This year I am taking over a module EG-247 Signals and Systems from a colleague who has moved to another institution. This is the first of a series of Blog posts with which I intend to document and reflect on the process for my own benefit but in the hope that it will be useful to others. My first step this year was to buy a hard-backed notebook. There are some nice ones with Swansea University livery in the Campus bookshop for £4.

Heads by Chris Jobling I’ve got a new module to deliver this session. I wonder if documenting the process of putting together the course site on Blackboard would be of interest to anyone? Feedback in the comments please.

Einstein Agrees with Brian, mashup by Andrea Arbogast “interlect” on Flickr. Image licensed under Creative Commons share alike with attribution. Some rights reserved. In recent times, the Blackboard company has been reaching out to its community of institutional users via a series of weekly webinars in what it calls the Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series (BITS). It hosts and records these webinars on Blackboard Collaborate and then releases the recordings on the BITS Channel on YouTube.

I’ve just upgraded to the new 3.6 release of WordPress and switched to the new default Twenty Thirteen theme. What do you think? P.S. It’s an HTML5 theme (good for case studies if you’re teaching web applications) and it works great on an iPhone!

It’s summer. And of course the world believes that academics do nothing over the summer. Well, apart from the summer resit examinations that have to be set and marked, course preparation and undergraduate project allocation that has to be done, I’d agree there isn’t much to be done. But it is a period of the year for which there can be time which can be set aside for personal self-development projects.

Just some notes on my first impressions. I’ve used iAnnotate a lot since I first wrote these notes, but reading back, my first impressions were pretty accurate. It can open documents from Dropbox (registered on iPad as a send target) and iAnnotate converts them to PDFs automatically. Fidelity of PDF conversion is not great (there’s an on-line service for this now). I’ve found that it’s best to save documents as PDF from desktop first.

It’s summer so there must be time to blog! Right? Ignoring the fact that I failed to follow through on my last promise to do better, I’ve decided that after surviving another year of Interesting Times (See Alleged Mandarin Curse) there are a few “tales from the chalkface” that I could usefully recount. So watch this space! I’ll also try to reboot by 366 Crispy Things blog to provide a daily serving of goodness.

I just noticed (because I haven’t used it seriously for a while) that Google Reader has gotten rid of the “star” which I used to use to share articles that I had read with my FriendFeed and my own Crispy Feeds feed. It’s been replaced by G+ and Share with Google+ buttons. I suppose it makes sense from Google’s point of view that the default way to share from its feed reader should be through it’s own social network, and to be fair, other sharing options are still available from Google Reader via the Send to option.

With my daughter now staring her own blog, I feel guilty that my blog has been silent for so long. “I’ve been busy” is some kind of excuse, I suppose, but I know that I’ll be even busier next year. Perhaps I need some inspiration. Anyone got any ideas for me?

I’m registered to participate in BlendKit2012, the open, online course on blended learning. I thought you might be interested in joining me. If you haven’t heard about it already, it’s a five week opportunity to get ideas and develop materials for blended learning courses. There is no registration fee, and you can set your own goals for participation based on your existing time commitments. For more information or to register, please visit: http://bit.

A series of talking heads discuss the move of the Bloomsbury Learning Environment to Moodle 2 from Blackboard 8. Videos provided on the ULCC Events Channel. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PL797550437607675C&hl=en_US]

Early on this term I decided that HTML5 had reached sufficient traction to make it worth changing the flavour of HTML to be covered in my two modules EG-146 and EG-259. Now it seems that the media is starting to support my decision. As reported in this week’s HTML5 Weekly (Issue #37 – May 9, 2012) the BBC had a Business News Report on the Rise of HTML5 and in the same issue, there’s a link to an article on why (newspaper and magazine) publishers don’t like apps which rather echoes my view expressed earlier this year.