Uncategorised

… I’ve been mostly developing a new version of my project allocation tool in Drupal (permissions, CCK and views,.. oh my!); re-launching the annual research project selection round in Blackboard; and re-launching Social Engineering as a self-hosted Elgg site. In the meantime, last-year’s research projects have been winding down (submission deadline was yesterday and vivas are in two-weeks), and we’ve been winding up to asking colleagues for the 500 or so new projects we are going to need for 2010-2011....

Today, I’ve mostly been playing with Cloudworks (cloudworks.ac.uk). There’s a nice introductory slidecast from Gráinne Conole on slideshare.

While doing some research (i.e. Google search) on Drupal for social networking in education, I was intrigued to find out that the educational social network cloudworks.ac.uk was originally developed using Drupal. See Gráinne Conole and Juliette Culver, “Cloudworks: Social networking for learning design“, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2009, 25(5), 763-782. If Drupal was good enough for JISC and the OU …

Today I presented a “Lunch and Learn Session” to colleagues at our Staff Development Unit. Here are the slides which are hosted at Google Docs. [googleapps domain=“docs” dir=“present/embed” query=“id=ajggj8h93vqb_20130gsvxt3fw” width=“410” height=“342” /] The creation of a Ning network was a highlight of the session, and unfortunately that bit is not present here, but the *intro* and *outro* may nevertheless be of some interest. There is also a [SlideShare version](http://www.slideshare.net/cpjobling/a-beginners-guide-to-social-engineering) which includes some extra video which I may get around to narrating and including a screencast demo of Ning site creation....

The Digital Economy Bill was pushed through parliament last night despite the attempts of MPs on the Labour and Liberal Democrat benches to force it to be delayed for proper scrutiny until after the next election. It’s apparently not a big issue in the electoral coverage and at the time of posting there had only been four reactions in the *blogs* of mainstream media: - Charles Arthur, Guardian Technology Editor, [live blogged the whole debate](http://www....