I was a twitter use for many years and you’ll find the archeological remains of my twitter use in the blog by the broken embedded tweets that remain. After Elon Musk took over twitter, I decided to leave and I closed down my first account. I still have an archive at cpjobling.github.io/cpjobling-tweets. I had a skeleton presence for some time, but that closed too a few months ago. Now, I’ve gone over to Bluesky (bsky.

🗓️ Today Copied from Obsidian. ✅ Did Hosted the Hugo-generated version of my blog on GitHub pages here: cpjobling.github.io/fresh_and_crispy and set up a repo here: cpjobling/fresh_and_crispy: Static website version of my blog (github.com) 📖 Reading My Hugo setup and how this blog works by [[Taylor Jadin]].

🗓️ Today Copied from Obsidian. ✅ Did Hosted the Hugo-generated version of my blog on GitHub pages here: cpjobling.github.io/fresh_and_crispy and set up a repo here: cpjobling/fresh_and_crispy: Static website version of my blog (github.com) 📖 Reading My Hugo setup and how this blog works by [[Taylor Jadin]].

🗓️ Today Copied from Obsidian. ✅ Did Hosted the Hugo-generated version of my blog on GitHub pages here: cpjobling.github.io/fresh_and_crispy and set up a repo here: cpjobling/fresh_and_crispy: Static website version of my blog (github.com) 📖 Reading My Hugo setup and how this blog works by [[Taylor Jadin]].

Day 36 of the first 2020 Covid-19 Lockdown I’m a bit envious of the Covid-19 journals of my friends and colleagues Chrissi Nerantzi and Sheila MacNeill so today I thought I’d try an experiment and post my Crispy Journal entry for 28th April 2020 here in my blog. There was a bit of formatting to do to convert TiddlyWiki markup to WordPress blocks which would go away if I used MarkDown in both places.

Introduction In August 2024, I decided that I would attempt to move my old Fresh and Crispy WordPress blog to a new static website using the Hugo tool. This is a record of the process that I followed. Installing Hugo I installed Hugo by following the instructions given on the Quick Start. This is the first page that I created using hugo new content/posts/my-first-post.md This is what the new blog site looks like after this first step

It’s graduation next week, the official end of the University year and the start of the summer battery recharge. Inspired by a comment from my friend and colleague Chris Hall made at yesterday’s #SUSALT18 Conference, I thought that it was time to reactivate my blog with a few thoughts on what I want to achieve over the summer. So here, in no particular order, are the things on my todo list.

I created this page as a proof of concept using CoDog’s link extraction tool on the story that was curated by Sheila McNeil. Observations, long tweetchats like this should be edited in the Text view in WordPress. Rendering the tweets in the Visual HTML editor view is not something that the WordPress can cope with, but is probably necessary if you want to add commentary to a chat rather than a straight record.

It’s time for Bring Your Own Device for Learning 2018 (my 6th) and this year there are 5 additional C’s (Confidence, Capability, Copyright, Community and Celebrating) to add to the usual menu of Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating, and Creating. I’m probably not going to have the freedom that I had last year to contribute as much as I would like, but I will be using a new curation tool – TiddlyWiki – and its mobile editing app Quine.

[Cross posted from my Work Blog.] https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/949747428848295936 [caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“439”] Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull (photographer: James Lafayette, c. 1885–1900). Image from Wikimedia Commons as published in Hamlet (Wikipedia).[/caption] I’ve had a work blog, courtesy of my employer Swansea University, for a number of years, but rarely use it. Instead, I tend to post most often in this personal blog. So, at the start of this new year, a time for reflection and resolutions, I find myself asking myself should I keep this blog and start using it more systematically or should I abandon it?

My adventures of Domain of One’s Own with Reclaim Hosting continues. I’ve just resurrected the Dokuwiki that I used for various modules related to Internet and Communications Technology (ICCT). You’ll find this at its new home at dokuwiki.cpjobling.net. I’ve also set up a new development blog using the static-website generation tool Nikola. You’ll find Crispy Dev hosted at dev.cpjobling.net as well as on GitHub at cpjobling.github.io/dev.cpjobling.net.

