This new Flowgram weaves the best of the Internet’s sites on presentations into a briefing presentation for my research project students. At the time of writing, there is no soundtrack but check back later. Important note, Flowgram goes off line on 30th June: you probably won’t see the embedded presentation after that date. http://www.flowgram.com/widget/flexwidget.swf?id=haycqp6hibqjxr&hasLinks=false Flowgram has been playing up lately: it takes an inordinate amount of time between uploading PowerPoint slides and them appearing on the site.

An informal guide for the engineering education scholar has been published by the Engineering Subject Centre (ESC) at the Higher Education Academy (HEA). It’s aimed at engineering educators (like me) who don’t have much idea of the theory of education and educators (also like me) who want to do research in this area. Hope it delivers what it promises! [Published: 10 days ago shared via feedly] Posted via email from Half baked but crispy.

So I subscribed to posterous.com (just by sending an email to post at posterous.com) and now I can post to the Learning Lab Community blog, Fresh and Crispy, Twitter and Flickr all at the same time … by email! And as I’m doing this at 12.42 am, I’ve obviously got a bad case of social network addiction. Must stop signing up! Posted via email from Half baked but crispy

I have noticed that a few people in my Friendfeed have been using a new (to me) social commenting service Disqus to mediate their blog comments. Unable to resist trying out “yet another Web2.0 service” (YAWTS), I’ve signed up. After some adjustment to my Blogger template to include the necessary third-party code, my comments are now using Disqus and you can subscribe to a post’s comment stream, or all my comments.

Swurl was a lifestreaming tool with a great interface that I was subscribed to since I read about it in Read Write Web back in July last year. Unfortunately, without warning, it’s now gone and taken my life with it! All that is left is the apologetic note illustrated. Luckily I still have my friend-feed, tumblr blog and netvibes home page. Moral: don’t get too attached to a single Web 2.

I am grateful to my friend and former Swansea colleague Dr Farzin Deravi of University of Kent at Canterbury who read my blog post on Euler’s identity (“The Most Beautiful Equation in the World”) via Facebook and told me about this video proof of the equation: It’s well put together, but for me crucially omits the vital step that substitutes cos ? = -1 and sin ? = 0 to reduce e_i_?

I regularly post to three blogs. This one, which used to be work related, is now sort of miscellaneous. I try to keep my other blog @the.coalface, which is a multi-user WordPress blog hosted at my University, focussed on my reflections on my experiments with education technology. And I am a regular contributor to the Swansea Learning Lab community blog, where I typically re-post interesting items of e-learning inspiration and that I find in my daily trawl of my RSS feeds.

According to some, Euler’s identity is one of the most beautiful mathematical expressions in the world. The identity is 1 + e__i? = 0 (although electrical engineers like myself are more familiar with seeing it written as 1 + e__j? = 0). * Euler’s Identity, Technical Museum Berlin* On a recent visit to the Mathema Exhibition at the German Technical Museum, Berlin, I took this photo of some art that represents this equation.

In about four weeks I will be giving a lecture to the Level 3 Engineering Dissertation class on proper referencing. I will probably want to cover the following ground: Plagiarism (or how not to reference) How to reference A couple of referencing styles (I was thinking numerical and Havard styles). Referencing tools: Word 2007, Zotero, Endnote. There is a brief guide to bibliographic referencing that has been provided by the Library and Information Service at Swansea University which I will use, but I am also looking for examples of plagiarism that I can cite (properly) and any pointers to good on-line resources for using the referencing tools.

A couple of interesting articles crossed my on-line reading list today. First of all, Chris Hall from the Swansea Learning lab posted a delicious.com bookmark to a Times Higher Education article which reported on a JISC Report on new models for academic publishing which concludes that “an “open-access” future for academic publishing would save money while boosting the profile of research and maximising its economic impact.” In The Guardian Technology supplement, Andrew Brown presents a similar argument in today’s Read me first column: “Digital Britain needs access to science journals, not YouTube.

[](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/SYh54SkCROI/AAAAAAAAJNY/Q9-ckaU1XYw/s1600-h/IMG_0008-10.JPG) The snow finally arrived in Swansea but brought with it the usual British “severe weather” madness. I received a Twitter tweet from a colleague that said that the University was closed and because I couldn’t believe it: I walked out into the pleasant wintry day to see if it was true. And it was! The entire staff was sent home at around 9.00 am. Students flooding in from Brynmill were turned away from lectures and were able to build snowmen and have snowball fights instead.

[](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/SYdMZ5R9SMI/AAAAAAAAJMg/A1bdH__d55g/s1600-h/IMG_0017-7.JPG) According to the [BBC](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7865378.stm “BBC Snow!”), snow falls today caused major [disruption](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7864315.stm “BBC: London Travel Severely disrupted”) to normal sevice of [UK PLC](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7864804.stm “BBC: Businesses counting the cost”). In Swansea, we had a light dusting as this shot of my route into work shows. Light snow showers expected tonight. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)