WebDAV for Blackboard
Quite a few years back I blogged about using the CMS on Blackboard to store learning materials for students. A much more flexible system that uses WebDAV for drag and drop file management. Well, yes, there are a few Android WebDAV clients around, my favourite of which is WebDAV File Manager. Log in to BlackBoard merrily and modify your files....
posted on: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
CK-12 Foundation
The CK-12 Foundation:
"....is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U....
posted on: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Kindle Clippings
As I noted in this earlier post, it is dead useful to be able to mark up paragraphs of interest which are filed under "Notes"....
posted on: Fri, 09 Sep 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
BBP University College Fees Set
Mike baker reports on BPP University College setting its undergraduate fees at.... £5,000 per year. That's a very aggressive price squarely targeted at the public sector....
posted on: Tue, 06 Sep 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Make reading the number one skill?
An impassioned plea from Roy Blatchford (on Mike Baker's blog) to make reading a top priority for all schools. From the article:
"Provisional figures for 2011 indicate that, in England, one child in five reaches age 11 unable to read confidently. Confident, that is, to access the secondary school curriculum they are embarking on this month."
This goes alongside numeracy and writing..... and if children can't access the secondary school curriculum at age 11, what are their chances of studying at degree level?
posted on: Mon, 05 Sep 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Memory Techniques and Learning
I've just finished reading slew of books on memory techniques; Donald Clark put me on to Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer....
posted on: Sun, 04 Sep 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Kindle talk
As a follow-on...... I gave a talk at Middlesex University on the use of Kindles in HE.
posted on: Thu, 18 Aug 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Using the Kindle.... to read a book!
I was actually using the Kindle to read a book today.... funny that up to this point I haven't actually done this....
posted on: Thu, 18 Aug 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
£27,000 degree revisited
Another interesting article by Mike Baker over on BBC News about the recent toings-and-froings on university tuition fees. Well worth a read, but in summary, almost all fees are likely to be £9,000 per year in part because the government has pulled so much money out of HE. As a result there is little chance of an educational market. And the net result for students will also marginal. It will be fascinating to see the landscape once universities start publishing their fee schedules for 2012 entrants.
posted on: Sat, 12 Feb 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Experiences in using the Kindle
So some initial experiences in working with the Kindle..... I don't read many novels and, if you borrow heavily from a library, then this isn't for you....
posted on: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
£27,000 for a degree....
So there we have it, the cost of a degree looks set to march onwards to £27,000, plus living expenses. Not an insignificant amount of money. The BBC provides an alternative discussion, but in essence prices are rising to £6,000 pa, with an upper cap of £9,000, although this will come with requirements for fair access. The concern of many universities is that, with the removal of state funding, £9,000 will only allow them to tread water and probably slip back in real terms.
There are some other articles around the issue: $200,000 degree, 2yr degrees... I guess we'll see if a market will develop and, indeed, if we see a rise in state-funded science courses.
posted on: Wed, 03 Nov 2010 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Blackboard Woes: uploading marks
Spent ages going around in circles today trying to upload marks in Blackboard. I've just finished marking 80 odd essays, with comments, and wanted to upload this back in to the Grade Book....
posted on: Wed, 03 Nov 2010 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
University places... a slow news week?
OK, perhaps that's a little uncharitable, but there have been a few heckles raised at poor A-level students who don't get university places....
posted on: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Knowledge retention
Donald Clark has a nice synopsis, in his usual brusque style (!), on knowledge retention as part of learning. He kicks off with the classic graph showing how rapidly retention drops off after first exposure, and then goes through a (mixed) variety of strategies to offset this loss. If students haven't come across this then they need to be aware of it. And it goes without saying that teachers/lecturers should be building this style of knowledge "training" and re-exposure in to their schedules.
posted on: Sat, 29 May 2010 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Prezi for presentations
I was recently introduced to Prezi, a rapid presentation package for those sick of the usual Powerpoint interface....
posted on: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Students have 10 minute attention span
Students only have '10-minute attention span' - it's a great headline from the BBC and the first part of the copy reads: "University students have average attention spans of just 10 minutes and many miss lectures because of the need for part-time jobs, research suggests." Actually, the 10-minute attention span is a pretty well known phenomena; John Medina outlines this in Brain Rules (amongst other things) and discusses how he structures 1 hour lectures in to 15 minutes blocks to leverage attention spans. So not so much a real headline as a storm in a teacup.
posted on: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Education under Labour
Mike Baker again has a nice reflective piece on the ONS report of education under Labour over the last 12 years (I can't find the right ONS report though)....
posted on: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Applications to HE
Mike Baker, the BBCs Education Correspondent, again has an interesting this week about changes to university admissions. In essence the government wants to move towards universities offering places based upon a student's actual grades, rather than predicted grades (which aren't that accurate). In a half-hearted move we now have a 5-day "adjustment period" in which students who performed better than expected have the option of "upgrading" and applying elsewhere. This sounds all very good in theory, but as Mike outlines the likely net effect (because "good" universities are already full) is that there will be no change other than getting the hopes up of many students.
posted on: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
How to do well in a PhD viva
After a brief chat this week with a student about an upcoming viva I thought I would list some of the useful pieces of advice from my own viva (thanks to Ian Evans for a pleasant experience!) and some recent students:
be honest
its a 2-way conversation. Talk about your work
its better without your supervisor. It also means that if theyve made a bad project decision you can happily blame them!
its quite nice at the beginning of discussing each chapter to actually point out any mistakes you've spotted
make sure you references are totally spot on
Im sure there are others so feel free to add to them.
posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Engaging students
OK, so there are potentially cognitive thresholds which inhibit the progression of (willing!) students in their learning....
posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Cognitive Thresholds
I was at the Middlesex University Teaching and Learning Conference today where one of the keynote presentations was given by Sandy Gilkes from the University of Nottingham....
posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
IR-pen again...