This is my new blog blog.cpjobling.net which is a self-hosted wordpress.org site hosted on reclaim hosting. The original version of this blog is to be found at cpjobling.wordpress.com aliased to blog.cpjobling.me. As I have moved this blog by exporting from another WordPress site, there may be some broken links. Leave comments if you find anything.

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/943807725955301376

If the twitter hashtag (#SocMedHe17) I followed today was anything to go by, the 3rd Annual Social Media in Higher Education conference, held today at Sheffield Hallam University, was a great success. I made a twitter moment and a Storify story (plus archive) of the event, but from my remote vantage point, the highlights were: The build your own conference (or BYOC) The Lego Serious Play session (lots of ducks) David Webster and Lucy Cadbury on Saying no to fun The mince pies Sue Beckingham and Simon Horrock’s expose of University leaders who tweet The twalk.

If you take a TAGS file (I used this one: BYOD4L 2016-2017 (@cpjobling)) and sort it in time order, you can then copy column Q (status_url) and paste the data into the HTML view of a WordPress page or Post to get a similar archive to that which @Storify produces. Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit (on hosted WordPress at least) and only the first N tweets are shown (where N is to be determined).

status_url http://twitter.com/cpjobling/statuses/819294022271467520 http://twitter.com/cpjobling/statuses/819288790074327042 http://twitter.com/chrissinerantzi/statuses/819226352347967488 http://twitter.com/chrissinerantzi/statuses/819226352347967488 http://twitter.com/Oelmann_Richard/statuses/820724880865902594 http://twitter.com/hopkinsdavid/statuses/820724476665090049 http://twitter.com/sultec4/statuses/820717971056238593 http://twitter.com/cpjobling/statuses/820717926592483328 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821102368297222144 http://twitter.com/debbaff/statuses/821101825516601344 http://twitter.com/suebecks/statuses/821100912819236864 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821100893596745729 http://twitter.com/KeelyFlather/statuses/821100549370183680 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821100526758723584 http://twitter.com/crumphelen/statuses/821100490758979584 http://twitter.com/srowett/statuses/821100485805535233 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821100381392478209 http://twitter.com/RogerMickywatts/statuses/821100216342323201 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821100170733584385 http://twitter.com/cpjobling/statuses/821100063317491713 http://twitter.com/sultec4/statuses/821100063288160260 http://twitter.com/AllanGThomson/statuses/821100041733603328 http://twitter.com/neilwithnell/statuses/821100041565798401 http://twitter.com/sheilmcn/statuses/821100025220571138 http://twitter.com/crumphelen/statuses/821099960703873026 http://twitter.com/srowett/statuses/821099919897399296 http://twitter.com/neilwithnell/statuses/821099878856200192 http://twitter.com/MartinRich106/statuses/821099878411550721 http://twitter.com/lcreanor/statuses/821099803111227397 http://twitter.com/BYOD4L/statuses/821099790134112256 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821099688380289024 http://twitter.com/neilwithnell/statuses/821099619597877249 http://twitter.com/debbaff/statuses/821099599251156992 http://twitter.com/suebecks/statuses/821099595803557890 http://twitter.com/Oelmann_Richard/statuses/821099531295145984 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821099500978704384 http://twitter.com/debbaff/statuses/821099489272483840 http://twitter.com/srowett/statuses/821099391490605056 http://twitter.com/WarwickLanguage/statuses/821099365993447425 http://twitter.com/WarwickLanguage/statuses/821099337090473984 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821099328622198785 http://twitter.com/suebecks/statuses/821099316706209792 http://twitter.com/cpjobling/statuses/821099289736839170 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821099280438087684 http://twitter.com/alexgspiers/statuses/821099266441678848 http://twitter.com/WarwickLanguage/statuses/821099264235470849 http://twitter.com/debbaff/statuses/821099213048123392 http://twitter.com/crumphelen/statuses/821099209709539329 http://twitter.com/srowett/statuses/821099203409678339 http://twitter.com/WarwickLanguage/statuses/821099113399910405 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821099105338490880 http://twitter.com/BYOD4L/statuses/821098969002610688 http://twitter.com/crumphelen/statuses/821098955299844096 http://twitter.com/debbaff/statuses/821098924828164096 http://twitter.com/ARTiFactor/statuses/821098837607641088 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821098832213798912 http://twitter.com/alexgspiers/statuses/821098800467079169 http://twitter.com/WarwickLanguage/statuses/821098797812039680 http://twitter.com/suebecks/statuses/821098796948004865 http://twitter.com/neilwithnell/statuses/821098751792185344 http://twitter.com/lcreanor/statuses/821098749162307589 http://twitter.com/chasing_ling/statuses/821098713338826752 http://twitter.com/sallyburruk/statuses/821098690148442112 http://twitter.com/srowett/statuses/821098671534178304 http://twitter.com/cpjobling/statuses/821098668245786625 http://twitter.com/debbaff/statuses/821098640445992960 http://twitter.com/alexgspiers/statuses/821098603481624576 http://twitter.com/BYOD4L/statuses/821098597299224578 http://twitter.com/neilwithnell/statuses/821098546099290113 http://twitter.

