3" href="http://blog.posterous.com">Official Posterous Posterous</a> (i.e. their blog).</p>
<p><em>Do you have a blog? If so, what platform do you use to host it. Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.</em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/moving-on/">Friday 27 August 2010</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">CSCT</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">VRE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Digital scholarship</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Career</span></li>
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<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/4114167117/"><img class="alignright" title="Future Tense by Kevin Dooley" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2569/4114167117_461065fe2a_m_d.jpg" alt="Future Tense by Kevin Dooley"></a> Well, what a busy few months it’s been. As I’ve <a href="http://erambler.co.uk/2010/06/17/briefly-brushing-away-the-cobwebs/">already alluded to</a>, my wife and I got married in June. In addition, I took the difficult decision a few months ago to leave my PhD, and now I have a new job!</p>
<p>No jobs being forthcoming after withdrawing from my course, I set up as a freelance web developer. It’s been an incredible learning experience, and great fun. I’ve learned a lot about business, from marketing through to finance and everything in between, and I’ve met lots of new people into the bargain.</p>
<p>However, life is always ready with a curveball. (What’s the appropriate British metaphor here? A googly perhaps?) I’d stopped applying for jobs to focus on freelancing, and business was just starting to pick up. Then out of the blue I was interviewed for, and subsequently offered, a post for which I’d applied back in May.</p>
<p>The job? ICT Project Manager at the University of Bath’s <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/csct/">Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies</a> (CSCT) and, basically, it’s my perfect job. I get to be involved with setting up a virtual research environment (VRE) for the centre, which will involve lots of web stuff along with consulting, training and supporting users, all of which I really enjoy.</p>
<p>So, I’m back working in higher education, and I’ll be back blogging on similar subjects after a hiatus of several months. Given the nature of the job, there will be more of a focus on research and digital scholarship than before, but I’m sure I’ll still have plenty of opportunities to talk about elearning and education too, especially as the EPSRC-funded <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/csct/dtc/">doctoral training centre</a> is a major part of CSCT.</p>
<p>I’m really excited about the whole thing. Bye for now!</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/moving-to-a-more-agile-vle/">Wednesday 19 August 2009</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Web 2.0</span></li>
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<p>There’s been an interesting debate going on in the blogosphere over the last week about the future of the VLE. It all kicked off with Steve Wheeler’s (intentionally over-polarised) post suggesting we should <a href="http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/08/two-fingered-salute.html">stick two fingers up at the centralised VLE</a>. Posts from <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/its-not-dead-yet/">James Clay</a>, <a href="http://mattlingard.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/vl-istically-speaking/">Matt Lingard</a>, <a href="http://lindsayjordan.edublogs.org/2009/08/12/the-vleple-debate/">Lindsay Jordan</a> and many others swiftly followed.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>I thoroughly recommend you read their opinions before reading on. Go on, I’ll wait…</p>
<p>Right then. My take on the whole thing is heavily coloured by my use of Unix-based computers over the last 10 years or so. To cut a long story short, it’s long been common on these systems to have lots of small separate tools which each do one job very well; you can then do more complex tasks by combining them in various ways through well-defined interfaces.</p>
<p>Compare this with, for example, Windows. Each piece of software is fighting with all the others to include every feature the user could possibly want, which results in big, heavy programs which take ages to load and are often full of bugs. I accept that I’m overgeneralising here, but I hope you understand what I’m aiming at.</p>
<p>So, one of the big problems that I see with the current generation of VLEs is that they try to do everything all in one package. The result is a textbook illustration of the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none”.</p>
<p>WordPress, Blogger and others do blogging better. MediaWiki, WetPaint <em>et al</em> are better for wikis. Facebook and friends connect people much more easily.</p>
<p>I agree with James, Matt and Lindsay (and, I suspect, Steve as well, despite the stance in his post) that there’s still a place for the centrally-run VLE. But it should be more flexible. The word that keeps coming to my mind is ‘agile’. We should be following good software engineering principles and providing tools that are best-of-breed and put the effort instead into making them play nicely together. And we should give learners and teachers the option of using something else if they prefer.</p>
<p>This is where the idea of the personal web/personal learning environment comes into play. By providing a diverse toolset instead of insisting on one monolithic solution our learners and teachers can choose what works best for them. The VLE can evolve into a framework to help coax these tools to play together nicely, and to join them into a coherent whole for those who lack either the time or the inclination to choose their own.</p>
<p>Open standards will help with this. Open source will be a big help too, particularly if a community of developers with educational experience start to contribute. But above all, we need to start trying it out. We’ve got the tools already, all we need to do is persuade our institutions to use them.</p>
<p><em>What’s your take on all of this? Do you think the VLE should lay down quietly to die? Or should we bravely resurrect it and bring it back to its former glory? Leave your opinion in the comments below, or by linking here from your own blog.</em></p>
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<p>I’ve decided to sign up and join <a href="http://openeducation.us/">David Wiley’s MOOC, Introduction to Open<br>
Education 2012</a>. A <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooc">MOOC (Massively Open Online<br>
Course)</a> is an online course, typically run<br>
by a lecturer at a university, which is freely accessible and built around the<br>
ideas of connectivism and social learning.</p>
<p>The content of the course, which is about the various ‘kinds’ of openness<br>
currently practised in higher education, fits nicely with what I’m doing at the<br>
moment so I thought I’d give it a try.</p>
<p>Although I could theoretically find, study and blog about all of the content in<br>
this course on my own, I think that the social aspect and the defined set of<br>
objectives (in the form of “badges”) combined make it more likely that I will<br>
follow through.</p>
<p>Let’s see if that’s actually true…</p>
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<p>It’s been a bit hectic lately because I’ve been finishing up my old job (at Imperial College) and getting started on my new one (Research Data Manager at the University of Sheffield), with a bit of a holiday in between. Hopefully things will calm down a bit now and get back to normal (whatever <em>that</em> looks like…).</p>
<p>In the meantime here are three things I will miss from Imperial:</p>
<ul>
<li>Lovely, friendly, supportive, competent and professional colleagues</li>
<li>Lunchtime walks in Hyde Park</li>
<li>Imperial College Scifi &amp; Fantasy library (part of the Students’ Union)</li>
</ul>
<p>And three things I <em>won’t</em> miss:</p>
<ul>
<li>Rude people &amp; overcrowding on the tube/bus/etc</li>
<li>Masses of air and noise pollution</li>
<li>Travelling between Leeds &amp; London all the time</li>
</ul>
<p>And finally, three things I’m looking forward to in Sheffield:</p>
<ul>
<li>Taking up a new challenge with a new set of disciplines to work with</li>
<li>Catching up with old friends and making a few new ones</li>
<li>Lunchtime walks in Weston Park, Crookes Valley Park &amp; the Ponderosa</li>
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<p>Well, I’m just back from the launch meeting of the JISC Managing Research Data<br>
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<p>Looks like it’s time to get back into my blogging rhythm once more. Time to<br>
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<p>Right now I’m on a train on my way to Liverpool for the annual <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/03/jisc11">JISC Conference</a> there. There are a few small things going on this afternoon, but the main event doesn’t start til tomorrow.</p>
<p>There are loads of interesting sessions going on, but I’ve narrowed it down to these three based on the abstracts:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cloud Solutions: risk or reward?</li>
<li>Open scholarship</li>
<li>Amplified Events, Seminars, Conferences: What? Why? How?</li>
</ul>
<p>If you’ll be there too, please come and introduce yourself — it’s my first JISC conference and it’s always nice to meet new people. I’ll be blogging and tweeting for anyone who’s interested (so apologies in advance to anyone who doesn’t care: it’s only for one day).</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Open Access Button: getting research to the people who need it</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/open-access-button/">Tuesday 25 February 2014</a>
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Tagged with
<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open access</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open scholarship</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Hacktivism</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">OA Button</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Things I made</span></li>
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<blockquote>
<p><img src="https://raw.github.com/OAButton/OAButton/ab5539194f18bd8ed099fe0f93646cf46a4b62b9/oabutton/static/public/img/oabutton_logo_final200.png" alt="Open Access Button" class="main-illustration-s"><br>
Every day people around the world such as doctors, scientists, students and patients are denied access to the research they need. With the power of the internet, the results of academic research should be available to all. It’s time to showcase the impact of paywalls and help people get the research they need. That’s where Open Access Button comes in.</p>
<p>The Open Access Button is a browser plugin that allows people to report when they hit a paywall and cannot access a research article. Head to <a href="http://www.openaccessbutton.org/">openaccessbutton.org</a> to sign up for your very own Button and start using it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I just want to flag up this cool project that’s trying to improve access to scholarly literature for everyone. I’ve been involved with the project from the start, helping to figure out how to tie it in with open access repositories, but it’s medical students David Carroll and Joe McArthur who deserve the credit for coming up with the idea and driving it forward.</p>
<p>To date, <a href="https://www.openaccessbutton.org/#world">more than 5,000 blocked articles have already been logged</a>. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/18/open-access-button-push">It even got mentioned in the Guardian</a>! Take a look, give it a try or even get involved:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.openaccessbutton.org/">Open Access Button</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.openaccessbutton.org/">OA Button blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/OA_Button">OA Button twitter</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/OAButton/OAButton">Source code on github</a></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<h2 id="how-did-i-get-involved">How did I get involved?</h2>
