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Restoring Apps page in Google Chrome for home and new tabs
Google Chrome has updated and you’ve lost your big buttons to GoogleMail (GMail), Google Drive and YouTube. Fear not, there is a quick solution to restore your Apps buttons as your home page and an extension to sort out your new tab.
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Copyright training with clickers – evaluation
As part of the Social Media for Social Policy short course I run for students at the University of York, one of the key introductory sessions is on copyright. This session aims to inform students about digital copyright and ensure they do not infringe copyright using third-party works when creating their social media projects.
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Recording videos for incoming students and the transition to higher education
As part of an institutional-wide project on the Transition to Higher Education, I presented a few months back on an approach to create videos to help students understand what a subject entails at university-level. One of the biggest challenges that some subjects have is that they are not taught at A Level, which means for…
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Coloured photographic lens filter test for digital cameras
If you’ve ever wondered what the effect of coloured filters has on photos taken by digital cameras, well wonder no more. I recently purchased a cheap set of colour solid and graduated filters and decided it was time to run a little experiment. See the results here:Lens filter comparison page
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eBay down for August scheduled maintenance – lessons learnt on Twitter
In a previous post I mentioned how Twitter is being used by people to monitor the availability of web services, and for web services themselves to communicate with its users when their primary channels (website, mobile app, etc) are unavailable. See: BBC website goes offline – Twitter community all a flapper.Today was another example of such…
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Four stages of competence marketing model: Unconscious incompetence / conscious competence
The ‘Four Stages of Competence’, ‘Conscious Competence’ or ‘Competency’ model traditionally applies to learning, training, self-development, organisational learning and change management. It is a skills model (see here for details), designed to move people around the matrix from unconscious incompetence, anticlockwise to unconscious competence.
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Facebook now 100% irrelevant to me – The impact of advertising vs user engagement
Facebook’s approach to advertising is one of those topics that has its fans (the marketers) and its foes (the average user). With the desire to make money in order to facilitate the service, advertising is a key revenue stream for Facebook. However, yesterday (probably not for the first time), advertising took up 100% of my…
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MOOCs – Enough of the sensationalism, will they really affect Higher Education?
I have avoided writing a post on MOOCs (massive open online courses) for far too long. Partly because many other people have written about them already, and partly because I fear I might just write a diatribe. I’m not against the concept of MOOCs I hasten to add (I’d love to develop one), but against…
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Four types of student posts in introductory online discussion activities
In introductory or ice-breaker activities, there are four types of posts that are made by students/participants on discussion boards or community blogs. These four types I have drawn up after looking at a selection of ‘Welcome Sites’ for new students. These Welcome Sites are used for new students to make contact with each other and the…
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Project Launch: Reading On Screen
In direct response to student feedback on the way that we are making extensive use of digital resources for teaching, we have developed a special guide and supporting website addressing ‘reading on screen’.Summary PDF Guide [PDF]Supporting website – feedback and user experiences warmly invited via the siteThe site covers such topics as:
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Guide: Resizing photos on a Mac
This may sound like an obvious guide, but not being a regular Mac user it took me a fair while to work out how to do batch resizing (or even single resize) of photos. So here are the steps:
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What makes a 21st Century teacher? (Durham Blackboard Conference 2013)
Summary of Panel Discussion: What makes a 21st Century teacher?Durham Blackboard Users Conference, Durham University, 8-9 January 2013.Panelists: Ray Land, Richard Pears (Durham University); Jeremy Knox (Edinburgh University); Peter Felton (Elon University, USA); Mike Cameron and Iain Wheeldon (Newcastle University).Chair: Malcolm Murray
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Creating rich resources with free tools: Customised Google Maps for Learning & Teaching
Workshop at the Durham Blackboard Users Conference, Durham University, 9 January 2013. See: Conference Website. Presentation This was my workshop at DurBbU with the general aim was to showcase the way that Google Maps has been used by academics in my Department and to invite workshop participants to try out the Google Maps interface on…
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Reflections: The scientific approach to teaching, Eric Mazur (ALT-C 2012)
For fear of not being able to understand my scribbled, hand-written notes a few months down the line, I have decided to write up my ALT-C experience on the blog again. This is my ‘processing’ method… read on, it’ll all make sense. This post is a brief summary of just a handful of the key…
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Unravelling student expectations (ALT-C 2012 Conference Short Paper)
Unravelling student expectations: the use of early student data and module feedback to inform implementation (in the context of learning technologies). Short paper for the ALT-C Conference, Manchester, 11 September 2012. Matt Cornock (Social Policy and Social Work, University of York) Downloads Unravelling student expectations – Abstract [PDF] Unravelling student expectations – Slides with notes [PDF] Abstract Managing student expectations has become a…
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Facebook slash – is this the end for web addresses?
In this blog post I discuss the rise of third-party branded URLs and the possible future of web addresses leading towards registration-plate domain names. Are branded URLs becoming redundant?Facebook dot com slash…With a number of big brands now using Facebook (facebook.com/brandname) instead of their own web addresses (brandname.com), the question has to be asked: Which…
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BBC website goes offline – Twitter community all a flapper
Arguably the worlds largest and most visited website (ignoring search engines and other major internet portals), bbc.co.uk, went offline tonight around 10.44pm (BST). At the time of writing it is still unavailable. Shockingly 30 minutes has gone by…
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Laws of the Web – Bandwidth
I’ve borrowed a book from the University Library. Published in 2001, Bernado A. Huberman’s ‘The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information’, offers a window back a decade to when the internet boom started and mass-access in the developed world became a reality. I’m probably the only person to borrow this book…
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Email and why it’ll never disappear
Like an old faithful dog, email still persists as one of the fundamental communication methods online. But is it’s time limited? The attempts to create what is effectively a microcosm of the internet with Facebook (as one blog depicted rather well in 2011), would suggest that Facebook messaging should have surpassed the need for email…
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Website effectiveness (part 1) – defining success of a website
I had an interesting discussion with a colleague recently about how we judge the effectiveness of a website. I thought I’d share my pre-meeting notes here and the approaches and considerations I have to judging the effectiveness of non-ecommerce sites.
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Website effectiveness (part 2) – using stats and analytical tools
This is the second part of a three-part series looking at approaches to judging website effectiveness, based upon my approaches and prep notes for a meeting I had with a colleague on this matter. See introduction post.
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ALT-C 2011: Conference report
From this page I will link all the blog posts and anything else of interest that relate to my attendance at the 18th Association for Learning Technology Conference, held at the University of Leeds in 6-8 September 2011.
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Reflections on Open Learning and its Role in the 21st Century (Durham Blackboard Conference 2012)
Part of a series of posts reporting back on the Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference 2012.
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Reflections: US National Education Technology Plan (ALT-C 2011)
This is the third of a series of blog posts in which I write up my reaction and reflections on some of the sessions at the ALT-C 2011 learning technology conference. This keynote looks at US policy for elearning.
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Reflections: Online resource personalisation; Work based learning (ALT-C 2011)
This is the second of a series of blog posts covering my reaction to the ALT-C 2011 conference sessions.See my main ALT-C 2011 overview pageCrowdvine reference for this session: http://altc2011.alt.ac.uk/talks/22287Effectiveness of technology to support work based learning: the stakeholders’ perspective Rebecca Strachan, Lalith Liyanage, Biddy Casselden, Roger PenlingtonNorthumbria University