Yesterday, Storify announced the retirement of its Storify service. This leaves a lot of users, including myself, with Storify stories linked into their blog sites and nowhere to host them when the service closes. Storify has provided an export feature, which can output a whole Storify store as a static HTML5 webpage, and GitHub provides a way to host static websites via its free GitHub pages feature. I, therefore, yesterday tweeted about a proof of concept trial:

Today, was day one of the 2017 ALT Winter Conference (#altc) and I was supposed to chair the 10:00 am session “The Great Sussex Podblast” to have been delivered by Pete Sparx, George Robinson and Tab Betts from Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) at the University of Sussex. Unfortunately, problems with the Conference Webcasting platform (Blackboard Collaborate Ultra) and it’s back up (Blackboard Collaborate Classic) meant that the session had to be cancelled.

Though signed up to the EdX Course in good time, I’ve only just today, already half-way through week 2, gotten around to exploring the resources and activities for Week 1 of George Siemens’ and David Wiley’s (or is the attribution the other way round) open course on an Introduction to Open Education (hashtag #OpenEdMOOC). On first viewing, the structure is interesting. The course is available as an xMOOC (with the possibility of an optional certification) on the EdX platform.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - an annual celebration of women in STEM. To mark the occasion I used Storify to make a personal curation of the tweets and blog posts that I liked on #AdaLovelaceDay 2017 (#ALD17) https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/917726864491335680

A big news story today was the QAA’s publication of advice for universities on how to combat contract cheating. I made a Twitter moment: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/917333938774913025

Important thread on work patterns in academia. https://twitter.com/neuroimm/status/917140521524645900 I recommend that you read the whole thread! Perhaps it reflects the US experience more than the UK, but I think the pendulum might be swinging this way in the UK too. One of the replies https://twitter.com/igordownunder/status/916749458016260097 prompted this response from the Times Higher’s Phil Baty https://twitter.com/phil_baty/status/917278269669560320 What do you think?

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/911917026750418947

https://flic.kr/p/Yrprxv I’ve been a teacher in engineering and technology for over 30 years. I love computing, coding, and ed tech. I spend hours on-line watching videos to increase my understanding of the technologies that I love. I love engaging with my personal learning networks, particularly #LTHEChat and #CreativeHE. I take part in MOOCs and am curious about teaching and learning and how to do it. I’m a course leader and want my students to have the best experience possible.

LTHEChat returned last night with a chat on Staff and Student “Digital” Development led by Simon Thompson (@digisim) supported by the new backroom team. There will be a Storify but I thought I would provide a personal curation of the key conversations that I engaged with or noticed during and after the chat. This is made easier by a Wordpress feature that converts the URL of a tweet into an embedded tweet.

My reciprocal post on Enthusiastic HE.