<p>Last year, I spent some free time creating an experimental web tool to look up Open Access<sup id="fnref:OA"><a href="#fn:OA" class="footnote">1</a></sup> versions of scholarly articles from their DOIs<sup id="fnref:DOI"><a href="#fn:DOI" class="footnote">2</a></sup>. There is already a system for getting the official version of record for any DOI, but it struck me that where that version is hidden behind a paywall and a free version is available elsewhere, it should be just as easy to find that.</p>
<p>This work got noticed by a group of people at a hack day<sup id="fnref:hd"><a href="#fn:hd" class="footnote">3</a></sup>, which resulted in my contributing to their project, the Open Access Button. The primary purpose of the OA Button is to allow people to report whenever they hit a paywall while trying to read an article (so that the scale of the problem can be visualised), and as an added bonus, we’re adding functionality to help gain access through other channels, including finding green open access versions and contacting the corresponding author.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:OA">
<p>“Open Access” refers to content which is freely available for all to read and use (usually referring to scholarly articles that publish the results of academic research), as distinct from that which is only accessible by paying a fee (either per-article or a as subscription to a journal). <a href="#fnref:OA" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:DOI">
<p>A <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier">Digital Object Identifier (DOI)</a> is a unique string of characters that identifies a published object, such as an article, book or dataset. They look something like this: <code class="highlighter-rouge">10.1000/182</code>. <a href="#fnref:DOI" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:hd">
<p>A hack day is an opportunity for developers and non-developers to get together and prototype projects without any risk of loss or ridicule if things don’t work out — great for getting the creative juices flowing! <a href="#fnref:hd" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Open Licensing #ioe12</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/open-licensing/">Sunday 15 January 2012</a>
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Tagged with
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Copyright</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Licensing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Creative Commons</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">IOE12</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Openness</span></li>
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<div class="post-content e-content">
<p><a id="post-image" class="alignright" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/biwook/145765624/" title="A copyright will protect you from PIRATES by Ioan Sameli, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/54/145765624_65d3eaf886_m.jpg" width="191" height="240" alt="A copyright will protect you from PIRATES"></a><br>
<em>This blog post is part of my contribution to the open online course<br>
<a href="http://openeducation.us/">Introduction to Openness in Education</a>.</em></p>
<h2 id="copyright">Copyright</h2>
<p>At the heart of the various forms of “open” lies the concept of intellectual<br>
property: who owns it, who can use it and for what.</p>
<p>A physical object, such as the computer I’m writing this blog post on, is in<br>
one place at a time, and its ownership is pretty clear cut: I paid for it and<br>
it’s in my house, and if you took it without my permission we’d call that<br>
theft.</p>
<p>Things get trickier when you start talking about creative works. If I write a<br>
piece of music and you make a copy, I still have the piece of music, but so do<br>
you. I can take a photograph of a painting by Degas, and it stays hanging in<br>
the gallery, but in some sense I have a copy that I can enjoy independently of<br>
the original work.</p>
<p>If this situation goes unchecked, then there’s not a lot of incentive to become<br>
an artist, or a composer, or a writer. Even if you charge for your work there’s<br>
nothing to stop me buying one copy and then selling hundreds, for which you<br>
would see no profit whatsoever.</p>
<p>Under most modern legal systems, the concept of copyright exists to right this<br>
imbalance. It does this by allowing the creator of a work the opportunity to<br>
exploit that work in whatever way they see fit, effectively creating a<br>
monopoly.</p>
<p>As the creator of a work, it’s still possible to grant certain rights to third<br>
parties, and this is done by the granting of licenses. This is the mechanism<br>
which allows you to “sell” rights to a work in exchange for money or some other<br>
consideration.</p>
<h2 id="fair-usefair-dealing">Fair use/fair dealing</h2>
<p>If you were to film an interview in the high street of your town, you might<br>
think that it would be difficult to infringe copyright in any way. If you’re<br>
not infringing copyright, you don’t need to pay anyone for a license. Yet if,<br>
say, a TV set in the background was showing reruns of The Simpsons, then you<br>
could well be in from a visit from lawyers representing the Fox Broadcasting<br>
Company.</p>
<p>Some jurisdictions include a concept of “fair use” (or fair dealing in the UK),<br>
which permits such incidental reuses under a specific set of circumstances.<br>
This can make documentary-making, for example, much easier.</p>
<p>However, many organisations (Fox being a common example) are quite happy to<br>
threaten legal action and demand that you pay tens or hundreds of thousands of<br>
pounds(/dollars/euros/etc.) for a license, even if you may in fact be covered<br>
by fair use rules. They are able to do this because most people are unaware of<br>
their legal rights, or even if they are do not have the money to fight the<br>
ensuing lawsuit.</p>
<p>Even if the law gives you a fair use right to use some work or other, other<br>
organisations to which you might sell your own work may not be so forgiving.<br>
Because of the litigation culture surrounding copyright, a lot of organisations<br>
take a very paranoid approach and insist on rights being cleared and licenses<br>
purchased even if they’re not strictly necessary.</p>
<h2 id="orphaned-works">Orphaned works</h2>
<p>The situation becomes worse when the holder of the rights that must be cleared<br>
cannot be found. This usually happens when no contact details can be found for<br>
the creator of a work, or when those that can be found are out of date. In many<br>
cases, it’s impossible even to know whether the rights holder is still alive,<br>
and works like this are referred to as “orphaned works”.</p>
<p>In the early days of copyright this would not have been a problem: for<br>
copyright to exist it was necessary to the creator to explicitly assert their<br>
rights, and to renew them periodically.</p>
<p>However it is now the case in the US and the UK that copyright automatically<br>
exists for the lifetime of the creator and for 70 years after their death. If<br>
the creator has passed away, their estate still owns the copyright, but may be<br>
impossible to trace until they discover the breach.</p>
<p>For this reason, it is almost impossible to safely use orphaned works — if<br>
you do, you do so at your own risk.</p>
<h2 id="open-licensing">Open licensing</h2>
<p>As you can see, copyright creates incentives to create, but the way it’s<br>
currently implemented can also have a chilling effect on certain types of<br>
creation, especially those that involve mashing up existing content.</p>
<p>There’s not a lot most of us can do about the depredations of Fox and their<br>
ilk, other than lobbying our MPs for a change in the law. But thankfully we can<br>
make it easier for others to make use of our own works.</p>
<p>Open licensing gives creators legal tools to relinquish some or all of their<br>
rights over a piece of work, in the interests of supporting the creativity of<br>
others.</p>
<p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> was set up to provide a set of<br>
open licenses which creators can use to make it very easy to understand what<br>
can and can’t be done with their work.</p>
<p>The key terms which can be applied by the standard Creative Commons licenses<br>
are:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<strong>Attribution</strong>: the creator of the work must be acknowledged in any works<br>
which incorporate it;</li>
<li>
<strong>Share-alike</strong>: the work can only be used if the resulting work is<br>
released under the same license;</li>
<li>
<strong>Non-commercial</strong>: the work may only be used if the user doesn’t profit<br>
financially from doing so;</li>
<li>
<strong>No derivatives</strong>: the work may only be redistributed unchanged from its<br>
original form.</li>
</ul>
<p>By combining these terms, it is possible to specify exactly what rights you<br>
want to retain on each individual work.</p>
<p>In higher education, we often find ourselves needing a photo or video to<br>
illustrate a point in a class or at a conference, or increasingly in a blog<br>
post (like this one). Thanks to Creative Commons, finding content to be used<br>
legally in this way is as easy as doing a <a href="http://search.creativecommons.org/">simple web<br>
search</a> — no more excuses!</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>This was intended to be a short blog post, and it’s already longer than I<br>
intended! There are a whole raft of other important issues, such as the<br>
creeping extension of copyright terms, which I haven’t had space to cover, but<br>
hopefully I’ll come back to those some other time.</p>
<p>For now, I hope you’ve got a good idea of why open licensing is necessary and<br>
how you can apply it to your own creative works. It’s worth noting that this<br>
whole blog is released under a CC license — just scroll to the bottom!</p>
<p><em>In writing this post, I made heavy use of <a href="http://openeducation.us/open-licensing">this open licensing<br>
material</a>, which I encourage you to<br>
take a look at if you want to learn more.</em></p>
<p><em>Photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/biwook/145765624/">Ioan Sameli via<br>
Flickr</a></em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/open-source/">Monday 12 March 2012</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open source</span></li>
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<p><em>This blog post is part of my contribution to the open online course<br>
<a href="http://openeducation.us/">Introduction to Openness in Education</a>.</em></p>
<p>Ok, so the last post was a bit long. Like essay long. I started writing and<br>
then I kept on writing til I’d got it all out. I’m pretty happy with the<br>
content, but it took too long to write and it takes too long to read.</p>
<p>So here’s my pithy(ish) introduction to Open Source.</p>
<p>‘Open’, as you might expect, refers to the free sharing of stuff. The ‘Source’<br>
part refers to <em>source code</em>: the human-readable form in which computer<br>
software is written. So we’re talking about software distributed in<br>
human-modifiable form, not the compiled, click-to-run executable most people<br>
are used to.</p>
<p>There are two key arguments in favour of Open Source: the moral one and the<br>
economic one.</p>
<p>The moral argument goes like this. In the beginning only a few dedicated<br>
hackers had computers. They put their craft first, worked together well and<br>
shared their developments with each other. They were able to learn from and<br>
build on each other’s code, and everyone was happy.</p>
<p>As the computer industry grew, the business types who started up companies to<br>
exploit new developments realised that they could make money by keeping the<br>
source code secret and only releasing the executable code to customers. So they<br>
made non-free software the norm and the world a poorer place for it.</p>
<p>But there are many people who feel this is naive and unrealistic. To convince<br>
them, you also need the economic argument.</p>
<p>Conventional wisdom has it that if you try to build software with a team that’s<br>
too large, you get bogged down in communication between team-members and the<br>
whole enterprise becomes unmanageable.</p>
<p>This is fairly accurate for closed-source software: the nature of commercial<br>
companies is that everything has to be managed in a certain way and everyone<br>
has to be in communication with everyone else.</p>
<p>Mathematicians may recognise this as a complete graph — in which every node in<br>
connected to every other node — and the problem is that the number of links<br>
grows much quicker than the number of people.</p>
<p>Open source projects, like Linux, involve huge numbers of people, so on paper<br>
