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Back in November, member of my social network Alan Cann asked me to participate in a project he was doing with the International Centre for Guidance Studies for the Research Information Network on Social Media for researchers. A few days later, I met online in Skype Chat with researcher Konstantia Dimitrou and we discussed my attitudes to social networking and its use in my teaching and scholarship. The report Social Media: A Guide for Researchers has now been released and you can read part of what I had to say on page 38 and in full on the Web at http://www....

During this first couple of weeks of the new teaching term I’ve been experimenting with using screen capture software as a means of capturing my lectures. Using nothing more than the built-in microphone on my Macbook Pro and an educational license for Camtasia Studio, I’ve been able to capture several lectures live in the lecture room. When I plug my Mac into the LCD projector, the screen resolution changes to super VGA (1024 x 768 pixels)....

Tara Brabazon, writing today for the Times Higher, provides a useful analysis of the common mistakes students make when submitting assignment work and suggests ways that we in academia could improve the first year experience. Her 20-point check list of what students do wrong and how lecturers react to those errors should be published in every student handbook. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/iid0ME

I’ve just installed the new TweetdDeck app for Google Chrome and like what I see so far. It takes the “that’s so obvious, why wasn’t it done before” idea of combining (TweetDeck calls this blending) all your feeds into three columns. Home: for all your identities and the people they follow across all of your social networks; Me: for mentions of your social identities and posts to your facebook newsfeeds; and Inbox: for direct messages....

Last year, I bought a Livescribe Echo Smart Pen with the hope that it would be useful in teaching. Well, here the result of my first attempt to use it “in anger”. I used the pen to write out a solution to one of the problems from my module EGLM03 Modern Control Systems while recording a narrative of what I was doing. The pen recorded the pen movement on the special notepaper and matched the movement to the audio....