Wednesday 20 May 2009

Cheating has always been around in schools and universities

A Guardian Tech Tweet:

Cheating has always been around in schools and universities - but the internet is making it far worse | Marcel B.. http://bit.ly/9Gmyu

Friday 15 May 2009

Posterous blog

I have found another really cool blogging tool/website that maybe useful to people. Posterous blog, which is used for propagating info to other places. Posterous is dead clever. I can email it words, pics, other stuff and it puts it in loads of other places instantly.


Posterous is the easiest way to post anything online using email. Just email post@posterous.com and attach any photos, music, video, and documents you want, and they will instantly reply with your new good-looking posterous.com blog. No signup, no setup required.

Multiple images become an easy to use image gallery. MP3's get a flash player. Documents get a Scribd flash preview. If you already use Flickr or Twitter, we can automatically update those services with your posts. Photoblog from your iPhone using email, and get it sent to everywhere you care about too.

Even experienced bloggers can use Posterous to blog-by-email quicker than ever. They also can autopost to every major blog platform, including Blogger, Wordpress, Movable Type, Typepad, Livejournal, Tumblr, Xanga, and any blog that supports MetaWebLog API and Really Simple Discovery.

Thursday 14 May 2009

Twitter stream

Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like photos and videos. http://tweetree.com/

I really like it I haven’t used use plain old Twitter since finding this. Hope you like it too.

Wednesday 13 May 2009

First impression

I have just read a blog that brought up the topic of good design and how they suggested a website home page should look. This reminded me of two thing I keep on my shelf to remind my about “good design” the fist is a Journal article by: Gitte, L. Fernandes, G. Dudek, C. Brown, J. 2006. “Attention Web Designers: You have 50 Milliseconds to make a Good First Impression!” Behaviour & Information Technology 25(2): 115-126.

And the second is a book by: Gladwell, M. 2005. Blink. Penguin Books.

I do like Malcolm Gladwell’s books in particular. One example he uses is how quickly students make judgments on how good a lecturer of teacher is going to be and how this correlates to their final opinions after months of teaching. Is their opinion formed after one week, one lesson? The answer seems to be about 30 seconds at most and their opinions do not seem to change for the entirety of the teaching. For more details on this I would highly recommend reading the book. But maybe you should definitely stop and think about what impression you are going to give someone when meeting them for the first time or showing someone your work for the first time.

Blink reminds me that people make up their mind very quickly about everything not just website not just lectures and teachers.

Friday 8 May 2009

Blackboard Buys Angel

A very interesting time head for all the university’s who have very recently decided to buy Angel over BB after evaluation due to, it is said, superior learning philosophy and significantly better customer service. As the article says “the market, it has seen number of colleges and universities shift to open source systems such as Sakai or Moodle, or to other companies. Angel has been particularly successful”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/07/bb

Thursday 7 May 2009

Wednesday 6 May 2009

Welcome to my blog

Hello and welcome to my blog! This is my first ever personal blog entry. Just to introduce myself I am Michael Bolton the Virtual Learning Environments Support Officer for the Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law, University of Leeds. I am also in the lucky position in that I really enjoy doing my job so much so that I would like to share the things I do with the world.

In the future intend to post on the projects I am working on with regard to Learning Technology / Virtual Learning Environments / E-Learning / ICT as and when I'm working on them. I also intend to post summaries of the books journals and news articles I have read on all the above subjects to hopefully create a useful resource for anyone interested in these subjects.