they shouldn’t work. But on a large open source project, most people contribute<br>
only to a small part of the whole, only communicating with a few others. Only a<br>
small number, by dint of personality type or happenstance, coordinate with many<br>
others to keep the whole thing together.</p>
<p>And because these projects don’t suffer from the communication difficulties,<br>
they can capitalise on the much larger group of minds working on a problem.</p>
<p>Thanks to this effect, hobbyist programmers really can built high quality<br>
software and that’s why OS projects Linux and Apache dominate the modern web<br>
between them.</p>
<p>But why should we use open source software?</p>
<p>As Cory Doctorow points out in his recent talk “The coming war on general<br>
computation”, the computer is fully general: there’s no program that they can’t<br>
in theory run.</p>
<p>That scares a lot of people: it means you can run whatever you like, even<br>
software that (shock horror!) makes it possible to break the law. So should<br>
governments or corporations be restricting what we can run?</p>
<p>Cars can be used to commit crime, but only a police state would try to restrict<br>
where you can drive to, or insist on low-jacking each one. Open source software<br>
is controlled by the community, and so is naturally resistant this type of<br>
centralised control — you may not agree but I think that’s worth defending.</p>
<p>And as Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty<br>
to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Oxford Open Science meeting</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/oxford-open-science-2012/">Monday 10 September 2012</a>
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Tagged with
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Openness</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open data</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open science</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research data management</span></li>
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<p>On Wednesday 22 August 2012, I gave an invited presentation at the August meeting of Oxford Open Science, hosted at the Oxford e-Research Centre. The theme of the evening was “How do we prepare postgraduate research student for the era of big data?”</p>
<p>There were some interesting presentations around that subject:</p>
<ul>
<li>Juliet Ralph and Oliver Bridle from the <a href="http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley">Bodleian</a> discussed information seeking behaviour amongst students;</li>
<li>
<a href="http://okfn.org/">Open Knowledge Foundation’s</a> Laura Newman told us about the <a href="http://schoolofdata.org/">School of Data</a>, a project to produce learning resources for those working with data;</li>
<li>Anna Collins from <a href="http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/">DSpace Cambridge</a> talked about “long tail in the shadow of big data”.</li>
</ul>
<p>My own presentation discussed some of the work I’ve done providing social media and data management training for PGRs, and the slides can be viewed here:</p>
<iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/14237401" width="427" height="356" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px" allowfullscreen=""> </iframe>
<div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope/technology-training-for-pg-students" title="Technology training for PG students" target="_blank">Technology training for PG students</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jezcope" target="_blank">Jez Cope</a></strong> </div>
<p>As an experiment, the <a href="http://github.com/jezcope/oxford-open-science-2012">LaTeX source of the slides</a> is also available on github. Let me know if they’re any use.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/portfolio-assessment-age-computer/">Wednesday 22 July 2009</a>
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Tagged with
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Portfolio</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">e-Portfolio</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Assessment</span></li>
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<p>On the PCHE course, a major component of the assessment is the portfolio. We have to maintain this portfolio throughout the course, and include reflections on our learning and teaching experiences, along with anything else we feel is relevant, such as clippings from articles and planning materials from sessions we’ve taught. At the end of the course, we all submit our portfolios and then the external examiner selects a few (partly at random, but to cover a decent cross-section of the course demographic) to make sure that the overall standard is good.</p>
<p>I keep my portfolio in digital form, using <a href="http://www.circusponies.com/">Circus Ponies Notebook</a> on my laptop. This works very well for me, as I can type prose considerably quicker than I can write with pen and paper, so I’m able to keep up with my thoughts better. It also means that I can include movies and audio clips: for example, I have done a couple of supervision sessions with other people on the course and recorded the debrief session rather than taking notes. There are still a few physical bits of paper that I have too, primarily handouts from course workshops, but almost all of it is digital.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignleft">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephanieasher/131012025/"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/56/131012025_612696397b_m_d.jpg" alt="Files by S. C. Asher, Flickr" width="240" height="180"></a><p>"Files" by S. C. Asher, Flickr</p>
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<p>Now, I fully understand the reasoning behind having everyone submit their portfolio on the same day, even if only 3 or 4 will actually be checked by the examiner. If only those requested by the examiner were submitted, how could the examiner know that the rest had even produced a portfolio?</p>
<p>What I struggle to understand is this: <strong>why do I have to print off 100+ pages of A4 that may never leave the folder I submit them in?</strong> I’m going to have to put the multimedia bits on a CD anyway, so why can’t I submit the whole thing on CD. I could export it both as HTML for screen reading and as a PDF for the examiner to print and read offline if she prefers. All the links between sections would be preserved for easy browsing. I could even submit it by email (albeit quite a large one) and do away with having to submit a physical artifact at all. With a digital copy of the digital original, there’s nothing to stop the examiner from perusing it in whatever way she sees fit.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why it is that it’s done in this way: most likely it made sense when the course was first set up. I am sure, though, that it’s time to update this policy. In my ideal world, there would probably be a central e-portfolio system for us to use, but given the very personal nature of the PCHE portfolio this would probably need to be optional, since for some people the advantages of a physical portfolio outweight the disadvantages. However, even being allowed to submit the portfolio on CD would be a start.</p>
<p><em>Do you assess your learners using a portfolio? Is it a physical or digital artifact, or somewhere in between? Leave your comments below.</em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/privacy-identity-and-control-on-the-web/">Thursday 15 April 2010</a>
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<p><img alt="My Identity by Kathryn B (via Flickr)" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/4464828517_2fdf5f479c_m_d.jpg" title="My Identity by Kathryn B" class="alignright" width="240" height="209"><br>
Recently, my dad contacted me to ask some advice about Facebook: a friend of his (who shall remain nameless, for obvious reasons) had been a victim of Facebook identity theft. The friend is a school teacher, and unbeknownst to him, someone or other had set up a Facebook profile in his name with his photo and begun befriending his school pupils.</p>
<p>It’s still unclear what the intention was here. It may have been to groom children by posing as someone they knew. It may have been to falsely accuse the friend of grooming children. It may even have been totally innocent.</p>
<p>In the end, the friend was very lucky. Well before the situation could get out of hand, he was able to contact Facebook, prove satisfactorily that this was a fake account and have it taken down. But reputation being what it is, it could have ended his career.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>Last week was the <a href="http://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/e-learning/">Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2010</a>, and although I didn’t attend, I have been reading some of the coverage on the blogosphere. In particular my eye was caught by James Clay’s blog post, <a href="http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/privacy-has-gone/">Privacy has gone…</a> which in turn discusses Josie Fraser’s keynote on privacy.</p>
<p>As I was reading James’s blog post, that story came back to me, and it occurred to me that there’s an element of balance to be found in protecting one’s privacy and identity online.</p>
<p>Those of us engaged in education often teach our students about the dangers of revealing too much information about ourselves online. The publishing of addresses, birth dates, account numbers will almost inevitably lead to identity theft.</p>
<p>But it seems just as important to strongly establish your identity online. Perhaps by having a well-established Facebook page it would be much easier to say “that fake profile is not mine.” If there are even a dozen people who you’ve friended online who you know in real life, and who can vouch for the real you, you’re in a much stronger position.</p>
<p>In addition to this, having a Facebook account permits your friends to tag photos of you properly if they wish, rather than just entering your name, which in turn allows you to restrict who sees those tags.</p>
<p>The way to protect yourself online is not to become the Ungooglable Man — James rightly points out that this strategy doesn’t work. Much better to step up and proudly say “<a href="http://thisisme.reading.ac.uk/">this is me</a>”. Take control of your brand, and don’t let other people have the only voice in what the web says about you.</p>
<hr>
<p>Do you have a Facebook profile? How tightly do you control your privacy settings? What comes up if you <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jez+cope">Google yourself</a>? Share your thoughts in the comments below.</p>
<p><em>Photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/56695083@N00/4464828517/">My Identity</a> by Kathryn B</em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/project-update/">Monday 26 January 2009</a>
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<p>It’s been a little while since I posted, so just to keep you interested, here’s a brief summary of what we’ve been up to.</p>
<h2>Learning and Teaching Conference 2009</h2>
<p>Mark and I, introduced by Patrice, presented a showcase session on the project at the university’s annual <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lte/conference">Learning and Teaching Conference</a>. Mark gave an overview of the motivation and inspiration for the project, and then I gave some examples of some of the technologies we’re hoping to get students using. Feedback from the session was very positive. Interestingly, several members of staff seemed quite keen on the project as a way for them to learn more about innovative uses of the web — proof, if ever it was needed, that education is a two-way process! I was impressed with Mark’s use of <a href="http://www.vuvox.com/">Vuvox</a>, a Web 2.0 slide show creator (more on that on <a href="http://nevermindthepedagogy.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/engagement-via-visual-media/">his blog</a>). There’s a <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lte/conference/morley.html">summary of the session with a link to the presentation here</a>, and Mark also wrote a <a href="http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/the-student-learning-community-learning-teaching-conference-sheffield-january-2008/">blog post about the conference</a>.</p>
<h2>uSpace pilots begin</h2>