After my last post on using the Wiimote as part of an interactive whiteboard, and the follow-up on building an IR pen, I have now found that it is not quite so easy to get ahold of as I thought....
posted on: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
LED IR Pen
As a follow up to the recent blog on the Wiimote interactive whiteboard, you will need an IR LED pen for the Wiimote to track. You can obviously dust off your soldering iron and build your own pen, or follow this painless and easy tutorial!!
posted on: Wed, 14 May 2008 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Wii-moting
I came across Johnny Chung Lee's Wii remote projects this week. And, well... they blew me away!! Have a look at the 3 YouTube videos and you will see how understanding what hardware is in the Wii remote, with a little lateral thinking, can develop some astounding results. The fact that no games designers had actually thought of head tracking is amazing because the demo is cool beyond belief. If we don't see any games on the shelves that use these ideas in the next 6 months then I'll east my hat! And, from the teaching perspective, having a portable, low-cost, interactive whiteboard is brilliant. I'm building my LED pen as we speak!!
posted on: Tue, 13 May 2008 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Worst presentation moments?
I thought lecturers in HE had some pretty funny teaching moments (I remember one lecturer writing on an overhead projector and then stopping, going white. He had just realised there was no acetate on the projector and he was using a permanent marker!), but anything we can do, Microsoft can do better. Have a look at this page for some really very funny moments in the life of an IT consultant.
posted on: Thu, 08 May 2008 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Standard Normal Transform
Following on from the previous post on animating a stem and leaf plot for teaching, here is another one on a standard normal transforms.
posted on: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Stem and Leaf Plots
My wife was teaching stem and leaf plots to first year business students recently and wanted to dynamically show how they are built from a raw data set. We use Powerpoint 97 which doesn't support motion paths, so makes any kind of "real" animation difficult. Open Office's Impress has a half-hearted approach to motion paths, but they are pre-defined (although please correct me if I'm wrong!). As a result I ended up using the only animation software I have, which is the Flash-based Swish. For a quick effort, the animation works reasonably well.
posted on: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Adpative Release (and the spiral of death)
I have blogged about using Blackboard before and, by large, things have been pain free. I hit a problem recently which should have been (and was!)...
posted on: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Open Office Footers
I've finally taken the plunge and am in the process of fully switching over to Open Office. I've been wanting to do this for a while, partly to move over to open source software and partly because of Portable Open Office....
posted on: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
BlackBoard: when submitting a file is..... crap
I use the "Assignment" feature on BlackBoard extensively for students to submit material. Not only is there no "physical" copy to print, submit, collect, mark and return, but the student can submit from home and I can collect them from home....
posted on: Mon, 04 Jun 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Marking Presentations
I regularly get students on my courses to give assessed presentations which they are marked upon. Whilst we are primarily interested in academic achievement, we do utilise a variety of different assessment methods, of which presenting is one....
posted on: Thu, 03 May 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Public Speaking
I've just finished a two-day training course on public speaking with SkillStudio. Some might think a lecturer going on a course in speaking is a strange thing to do!...
posted on: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Rights of Way Surveying
I've just returned from a weeks field course to Swansea with the first year geography students. Yet again, the weather was fantastic and offered some memorable days at Oxwich Bay....
posted on: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Is a degree really worth it?
Another open day and another good article by Mike Baker on the price of a university degree. He notes the relief from the government with an increase in UCAS applications even after the introduction of top-up fees....
posted on: Sat, 17 Feb 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
What degree should you choose?
This question has been posed to me in a variety of guises by, several different people, over the last couple of weeks and remains a perennial problem for students taking A-levels....
posted on: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
What is a TOID?
I set my first year class an exam and one of the questions asked what TOID was the acronym for (I would have used the OS definition but it wasn't as good as Wikipedia!)...
posted on: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Being a good lecturer needs..... more sex
The BBC has reported (admittedly a year ago) on a study at the University of Paisley that was looking at the impact of different forms of sex on stress levels. Blood pressure was monitored during a variety of situations designed to increase stress, including public speaking. And the study found that participants who had had penetrative sex had reduced blood pressure and recovered from stress quicker than all other groups. The worst off were those who abstained from sex.
What does this mean for lecturers? Well I won't spell it out, but I suspect our stress reduction courses don't involve this kind of therapy ;)
posted on: Tue, 09 Jan 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Sense About Science
It's difficult to go a day without reading some loon story in the newspaper or seeing a reporter making ludicrous claims based upon flimsy evidence....
posted on: Mon, 08 Jan 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
First Year Experience: what are we trying to achieve?
Times have achanged in Higher Education in the UK. With the government aiming for 50% of young people to be entering HE, gone are the days of the "top 15% of the population" staying on education....
posted on: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
Academics For Academic Freedom
After a lengthy absence from illness, I thought I would give a plug for the "Academics For Academic Freedom" campaign that recently received some press from the BBC entitled Academics seek right to offend....
posted on: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 | path: /teaching | permanent link to this entry
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