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Acronyms – why you should not use them
Receiving emails from mailing lists (both internal and of national organisations), it became apparent to me that contrived acroynms are still on the rage. This post is an exploration of my views on the use of acronyms.
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eLearning Tools: Blogs, wikis and discussion boards – what do you use for what?
The diagram below (also available as a PDF) is my interpretation of how the three staple tools of elearning are best suited to different tasks.
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Rewiring Inclusion: strategies, tools and techniques to promote barrier-free learning (JISC/ALT Conference on Accessibility) [Short report]
Report back on attendance of JISC TechDis / ALT conference ‘Rewiring Inclusion: Strategies, tools and techniques to promote barrier-free learning’, Nottingham, 9th Feb 2010. Matt Cornock, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York. Funded by University of York FELT RRF.
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Trust or privacy?
This is a follow-up post to the Top 10 Google Streetview Pros and Cons post. A lot of the arguments on the internet still focus on privacy issues. However, how do web users consider their own web security?
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Google Wave – Am I surprised Google stops development?
Something of a premonition occurred the weekend just gone. I was flicking through my Google Mail (or GMail now in the UK since the bought the rights off the previous small-time UK mail host using that brand), pondering the existence of Google Wave.
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VLE adoption – approaching meaningful use of virtual learning environments
This post is a plain-text equivalent for the ideas presented in the Prezi: VLE adoption – approaching meaningful use of virtual learning environments.
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Nightly Bile Beans – Design tips from adverts that last 150 years
One of the stand out signs in York is that of the ‘Nightly Bile Beans’ on Lord Mayor’s Walk. For over a century (I’m guessing), this simple advert (pictured below) has informed millions and made the brand a household name, at least in York.
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The Times paid-only subscription goes live
I’ve mentioned the (questionable) usability of The Times website (thetimes.co.uk / thetimes.co.uk) subscription service in a previous blog post, however now the ‘free trial’ is over.
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Top 10: Marketese – Marketing words to avoid
Don’t use meaningless marketing words like ‘best’, ‘greatest’ or ‘incredible’. People are smart (mostly), and if not smart then they’re sceptical. When writing for the web (or any marketing copy) using words like ‘the best…’ or ‘amazing’ is a waste of space and damages your keyword ratio.
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Usability fail: timesplus.co.uk – the new Times Premium Content site
A few months back, you may remember the heads-up that Murdoch was going to make parts of the Times newspaper website pay-per-click. Essentially, requiring paid-for subscription to access news material (exclusives, popular, etc.). We will refer to this content as ‘premium content’.
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Website design analysis case study: The York Dancesport site refresh
This post is supported by a video overview of the site and the changes from the previous design: I outline here the approach I have taken in a quick refresh of the University of York Dancesport website, at yorkdancesport.com. Key points Website logo and title in the top left. This is now a convention which…
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General Election 2010: Party Campaign Websites Analysis (Part 3: Accessibility)
This is the third and final part of the UK 2010 General Election Campaign Websites Analysis for the three major parties. This post looks at the accessibility considerations of the three homepages:
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General Election 2010: Party Campaign Websites Analysis (Part 2: Manifesto Pages)
This is the second of an impartial three part analysis of the campaign websites for the UK General Election 2010. The party sites looked at will be Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. See Part 1 for full introduction. In this analysis, we’ll look at how the manifesto pages are presented. Comparing and contrasting each of the websites, we’ll…
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General Election 2010: Party Campaign Websites Analysis (Part 1)
This is the first of an impartial three part analysis of the campaign websites for the UK General Election 2010. The party sites looked at will be Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. This first analysis looks at general impressions of the party campaign homepage, the type of content available and key layouts. The second analysis will focus…
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Twitter Open for Business (and for Dizziness)
Twitter has recently woken up to embracing the B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-customer) community, encouraging C2B (customer-to-business) and C2C (customer-to-customer) relationship building with it’s Twitter for Business 101 pages. In other news below, I am stunned by the use of scrolling text.
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Useful web considerations: Bing vs Google, YouTube and accessibility, Top 100 internet sites
This is a very brief post about a few web related things that are worthy of note recently. Bing is coming! Batten down the hatches, Google I have to say I’ve been very impressed with Bing’s advertising campaign which effectively brands itself as a ‘decision engine’ rather than a search engine, but more noteworthy for…
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Prediction: The computer will go the same way as the steam engine
Computers will go the same way as steam engines. That’s my latest off-the-wall prediction (with no real scientific backing). Whilst recently looking at how institutions and organisations are cutting their energy consumption, it became unsurprisingly obvious that lighting and heating had a third energy consumption counterpart: that of computers (and the associated hardware).
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How I lost all my images on Google Image search: the perils of default settings
Although I like to consider myself quite well versed in the art of SEO and visibility on the web, I did have a ‘slap-forehead-moment’ a few weeks back. I’d recently reinstalled Drupal (which this site runs on) to the latest version. However, what I failed to remember was that I’d created my own robots.txt and .htaccess…
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There is a different Google out there – trust me
Whilst most UK Googlers don’t yet see much of a difference, in the US Google has made a few minor alterations to it’s interface. Most of the time when you go to http://www.google.com whilst in the UK, you will be automatically redirected to http://www.google.co.uk – however you can get to the .com version using browser…
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The tale of a digital hoarder: Videos
Videos are the new photos, in much the same way that black is the new black. For many, taking a video of an event is now just as easy (if not easier) than taking a photo. This is why the vast majority of mobile phones have a video function as well as a photo function.…
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The tale of a digital hoarder: Photos
In this post, I look at the way our attitude to storing photos has changed as a result of the ease and low-cost of digital storage which encourages the digital photo hoarder.Two questionsHow many photos did you use to take with your 35mm film camera? 24 or 36 exposure? A film reel or two a…
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The tale of a digital hoarder: Introduction
Digital hoarding: The keeping and collecting of all your digital possessions, forever and ever. It’s keeping a copy of everything that has ever passed through your computer, on your screen or in your virtual existence. Much like ‘physical’ hoarding, everything is pretty much kept in a crazy jumble, and with one explosion it’ll be destroyed…
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Googlemail down (again) – The curse of GMail
OK, so this is a hurried post relating to the current Googlemail outage (something to do with cows and wind?), however consider the following points:
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Top 10: Email inbox management techniques
Here’s some Top 10 Tips to manage your email inbox:
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Updating a large site
Apologies for not updating the site recently. Lots going on at work has encouraged me to spend less time infront of my PC monitor at home. I’ve been converting thousands of words worth of Word docs into pretty, clean, HTML ready for uploading to Moodle. Then (strangely) converting the tidy formating back into Word to…
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Murdoch charging for online news – seems a bit backward to me
The recent suggestion by Rupert Murdoch that he will be charging for online news provision starting sometime in 2010 goes against all intuition. Here’s my analysis and predictions. I mentioned the story to two people already and they both said ‘Well we’ll use BBC News instead…’ – who will pay for online news or celeb…
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Quick web design tips: Image size and optimisation
Optimising (or optimizing) images is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get the size of your web pages down. Not optimising images remains to be one of the most significant problems on the internet. Reducing image file size benefits all users, as well as for the increased popularity in mobile devices, making your…
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Top 10: 1990s bad web design (and early 2000s)
Web design has come a long way since the original 256 colour dithering of late-1990s web design and the myriad of weird and wonderful things it brought with it. In the late-1990s and early 2000s personal homepage were on the rage with companies like Tripod (Lycos) and Geocities (Yahoo) offering 5 free webpages with free site building tools. Here’s a…