<p>For the last few months, CICS (the university’s Corporate Information and Computing Services) have been setting up a university-wide social networking platform to support collaboration in learning, teaching, research and administration right across the university. It’s called uSpace and a few pilot projects (of which the SLC is one) began testing it out properly today. I’ve been lucky enough to get to play with it over the last few months and I have to say I’m pretty impressed. It’ll take a while for people to figure out what it’s good at and how to use it, but I can see it becoming a central part of the university’s IT provision. After some months trying to decide on the best way to get the SLC 2.0 project properly started, we’ve chosen to set aside the focus groups for now and concentrate on putting together a proof of concept within the uSpace environment. We’ve picked a fairly abstract-sounding name, “bluecloud”, and started work. Hopefully we’ll get a few interested parties to contribute, and we’ll be sending out a questionnaire to gather opinions from the whole student community soon. Since uSpace is still early in the pilot phase, CICS are trying to keep the server load low, so I won’t publicise the address. For those of you who don’t have access to it yet, I’ll post a more detailed run down here soon. For those of you who do, check out the bluecloud space and let us know what you think, either here or through uSpace itself.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/quickie-new-twitter-client-tweetie-released-for-mac/">Monday 20 April 2009</a>
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<p style="clear:both"><a href="http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/" class="image-link"><img src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/atebits-tweetie-for-mac-thumb.png" height="229" align="right" width="214" style="float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px"></a>I've been playing with Twitter for a couple of months now, and I have to say, I rather like it. I've graduated from interacting with it purely through <a href="http://twitter.com/">the Twitter site</a>, and tend to use a client for most of my tweeting.</p>
<p style="clear:both">On my iPod touch, I've been using a client by the name of <a href="http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/">Tweetie</a> from an indie developer by the name of <a href="http://www.atebits.com/">atebits</a>, which has loads of great features that I won't bore you with here. Today it was announced (<a href="http://twitter.com/atebits/status/1564541335">via Twitter, of course</a>) that the <a href="http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/">Mac version is ready for human consumption</a>.</p>
<p style="clear:both">I've switched over to it as my primary Twitter client already and I have to say I really like it. It's still got some rough edges and it's missing some useful functionality that I liked in <a href="http://www.nambu.com/">Nambu</a>, but it's already showing the great attention to detail and some of the range of features that have made the iPhone/iPod touch version so good. There are already some detailed reviews up, from <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/17/tweetie-twitter-client-with-oomph/">The Unofficial Apple Weblog</a> and <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/20/tweetie-for-mac-a-powerful-native-twitter-client-for-the-masses/">TechCrunch</a>, so I'll leave it at that, but if you're a Mac twitterer and you haven't already, I strongly recommend you give it a try.</p>
<p style="clear:both"><em>I'm also testing out another bit of software right now: a Mac blogging client by the name of <a href="http://www.drinkbrainjuice.com/blogo">Blogo</a>. This is my first post using it, and I'll let you know how I get on with it.<br></em></p>
<p style="clear:both"><em>In the meantime, how do you access Twitter? Or perhaps you dont? Leave a comment below to share your opinion.</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Research data management as a "wicked" problem</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/rdm-wicked-problem/">Wednesday 11 March 2015</a>
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<p>I recently read an article, by Cox, Pinfield and Smith<sup id="fnref:citation"><a href="#fn:citation" class="footnote">1</a></sup>, which attempted to analyse research data management (RDM) as a “wicked problem”. The concept of a wicked problem has been around for a little while in the context of social policy, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.</p>
<p>What, then, is a “wicked” problem?</p>
<p>Cox <em>et al</em> invoke a full 16 properties of wicked problems (drawing on the work of earlier authors), but put simply a problem is wicked if it is so difficult to define that they can only ever admit of an imperfect, compromise solution. Many different, often contradictory, perspectives on such a problem exist, each suggesting its own solution, and any intervention “changes the problem in an irreversible way”, so that gradual learning by trial and error is impossible.</p>
<p>Many truly wicked problems affecting society as a whole, such as child poverty or gender inequality, are unlikely to be satisfactorily solved in our lifetimes (though we should, of course, keep trying). For RDM though, I feel that there is some hope. It does display many aspects of wickedness, but it seems unlikely that it will stay this way forever. Technology is evolving, cultures and attitudes are shifting and the disparate perspectives on research data are gradually coming into alignment.</p>
<p>In the meantime, “wickedness” provides a useful lens through which to view the challenge of RDM. Knowing that it shows many wicked features, we can be more intelligent about the way we go about solving it. For example, Cox <em>et al</em> draw on the literature on wicked problems to suggest some leadership principles that are appropriate, such as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Collective intelligence not individual genius – turning to individuals to solve problems through their individual creativity is less successful than people working together to develop ideas.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Far from getting disheartened about the difficulty of the task ahead, we can accept that it is necessarily complex and act accordingly. I look forward to following up some of the references on strategies for dealing with wickedness — hopefully I’ll be able to share more of what I learn as I go along.</p>
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<p>Cox, Andrew M., Stephen Pinfield, and Jennifer Smith. 2014. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0961000614533717">“Moving a Brick Building: UK Libraries Coping with Research Data Management as a ‘wicked’ Problem.”</a> Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, May, 0961000614533717. doi:10.1177/0961000614533717. <a href="#fnref:citation" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/reader-poll-how-do-you-follow-blogs/">Friday 2 October 2009</a>
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<p>I have several reasons for writing this post. Chief among them is curiosity: I like pulling the universe to bits and poking it to see what happens, and I’m genuinely interested in finding out how readers of this blog actually keep up to date with the blogosphere. Second, I’ve spent a lot of time in academia, where evidence is a key part of life; I’m aware that a lot of what I say on here is just my opinion so it’ll be nice to make a change to that (self-selecting samples aside). Third, it’s useful from a promotion perspective to know how people are getting here: <a href="http://www.feedburner.com/">Feedburner</a> and <a href="http://analytics.google.com/">Google Analytics</a> stats only tell part of the story. Finally, the <a href="http://polldaddy.com/">PollDaddy</a> plugin for Wordpress has been around for a while now and I really want to try it out.</p>
<p><strong>Update 17 May 2015:</strong> I’m doing some cleanup and this poll is no longer accessible.</p>
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<p>This year, I’ve decided to make a project of working through the winners of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_award_for_best_novel">Hugo Award for Best Novel</a>. The Hugos are one of the biggest English-language science fiction and fantasy awards going. Late last year, I came across the list looking to broaden my reading (I tend to fixate on individual authors and devour entire canons of work before moving on) and realised I’d already read quite a few, and there were quite a few more that I had my eye on to read soon.</p>
<p>I’ve already been distracted by the epic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Amber_%28omnibus%29">Great Book of Amber</a> (all 10 of Robert Zelazny’s Amber novels in a single mighty volume — I’ve wanted to read it for ages and I got it for Christmas), but I’m enjoying the variety. So far, I’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars and Blue Mars, having started the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy">Mars trilogy</a> before Christmas, and Zelazny’s classic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_light">Lord of Light</a> (watch out for The Pun!), and I’m currently enjoying <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_hand_of_darkness">The Left Hand of Darkness</a> by Ursula K. Le Guin.</p>
<hr>
<p>Winners I’d already read:</p>
<ul>
<li>Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein</li>
<li>Dune, Frank Herbert</li>
<li>Ringworld, Larry Niven</li>
<li>Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke</li>
<li>The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke</li>
<li>Foundation’s Edge, Isaac Asimov</li>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Reflective writing</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/reflective-writing/">Monday 8 February 2010</a>
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<ul class="post-tags">
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Personal development</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Professional development</span></li>
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<p><img alt="" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2679/4315247682_0ec0540b84_m_d.jpg" title="Young Narcissist" class="alignright" width="240" height="161"></p>
<p><strong>“The unexamined life is not worth living.”</strong></p>
<p>So said Socrates, anyway, and he was a pretty bright chap by all accounts.</p>
<p>Reflective writing is increasingly being used as a form of evidence in many qualifications and as part of professional development programmes. It was central to the assessment of my <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/lets/lt-supp/pche.html">PCHE</a> qualification, and it’s the main method of assessment for my other half’s <a href="http://www.cilip.org.uk/Pages/default.aspx">CILIP</a> chartership process.</p>
<p>By why? What’s so important about it?</p>
<!--more-->
<p>Well professional qualifications are typically about being better at <strong>what you do</strong>.</p>
<p>Now, if you’re studying mathematics, biology or astrophysics, the object of your learning is external and independent. On the other hand, if you want to be better at teaching or people management, it’s <em>your own behaviour</em> that needs to change.</p>
<p>It’s not enough to know what you should be doing in theory. You also need to know what you’re actually doing so that you can work out how to improve.</p>
<h1 id="where-does-writing-fit-in">Where does writing fit in?</h1>
<p>It’s perfectly possible to think about your own behaviour without going near a pen (or computer). Why would you want to write it all down? For me, reflective writing serves several purposes.</p>
<p>First, it makes a permanent record. I can quite easily forget what I was thinking five minutes ago, let alone remember everything I thought last month. But if I write something down it’s a lot harder to lose.</p>
<p>Plus, it can be enlightening and even surprising to look back at a later date at what you thought in the past. It can be particularly useful to see how your thoughts develop over a period of time, particularly if you have an interest in how people learn.</p>
<p>Next, it can act as evidence of your learning. A portfolio which includes reflective writing shows not only that you have the right skills, but also that you’re both willing and able to improve them.</p>
<p>Finally, it externalises your thought processes, placing them in the real world where you can examine them more objectively. It’s far to easy to get wrapped up in those processes if you keep them locked away inside your head.</p>
<h1 id="how-can-i-write-reflectively">How can I write reflectively?</h1>
<p>As I rapidly discovered when I started, reflective writing doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. Thankfully there are a number of tricks which can help — here are a few that have worked for me:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p><strong>Use a timer</strong>: Set an ordinary kitchen timer for 10 minutes, and write without pausing until it goes off. Don’t worry about staying on topic; just don’t stop writing.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Write a letter</strong>: Try imagining that you’re writing a to a friend or family member. You don’t have to ever send it, but writing for someone else can make reflection feel less futile.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Ask a question</strong>: If you’re writing about a particular problem, seeing it phrased as a question can help to trigger problem-solving thought processes.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Mix it up</strong>: If writing doesn’t do it for you, try talking things through into a dictaphone. If you have a trusted friend or colleague, you could set up a tape recorder (or use a laptop or mobile phone) and record a conversation with them.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Learn more</strong>: <a href="http://www.gilliebolton.com/writing/reflective-writing.html">Gillie Bolton</a> isn’t the only author to write about reflective writing by a long way, but I found her book <a href="http://www.gilliebolton.com/books/reflective-practice-book.html">Reflective Practice</a> full of useful ideas. I’m also planning to take a look at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Schon">Donald Schön</a>’s classic work on the subject, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflective-Practitioner-Professionals-Think-Action/dp/1857423194/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265574365&amp;sr=8-1">The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action</a> soon.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>But I’m interested: <strong>what works for you?</strong> Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.</p>
<p><em>Photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/behind-the-lense/4315247682/">Young Narcissist</a> by Victoria Henderson</em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/research-data-management/">Sunday 15 March 2015</a>
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<p>So, it’s been a while since I’ve properly updated this blog, and since I seem to be having another try, I thought it would be useful to give a brief overview of what I’m doing these days, so that some of the other stuff I have in the pipeline makes a bit more sense.</p>
<p>My current work focus is research data management: helping university researchers to look after their data in ways that let them and the community get the most out of it. Data is the bedrock of most (all?) research: the evidence on which all the arguments and conclusions and new ideas are based. In the past, this data has been managed well (generally speaking) by and for the researchers collecting and using it, and this situation could have continued indefinitely.</p>
<p>Technology, however, has caused two fundamental changes to this position. First, we’re able to measure more and more about more and more, creating <a href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/257648/">what has been termed a “data deluge”</a>. It’s now possible for on researcher to generate, in the normal course of their work, far more data than they could possibly analyse themselves in a lifetime. For example, the development of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques have enabled the fast, cheap sequencing of entire genomes: for some conditions, patients’ genomes are now routinely sequenced for future study. A typical human genome sequence occupies 8TB (about 1700 DVDs), and after processing and compression, this shrinks to around 100GB (21 DVDs). This covers approximately 23,000 genes, of which any one researcher may only be interested in a handful.</p>
<p>Second, the combination of the internet and cheap availability of computing power means that it has never been easier to share, combine and process this data on a huge scale. To continue our example, it’s possible to study genetic variations across hundreds or thousands of individuals to get new insights into how the body works. The <a href="http://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/the-100000-genomes-project/">100,000 Genomes Project (“100KGP”)</a> is an ambitious endeavour to establish a database of such genomes and, crucially, develop the infrastructure to allow researchers to access and analyse it at scale.</p>
<p>In order to make this work, there are plenty of barriers to overcome. The practices that kept data in line long enough to publish the next paper are no longer good enough: the organisation and documentation must be made explicit and consistent so that others can make sense of it. It also needs to be protected better from loss and corruption. Obviously, this takes more work than just dumping it on a laptop, so most people want some reassurance that this extra work will pay off.</p>
<p>Sharing has risks too. Identifiable patient data cannot be shared without the patients consent; indeed doing so would be a criminal offence in Europe. Similar rules apply to sensitive commercial information. Even if there aren’t legal restrictions, most researchers have a reasonable expectation (albeit developed before the “data deluge”) that they be able to reap the reputational rewards of their own hard work by publishing papers based on it.</p>
<p>There is therefore a great deal of resistance to these changes. But there can be benefits too. For society, there is the possibility of making advancing knowledge in directions that would never have been possible even ten years ago. But there are practical benefits to the individuals too: every PhD supervisor and most PhD students know the frustration of trying to continue a student’s poorly-documented work after they’ve graduated.</p>
<p>For funders the need for change is particularly acute. Budgets are being squeezed, and with the best will in the world there is less money to go around, so there is pressure to ensure the best possible return on investment. This means that it’s no longer acceptable, for example, for several labs in the country to be running identical experiments to do different things with the results. It’s more important than ever to make more data available to and reusable by more people.</p>
<p>So the funders (in the UK, particularly the <a href="http://www.rcuk.ac.uk">government-funded research councils</a>), are introducing requirements on the researchers they fund to move along this path quicker than they might feel comfortable with. It therefore seems reasonable to offer these hard-working people some support, and that’s where I come in.</p>
<p>I’m currently spending my time providing training and advice, bringing people together to solve problems and trying to convince a lot of researchers to fix what, in many cases, they didn’t think was broken! They are subject to conflicting expectations and need help navigating this maze so that they can do what they do best: discover amazing new stuff and change the world.</p>
<p>For the last 6ish months I’ve been doing this at <a href="http://imperial.ac.uk/">Imperial College</a> (my <em>alma mater</em>, no less) and loving it. It’s a fascinating area for me, and I’m really excited to see where it will lead me next!</p>
<p>If you have time, here’s a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) take on the problem from the perspective of a researcher trying to reuse someone else’s data:</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/research-uses-for-new-social-media/">Monday 7 March 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Bath</span></li>
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<p>As part of my ongoing efforts to introduce a virtual research environment to the <abbr title="Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies">CSCT</abbr>, I’ve been thinking about running a general <a href="http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/1269-314021/Digital-Researcher.html">Digital Researcher</a> type workshop for our students. After putting out feelers I discovered that quite a few other people across the university are thinking about similar things right now, so we’re working together to avoid duplication as much as we can.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to focus on things that researchers actually want to do, rather than just thinking about the technologies. So far, based on my own experiences and conversations with one or two research students, I’ve come up with the following list of goals:</p>
<ul>
<li>Promote my research;</li>
<li>Communicate with existing collaborators;</li>
<li>Find potential new collaborators;</li>
<li>Find reliable information on X (including recognised experts);</li>
<li>Keep up to date with news &amp; opportunities;</li>
<li>Find my next job.</li>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/self-selecting-audience/">Wednesday 1 April 2009</a>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035602859@N01/814099991"><img class=" " src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1235/814099991_1114cdd4a0.jpg" alt="Photo by Pete Ashton" width="350" height="233"></a><p>Photo by Pete Ashton</p>
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<p>Do you like having an audience? I know I do: that’s at least part of the reason I’m writing this blog post.</p>
<p>The social web has greatly lowered the barrier to entry for those of us who want an online presence, and given us the greatest possible chance of reaching an appreciative audience through, for example, Google, social networking and RSS aggregation. Each one of us has a unique audience, defined by our own interests and views and how those come across in our writing, photography, music or whatever else we choose to share.</p>
<p>Those people who are interested in what we have to say will listen. Those who aren’t, won’t.</p>
<p>Now, if we want to reach more people, we can put effort into tailoring our output to their interests, marketing our stuff and generally going out to meet our audience half way. But for a personal blog or special-interest wiki, we don’t have to: we can just say what we want to say, and eventually a few people will start to read it. This is one of the things that makes social media great.</p>
<p>Education is not like this (and neither is business for that matter). We cannot just do what we want to do and expect it to be eventually found by those learners who can benefit from it. If students are taking your course and you’re using social media, then they’re pretty much obliged to participate: it’s common to enforce this with assessment. Because by now we’re getting used to the democratic nature of social media, it’s easy to confuse this captive audience with a genuinely interested one and assume that they will engage.</p>
<p>So, if we make them, they will participate. But unless they’re interested in what we have to say, they won’t be engaged, and if they’re not engaged, then their learning will be severely limited.</p>
<p>But fear not, for all is not lost! They’re generally taking a course (at least in HE) in which we have some expertise, so there will be at least some overlap in interests. Take advantage of social media to get rapid feedback and comments from learners; then <em>respond to it</em><em>!</em> Thing of a blogger who you really respect: chances are that they respond quickly to comments left on their blog, learn from them and adapt to make their future posts more relevant to their readers. Why can’t this work with students too? Here are a couple of ideas that I can think of:</p>
<ul>
<li>If you're asking students to blog, try to leave a relevant comment or two on each student's blog to connect their views with your material;</li>
<li>If your students are collaborating on a wiki, check up on it from time to time and use it to inform your lectures.</li>
</ul>
<p>Yes, this takes effort, but so does everything that’s worth doing (although I won’t claim that that <em>makes</em> it worth doing). And yes, they should be hanging on your every word because you’re the expert and they’re not. But only a few of them will: the rest you have to meet halfway.</p>
<p><em>Do you use social media to engage with your students and tailor your teaching to them? Why/why not? What’s your top tip? Share your comments below.</em></p>
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<p>You know you’ve made it on the web when you’re asked to take something down.</p>
<h2 id="the-story">The story</h2>
<p>For Christmas I received, amongst other lovely presents, a copy of Dan Lepard’s<br>
book <em>The Handmade Loaf</em>. I really enjoy breadmaking, with all of the processes<br>
and the minor biological miracle that turns flour and water into a cohesive<br>
loaf.</p>
<p>Since then I’ve been trying out at least one, sometimes several, recipes from<br>
the book each weekend. Two weeks ago I made flaky butter buns, posting a photo<br>
of the result (delicious) on Twitter and Google+.</p>
<p>I was asked for the recipe, but as a) I’m fairly conscientious and b) I’ve been<br>
learning a lot about copyright recently this raised a question: is it a breach<br>
of copyright to share someone else’s recipe.</p>
<p>A couple of online conversations and one <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/mar/24/foodanddrink.uk">Guardian<br>
article</a><br>
later, I had my answer: recipes are not protected by copyright under either UK<br>
or US law. A recipe is an idea, not the expression of an idea, and is therefore<br>
not copyrightable.</p>
<p>A recipe may be covered by a patent or trade secret, but for a patent to be<br>
granted it would have to differ significantly from any other previous recipe<br>
and, having been published in a book, it clearly cannot be a trade secret.</p>
<p>So conscience satisfied, I went ahead and posted the <a href="http://posterous.erambler.co.uk/flaky-butter-buns-recipe">recipe for flaky butter<br>
buns</a> on my other blog.</p>
<p>Rather than use Lepard’s own words, which would have infringed copyright, I<br>
wrote it in my own style, which tends to skip over steps — you either need to<br>
have some baking knowledge or take the hint and buy the book. I also raved (as<br>
I have done before) about the book itself, including an Amazon link so that<br>
readers could go ahead and buy it for themselves.</p>
<p>I felt in doing so that I behaved appropriately both legally and morally, and<br>
thought no more about it.</p>
<p>Several days later, I got an email notifying my of a comment on the post (this<br>
rarely happens). As it turns out, this comment was from a member of Lepard’s<br>
team accusing me of infringing his copyright.</p>
<p>Now as I’ve said, I don’t believe that I did infringe copyright (if you’re a<br>
lawyer, I’d love to hear a legal opinion on this), but since I respect Lepard<br>
as a professional and small businessman I chose to respect his wishes (or at<br>
least those of his employee) and remove the recipe anyway.</p>
<h2 id="the-point">The point</h2>
<p>In the end this isn’t a question about the law. It’s about whether sharing (and<br>
letting other people share) your stuff is a good idea or not.</p>
<p>Even the most cursory Google search for recipe titles suggests that, should I<br>
want to, I could recreate the entire collection for free. But one of the<br>
reasons I like this book is that it’s more than a collection of recipes. It’s a<br>
well crafted book <em>about bread</em>. In addition to the recipes it contains both<br>
photographs (by the author) and descriptions of encounters with bakers around<br>
the world.</p>
<p>Yes, you can get most if not all of those recipes for free online and not have<br>
to pay a penny, but anyone who’s going to do that was never going to buy the<br>
book in the first place. In fact you could get the whole experience of the book<br>
for free, <a href="http://nationallibrariesday.org.uk/">just by going down to your local<br>
library</a>.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I like to think that a few of my friends might have been<br>
motivated to buy their own copy of the book on the basis of my recommendation —<br>
word of mouth being the best form of advertising and free to boot.</p>
<p>So now there is no recipe, and no endorsement, and no link to buy the book on<br>
Amazon. I’ll probably think twice before recommending the book in the future<br>
(wait, didn’t I just do that again three paragraphs ago?).</p>
<p>I’d be kidding myself if I thought this will make the slightest difference to<br>
the book’s sales, but you have to wonder: if you have a book to sell, is it<br>
worth paying someone to spend time trawling the internet (which is a pretty big<br>
place) just to ensure your book is the only place the contents can be found?</p>
<p>People will still send recipes by email, or photocopy them, or pass them on by<br>
word of mouth. They will clip them out of the paper, note them down in<br>
notebooks and then post the clippings to loved ones.</p>
<p>This has always happened and always will, and though some instances are covered<br>
by copyright law, it’s completely unenforcible in such cases.</p>
<p>The internet makes this sharing more visible, but it presents an opportunity<br>
too. The classic example is YouTube: increasingly rights owners are taking the<br>
option to place ads around potentially infringing videos rather than blindly<br>
demand takedowns.</p>
<p>By the way, Martin Weller’s made his whole book, <a href="http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml">The Digital<br>
Scholar</a><br>
available online for free, and some mugs (me included) still seem to be paying<br>
for it. Perhaps we’re all just idiots.</p>
<p>All I really want to say is this: if you have a book to sell (or any other<br>
creative work), consider carefully the pros and cons of permitting parts to be<br>
shared freely.</p>
<p>Policing takes time and time is money, and even if the pros and cons balance<br>
out all you’re doing is spending that money to achieve zero result. Perhaps<br>
that time would be better spent engaging with your readers in positive ways.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">When to curate — sheer vs just-in-time</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/sheer-jit-curation/">Tuesday 19 May 2015</a>
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<h2 id="when-is-the-right-time-to-curate">When is the right time to curate?</h2>
<p>One of the things that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit since IDCC 2015 is this: exactly when should curation take place in a digital workflow.</p>
<p>There seem to be two main camps here, though of course it’s more of a spectrum than a simple dichotomy. These two views can be described as “sheer curation” and “just-in-time curation”.</p>
<h2 id="sheer-curation">Sheer curation</h2>
<p>Sheer curation involves completely and seamlessly integrating curation of data into the workflow itself. That’s “sheer” as in tights: it’s such a thin layer that you can barely tell it’s there. The argument here is that the only way to properly capture the context of an artefact is to document it while that context still exists, and this makes a lot of sense. If you wait until later, the danger is that you won’t remember exactly what the experimental conditions for that observation were. Worse, if you wait long enough you’ll forget about the whole thing entirely until it comes time to make use of the data. Then you run the danger of having to repeat the experiment entirely because you can’t remember enough about it for it to be useful.</p>
<p>For this to work, though, you really need it to be as effortless as possible so that it doesn’t interrupt the research process. You also need researchers to have some curation skills themselves, and to minimise the effort required those skills need to be at the stage of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence">unconscious competence</a>. Finally you need a set of tools to support the process. These do exist, but in most cases they’re just not ready for widespread use yet.</p>
<h2 id="just-in-time-curation">Just-in-time curation</h2>
<p>The other extreme is to just do the absolute minimum, and apply the majority of curation effort at the point where someone has requested access. This is the just-in-time approach: literally making the effort just in time for the data to be delivered. The major advantage is that there is no wasted effort curating things that don’t turn out to be useful. The alternative is “just-in-case”, where you curate before you know what will or won’t be useful.</p>
<p>The key downside is the high risk of vital context being lost. If a dataset is valuable but its value doesn’t become apparent for a long time, the researchers who created it may well have forgotten or misplaced key details of how it was collected or processed. You also need good, flexible tools that don’t complain if you leave big holes in your metadata for a long time.</p>
<h2 id="comparison">Comparison</h2>
<h3 id="when-might-each-be-useful">When might each be useful?</h3>
<p>I can see sheer-mode curation being most useful where standards and procedures are well established, especially if value of data can easily be judged up front and disposal integrated into the process. In particular, this would work well if data capture methods can be automated and instrumented, so that metadata about the context is recorded accurately, consistently and without intervention by the researcher.</p>
<p>Right now this is the case in well-developed data-intensive fields, such as astrophysics and high-energy physics, and newer areas like bioinformatics are getting there too. In the future, it would be great if this could also apply to any data coming out of shared research facilities (such as chemical characterisation and microscopy). Electronic lab notebooks could play a big part for observational research, too.</p>
<p>Just-in-time-mode curation seems to make sense where the overheads of curating are high and only a small fraction of collected data is ever reused, so that the return on investment for curation is very low. It might sometimes be necessary also, if the resources needed for curation aren’t actually made available until someone wants to reuse the data.</p>
<h3 id="could-they-be-combined">Could they be combined?</h3>
<p>As I mentioned at the start, these are just two ends of a spectrum of possibilities, and for most situations the ideal solution will lie somewhere in between. A pragmatic approach would be to capture as much context as is available transparently and up-front (sheer) and then defer any further curation until it is justified. This would allow the existence of the data to be advertised up-front through its metadata (as required by e.g. the EPSRC expectations), while minimising the amount of effort required. The clear downside is the potential for delays fulfilling the first request for the data, if such ever comes.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/short-book-review-here-comes-everybody-by-clay-shirky/">Tuesday 15 February 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
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<p>I promised some shorter posts, so here’s one. I’ve just finished reading <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Here-Comes-Everybody-Happens-Together/dp/0141030623/">Here Comes Everybody</a> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky">Clay Shirky</a> and since it made me think I thought I’d post a few of those thoughts up here.</p>
<p>It’s a clear and well written, and gives a well constructed theory of how and why communities form in or around things like Wikipedia, MeetUp and the Linux kernel.</p>
<p>Through the use of case studies, Shirky builds up a convincing framework of three elements: the promise of what the community offers; the tool which sets the environment for the community; and the bargain between the users which sets the rules of engagement. He also points out that the patterns of behaviour we see today have been emerging for quite a long time.</p>
<p>If there was a weakness to the book, it was that Shirky labours the point a bit with his case studies; at times it feels like he’s repeating himself so as to make use of all the carefully researched examples. I don’t think that really detracts from the overall picture though.</p>
<p>I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in what makes the social web tick.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Simple video-conferencing with BigBlueButton</h1>
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<div class="post-date dt-published">
<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/simple-video-conferencing-with-bigbluebutton/">Monday 24 January 2011</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Open source</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Video-conferencing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">BigBlueButton</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
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<p>Last week, some colleagues and I tried out promising new videoconferencing tool <a href="http://bigbluebutton.org/">BigBlueButton</a>. I’d previously used it It’s completely open source and based on Adobe Flash so it works in your browser without the need to download any software.</p>
<p>University of Bath colleagues <a href="http://colligo.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/focusing-on-bigbluebutton/">Nitin</a> and <a href="http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/al412/2011/01/21/an-assessment-of-bigbluebutton/">Alex</a> have already published their thoughts, so I’ll try to avoid duplicating them. I’ll also draw comparisons with <a href="http://www.elluminate.com/">Elluminate! Live</a>, which I’ve been using quite a bit recently to facilitate a guest lecturer on our course: she lives in Yorkshire and we’re trying to reduce the need for her to travel to Bath, especially since our course is all about sustainability!</p>
<p>As someone who supports the IT needs of research staff and students, I can clearly see the value in this type of tool: all the end user needs is a web browser and they’re away.</p>
<h1 id="positives">Positives</h1>
<ul>
<li>Uses technology that almost all users have installed already — Elluminate, for example, requires users to download and install Java on platforms that don’t ship with it, and there’s always one person who didn’t read the instructions and complains 10 minutes into a session that they can’t connect;</li>
<li>Seems to cope quite well with lots of people — we had 6+ transmitting sound and video at times;</li>
<li>Simple, no-nonsense interface — Elluminate has lots and lots and <strong>lots</strong> of features, which can be useful but makes for a very cluttered and confusing interface.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="negatives">Negatives</h1>
<ul>
<li>There’s currently no pre-flight check for users to test their hardware is detected and set up correctly, so there tends to be a lot of testing going on as people connect — ideally this could be done beforehand;</li>
<li>There are a few minor user interface tweaks which would be useful: for example, it’s not clear why you need to enable your microphone to hear audio, and there’s no easy way to neatly arrange a large number of video feeds;</li>
<li>There’s apparently an incompatibility between the current Flash plugin for Mac and Google Voice which prevents video from working, but this will apparently be fixed in the next Flash release.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="other-notes">Other notes</h1>
<p>Importantly for us in the CSCT, there’s a rapidly maturing <a href="https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BBB/Home">Sakai interface for BigBlueButton</a> which allows users to schedule their own meeting for collaborators in their project sites. It’s one of the few Sakai tools being developed in the UK, with Adrian Fish of the University of Lancaster as a major (main?) contributor.</p>
<p>The Sakai interface is also open source, making it much cheaper than the Sakai bridge for Elluminate! Live (the bridge itself is open source, but requires Elluminate to flick a switch at their end to enable the API it uses).</p>
<h1 id="summary">Summary</h1>
<p>Overall I think that, for fairly technically savvy users, BigBlueButton can and should be used in higher education. Open source projects like this need the oxygen of community, and the only way to smooth off the rough edges is to find them and talk about them.</p>
<p>For everyday use, it might need a little more polish, but probably not much. As long as it avoids the feature bloat which plagues Elluminate! Live, it will soon become a much better option than that product, both on price (usual caveats about open source cost-of-ownership notwithstanding) and on usability<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>If you’d like to try it out for yourself, just visit the <a href="http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/">BigBlueButton demo server</a>: as long as you’ve got Flash installed, it should just work.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>And as a bonus, it lacks the annoying extraneous exclamation mark too. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/social-media-resources/">Wednesday 11 March 2009</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">eLearning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Resources</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Technology</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Sheffield</span></li>
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<div class="post-content e-content">
<p>This post is specifically intended to support my seminar given as part of the seminar of the same title, given to my colleagues on the PCHE course as part of the “Expanding your repertoire” special interest session on Wednesday 11th March 2009. I’ll give a brief description of this seminar at the end of this post. The remainder is dedicated to a partial list of some of the most popular/interesting social media tools for learning and teaching.</p>
<!--more-->
<h1>What is "social media"?</h1>
<p>Social media, Web 2.0 (and by extension, Learning 2.0) or whatever you want to call it can be pretty slippery to actually define. Here are a few starting points:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html">What is Web 2.0?</a> — Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media</li>
<li>Wikipedia articles:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0">Web 2.0</a></li>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media">Social media</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Some <a href="http://www.commoncraft.com/show">cool introductory videos</a> from the Common Craft show</li>
</ul>
<h1>Examples</h1>
<p>Here are some of the most common types of social media tools currently available on the web, with examples. This is by no means a complete list, but <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> should help you if you want more.</p>
<h2>Wikis</h2>
<p>A wiki is a collection of web pages that can be edited in-place in the web browser by any user, with little or no knowledge of how to write conventional web pages using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML">HTML</a>. Most wikis allow you to restrict what it means to be a “user”, provide some standard navigational features and record the full edit history of each page. They’re great for collaboratively building a knowledge base on a particular subject, or for organising projects as a group.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki">The first ever wiki</a></li>
<li>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> — the best-known example</li>
<li>Places to set up your own wiki:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.pbwiki.com/">PBwiki</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.wetpaint.com/">WetPaint</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.wikia.com/">Wikia</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Blogs</h2>
<p>A blog (from web-log) is a website based around a series of articles, which are indexed and presented in chronological order. The articles may be as long or short as the author likes, and on any subject. Most blogging platforms provide management tools and an editor which, again, requires no knowledge of HTML. Here are some places to start your own blog:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.wordpress.com/">Wordpress</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.typepad.com/">Typepad</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.blogspot.com/">Blogspot</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Social networking</h2>
<p>Social networking connects people together, allowing them to share content with friends and friends-of-friends.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a> — begun for university students, but now available to all</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.myspace.com/">MySpace</a> — now popular primarily with musicians and bands</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a> — aimed at professional networking</li>
<li>
<a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> — centred around broadcasting of 140-character status updates, referred to as microblogging; simple and flexible</li>
</ul>
<h2>Social bookmarking</h2>
<p>Social bookmarking allows you to tag any page you find on the web, save a bookmark for later and share it with your connections.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.delicious.com/">Delicious</a></li>
<li><a href="http;//ma.gnolia.com/">Magnolia</a></li>
<li><a href="http://citeulike.com/">citeulike</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Media sharing</h2>
<p>Media sharing sites allow you to upload and share photos, videos and types of multimedia content.</p>
<ul>
<li>Photo sharing:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://flickr.com/">Flickr</a></li>
<li><a href="http://photobucket.com/">Photobucket</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Video sharing:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://youtube.com/">YouTube</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Presentation sharing:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/">SlideShare</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Specific educational sites</h2>
<p>While all of the above have educational uses and many of them provide specific services for educational users, there are a couple of websites which cater specifically to the educational community.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://moodle.org/">Moodle</a> — A learning management system (LMS) built on Web 2.0 principles</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.edmodo.com/">Edmodo</a> — A microblogging service (like <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a>) for education</li>
</ul>
<h1>The seminar</h1>
<p>The goal of the seminar was to introduce some of my fellow trainee teachers to the potential of social media for learning and teaching, and perhaps infect them with some of my enthusiasm, and also to inform them about the <a href="http://snipr.com/bluecloud">bluecloud project</a>. I began by showing the wonderful video from <a href="http://www.commoncraft.com/show">the Common Craft Show</a> on social media, using ice cream as a metaphor. I then gave a few examples of well-known social media tools and listed the common features, before asking those present to split into groups to come up with ideas for how they could use these new tools in their own learning, teaching or research. We then discussed these together as a whole group, and I demonstrated one way of using blogging by directing them here for further resources.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/social-networking-at-the-university-of-sheffield-uspace/">Tuesday 28 July 2009</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Research</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social media</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">uSpace</span></li>
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<img class="size-medium wp-image-278" src="http://allacademic.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/uspace.png?w=300" alt="uSpace" width="300" height="127"><p>uSpace home page</p>
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<p>If you’ve read a few of my previous posts, you might have noticed me talking about something called uSpace. This is the University’s new social networking platform and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve had to keep relatively quiet about it until recently but now it’s been launched, here are my thoughts on where I think this is going.<!--more-->I was quite excited to discover, in the middle of last year, that the University was investigating social networking platforms with a view to setting up their own. A whole raft of options were considered, including open-source and proprietary solutions, but CICS eventually decided to go ahead and buy <a href="http://www.jivesoftware.com/">Jive Software</a>’s Clearspace (now known as Jive SBS).</p>
<p>Having begun life as a Java-based bulletin board system, Clearspace has since evolved into a fully-fledged communication platform, incorporating a hierarchical structure, wiki-like documents, discussions, blogs and project-management features. According to <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/cics/uspace">CICS’s own information page</a>:</p>
<blockquote>It has been chosen to meet the needs of the diverse communities within the University.
<ol type="1">
<li>Academics - Develop an interactive learning area for your students in an environment integrated with MUSE and MOLE.</li>
<li>Researchers - Collaborate with external and internal colleagues in a secure and fluid way.</li>
<li>Administrative staff - Enjoy new types of communication with the University population. You can create intranet type areas for your department or Faculty, interest groups, discussions or polls. It enables much wider networking across department and role.</li>
<li>Students - It enables you to work collaboratively and creatively on course work as well as socialise with others.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>I think the main strength of uSpace is that it provides a university-controlled, safe and secure environment within which to collaborate. In research in particular it’s often considered necessary (though whether this is actually the case is another discussion altogether) to hide ones ideas from the wider research community and the general public until they are published. Using services provided by a third party, however secure and trustworthy, to collaborate is often seen as risky (though in reality insecure passwords are probably a much greater risk). In addition, there’s the very real danger that a third party could go up in smoke, taking all of your discussions, documents and data with it. Having a university-maintained system will go some way to alleviate these fears and get people using social media to the benefit of all.</p>
<p>I also like the democratising nature of social media, and that seems to have carried over to uSpace. Too many of the university’s services are segregated into students vs. staff: for example while both students and staff have an online calendar, neither can see the other’s which limits its usefulness somewhat, especially when you consider that many postgraduates need to work with research staff every day, but are classed as students. By contrast, everyone has access to the same facilities (to a greater or lesser extent) within uSpace. This might put off some staff, but will encourage use amongst students who won’t feel they’re being shortchanged.</p>
<p>On the other hand, uSpace isn’t perfect. It suffers somewhat from being a jack-of-all-trades: while all of the components are good and are well integrated, none of them can hold a candle to the best in their individual classes. Google Docs are more powerful than uSpace documents, and most wiki services provide greater flexibility. uSpace blogs provide very limited functionality, especially when compared to systems such as Wordpress. The social networking features such as friending and status updates feel clunky next to the power of Facebook or the simplicity of Twitter.</p>
<p>Another potential difficulty is Jive Software’s attitude towards the education market. They were obviously keen to play up their commitment to HE in order to make the sale, but I don’t think they’re really that bothered about it. It feels like they’ll be continuing to focus on the business sector, particularly with the recent renaming of Clearspace to Jive Social Business Software. At the start, they were very keen to provide support and help with education-related customisation. I’m not as involved as I was so I don’t know whether they’re maintaining this level of service, but I hope they do.</p>
<p>There’s definitely going to be an issue of training. Although some staff will have no problem hitting the ground running with uSpace, many others will need help getting used to such a novel way of working. And let’s not forget the students: I think we sometimes attribute them with more IT literacy than they possess. Tied into this is the fact that people will need a reason to use uSpace over whatever they already do, and it’s going to have to be a pretty good reason to overcome the natural human resistance to change. Staff and students alike will only use the service if they can understand how it will make their lives and/or work better, and at the moment a clearer message on this is needed.</p>
<p>I’m not convinced that uSpace in its current form is the way to go in the long-run, but it seems to be a good compromise for now, while the real work of embedding a culture of social media use within the university continues. In the longer term I’d like to see a more flexible solution using separate (ideally open-source) components such as Wordpress for blogging and MediaWiki for collaborative editing, but I can see this would be a big leap for most potential users and would require a lot more effort integrating and maintaining them. For the time being though, it will be interesting to see how uSpace develops and how people use it.</p>
<p>This blog post seems to have gone on a bit, so I’ll cut it off now. I will, of course, be discussing uSpace and social media in general more soon.</p>
<p><em>Have you used uSpace or something similar? How did you find it? What uses can you see? Share your thoughts in the comments below.</em></p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/social-networking-poll/">Wednesday 10 September 2008</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Social networking</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Students</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">University of Sheffield</span></li>
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<a title="photo sharing" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jezcope/2845538425/"><img style="border:solid 2px #000000" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3281/2845538425_42f347a86c.jpg" alt=""></a>
<span style="font-size:.8em;margin-top:0"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jezcope/2845538425/">Social networking poll</a>, originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jezcope/">Jez Cope</a>.</span>
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<p>I was busy pulling together some links for my last post when I came across this beauty. I think this says it all about the prevalence of Facebook in the current student community!</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/something-a-little-different/">Sunday 16 August 2009</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Fiction</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SciFi</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Writing</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Group writing project</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Joanna Young</span></li>
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<p>One of my main reasons for having this blog is so that I can experiment, throw some ideas out there and learn from what sticks and what doesn’t. So when I came across <a href="http://confidentwriting.com/2009/07/mission-impossible-group-writing-project/">Joanna Young’s Mission Im(Possible) group writing project</a> for this month, I thought I’d give it a go. The challenge was to produce something in a different <em>form</em> or a different <em>medium</em>. I’ve had a desire for a few years now to write a science fiction novel, but never really got round to it, so this seemed like a good way to test the waters and stretch my comfort zone a bit.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>So, without further ado, I give you what may one day become part of my first novel.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He took a deep breath and stepped out. The sun was just peeping over the horizon and there was a fresh smell in the air, of dew and day-old cut grass, with a hint of something spicy he couldn’t quite name. The sky above was clear and blue, fading to a pale orange where it touched the horizon. There were a couple of cotton-wool clouds, bathed from below in gold.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>It was the kind of morning when it felt good to be alive, good just to be walking the earth. And, of course, it didn’t hurt that there was no other human movement for miles. He enjoyed, sometimes, taking a run out in the morning air back home, when few were awake save the milkman and the early commuter. But this was different, this time he could almost believe he could feel the peace and tranquillity that comes of being the only human for miles.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>It was strange for him to feel so much at home, scores of lightyears from the planet which gave him birth. Close up, the plants looked foreign; branching filaments emerged from the stem of each, starting the thickness of his wrist on the largest specimens, and bushing out until they were only slightly thicker than a hair at their tips. But as the landscape stretched away to the horizon, the details blurred together, and if he didn’t know better, he would have said that the lake glistening in the distance was a neighbour to Windermere or Ullswater.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>A gentle vibration just behind his left ear awoke him from his reverie. “I’m here, go ahead,” he announced, startling a small birdlike creature into the air with a squeak.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Great, boss, that’s good to know,” came a slightly irritated voice with a Scottish accent into his earpiece, “we were starting to wonder if we’d be doing this one without you.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“OK, OK, I’m with you now. Let’s get on with this.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>He looked around until he found what he was looking for and concentrated.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It took me a week to work my way up to writing this, but finally I decided I’d better get on with it, so I set a timer for 15 minutes and just started writing. This is a great technique and I really ought to use it more often; I didn’t really know what would come out when I started, but just let it flow out. I haven’t done any editing: this is exactly as it came out onto the page in the first place. It feels good to have written something so different to what I’d usually write, and I got a big confidence boost from my fianceé when she read it and told me it was good: high praise from someone who’s not really a fan of scifi! Now that I’ve got started, I hope I’ll write more; it will be interesting to see the impact that writing fiction makes on my non-fiction writing.</p>
<p><em>I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Let me know what you think in the comments section below.</em></p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Staff driven, student owned</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/staff-driven-student-owned/">Monday 6 October 2008</a>
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Tagged with
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Students</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">SLC 2.0</span></li>
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<p>So, we’ve got this great concept for a grassroots community of students sharing advice and resources to improve their learning. The big question that needs to be answered is this: “How do we make this thing float?” We can feed it all the resources and great ideas we like, but if the students don’t take to it in the long run it’s not worth doing.<!--more--></p>
<h1>Staff driven</h1>
<p>At least initially, the project is staff driven. This is a fact; it’s already, inescapably true because the project has been conceived by members of staff. The reason we’ve initiated this project is in three parts:</p>
<ol>
<li>We really want our students to be the best they can be;</li>
<li>We're excited about the possibilities for learning presented by new technology;</li>
<li>We're concerned that it's relatively difficult to find out what tools are available to improve learning.</li>
</ol>
<p>We are able to see the need for a project like this because as teaching and support staff (I include in this category postgraduate students with teaching duties, like myself) we are well placed to see overall trends in student learning behaviour. Having spent some time in the academic environment, we tend to have a grasp of the differences between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ learning behaviour (though we may often be bewildered as to how to encourage the good).</p>
<p>But in spite of all this, it’s not our place to tell students how to learn. The best we can do is support and encouraging them in discovering how learning works for them.</p>
<h1>Student owned</h1>
<p>Now, we may have an interest in student learning, but it’s abstract. Students have an interest in their own learning, and theirs is immediate, concrete and very personal. In addition to this, they have several attributes which can be used to great advantage:</p>
<ul>
<li>They have a grip on technology that most of the current generation of lecturers and professors can only dream of;</li>
<li>They're incredibly creative, especially when they understand that their contribution is valuable;</li>
<li>They want (like most of us) to make like as comfortable as possible.</li>
</ul>
<p>This last point is a double-edged sword. If you can convince someone that doing something will ultimately make their lives better, it will be much easier to persuade them to actually do it. On the other hand, if we hand down an artifact from on high, it will likely be accepted at face value, used as-is for a while and ultimately end in stagnation; it is easy to believe that ‘the university’ is an authority on learning and there is no point in questioning its judgements on the subject.</p>
<h1>Solution</h1>
<p>The solution to this dilemma seems to be thus:</p>
<ol>
<li>Involve students in the planning and decision-making process as early as possible;</li>
<li>Form a core group of students to carry the project forward:
<ul>
<li>Drawn from as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible, to encourage 'cross-pollination';</li>
<li>Preferably as excited about learning and technology as we are!;</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>CICS/LeTS act as consultants to this core student group:
<ul>
<li>Providing expert advice where appropriate;</li>
<li>Supporting/maintaining infrastructure where requested;</li>
<li>Providing access to resources which would otherwise be unavailable.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>
<p>In this way, the university can provide a comforting background feeling of continuity while maintaining a respectful distance and allowing the students to go wild and create something amazing.</p>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/storytelling/">Monday 25 May 2009</a>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Education</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Learning</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">PCHE</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Reflection</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Stories</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Storytelling</span></li>
<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Teaching</span></li>
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<p>I love a good story, don’t you? I mention this because I recently had the good fortune to sit in on a lecture taught by a PCHE colleague of mine who is a brilliant storyteller. The lecture was on the subject of magic in the Bible, and consisted of a short introduction to the subject followed by a series of short stories apparently involving magic, taken from the Bible and told in her own style. She’s very exuberant, competed in storytelling competitions when she was younger and held the students spellbound for 50 minutes, at the end of which time they had not only enjoyed themselves, but had also taken in enough to come out with some intelligent questions.<!--more--></p>
<p>The whole experience really brought home the importance of the art of storytelling in teaching. When I think back to my school days one of the things that I really enjoyed in English lessons was writing stories. The key thing that my teachers always used to try to get across is that a good story should have a beginning, a middle and an end.</p>
<p>The beginning sets the scene, fills the audience in on any background they might need and generally gets the ball rolling. The middle is the meat of the story and should be where everything really happens. The end wraps up, ties up the loose ends and is the point of the rest of the story happening at all.</p>
<p>Now I come to look at it in this way, everything I write and every presentation I make tells a story. On the micro scale, each paragraph and slide tells it’s own little story. On a big scale, a lecture course or a research project is also a story.</p>
<p>I’ve particularly noticed the story structure of the PCHE course. In the beginning, we learned about reflective practice and supervision: the tools we needed to make sense of the rest. The middle consisted of a wide range of workshops related to teaching practice and theory. Now, at the end, we’ve moved on to subjects like curriculum design and course evaluation, which round everything off quite elegantly by placing it in back in the wider context which we considered earlier on.</p>
<p>Seeing teaching done in this way, with both explicit and implicit reference to stories has caused two changes in me. First, I want to start going to storytelling workshops at the folk festivals I sometimes visit. Second, I’m going to pay more attention to storytelling in my own teaching, speaking and presenting.</p>
<p><em>How do stories fit into what you do? Are you aware of the stories you tell every day? Share your thoughts in the comments section.</em></p>
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