I’m going to say it: I hate maths. Well, not the sexy stuff that’s super interesting like zero, infinity, chaos, or probability but the easy stuff that ties your brain in knots when working in a shop - long division! (Still can’t do it…) Why do I hate maths? Many fears and dislikes are rooted in bad childhood experiences. My fear of maths is down to Mrs Nameless, who physically dragged me out of class on more than one occasion, calling me out in front of all my classmates and using my full name to boot - the horror!

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

I’ve decided to return to social media a bit earlier than planned. Here are two things that I thought I needed to share and brought me out if hibernation. For the first, I’ve been catching up on Bryan Alexander’s discussions in his Future Trends Forum which can be viewed on this YouTube channel. I’ve been particularly interested in the discussion with Phil Hill on ‘Towards the future Learning Msnsgement System’ and ‘The Future of Moodle’ with Martin Dougiamas.

Over the last week or so, I have found myself getting more and more depressed about the state of the world and my place in it. The constant bad news about the UK election, Brexit, Trump, and the vile responses you read when you follow a Tweet stream on any of these topics. The crisis in Higher Education, too many students, falling student satisfaction, TEF, the stress of teaching and managing teaching, the false dawn of e-learning, analytics, AI; dire warnings about so-called “Generation-Z” students and their likely impact; and the devaluation of human relationships between teachers and their students.

On Wednesday, I chaired a presentation session at Swansea University’s annual SALT conference “Reaching for Teaching Excellence” (#susalt17). In the session the three speakers all presented examples of what might be summarized as authentic assessment of students engaged in content co-creation through problem based learning. First up we had Tanya May from Modern Languages who presented “Start where you are, use what you can: an online professional portfolio in the Spanish Class.

At Wednesday’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

#LTHEchat is another ongoing twitter chat that takes place one hour every week during University term time (on Wednesdays at 8:00 UK time). The purpose is to discuss various issues around Higher Education. The event was launched by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) of Sheffield Hallam University and Chrissi Nerantzi (@chrissinerantzi) of Manchester Metropolitan University in October 2014. Since 2015/2016 the event has been organised by a rotating team of volunteers who run it for a semester.

As part of my maintaining my professional registration as a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.), I am now required to record and reflect on my CPD and have my training records for 2016 audited by the IET. This has meant going back through my calendar and trying to recall all the CPD events and activities that I was involved with for the last 18 months so that I can populate my historic data and then hopefully continue to record events in more real time thereafter.

In this article published by Turning Technologies - makers of audience response system TurningPoint, clickers and ResponseWare - Professor of Chemistry Education at the University of East Anglia and National Teaching Fellow Simon Lancaster (@S_J_lancaster) discusses how he is encouraging his colleagues to use Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to engage students in lecture theatres. Here is a video of Simon’s keynote from the 2015 Sheffield Hallam University Learning and Teaching Conference in which he expands on and demonstrates these ideas.

https://flic.kr/p/8CBBk5 As an engineer with a keen interest in software development and the web I suppose I come to “Open” with a philosophy formed from my exposure to the Open Source Software movement. I remember reading Raymond’s The Cathedral to the Bazaar, and being fascinated by Richard Stallman, the Gnu Project, and his idea of Copyleft introduced by the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL). When it came to YouTube and Flickr, making my works available via a CC-BY licence seemed the right thing to do.

Inspired by friend and colleague Debbie Baff’s “Homeless blog posts”, I’ve just had a look at my own Wordpress draft posts folder. I clearly had things that I wanted to say 3 months ago and I had a critique of HEA fellowship (still not resolved) a month ago. I also haven’t posted anything that wasn’t a tweet since March 2. Perhaps we should all share our drafts (suitably redacted) from time to time, if only to spark us to get back on the blogging-bike.

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. It’s new year. Winter seems to be coming. The students are busy. Time for some useful CPD? On Monday 16 January 2017, the five day short online course Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) starts its fifth run. Structured around the five Cs: connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating, this course aims to provide you with practical experience and ideas of how you and your students might exploit your mobile devices in your teaching to enhance your students’ learning.

In advance of the fifth run of bring your own device for learning (#BYOD4L) and inspired by Sheila McNeil’s post “#BYOD4L A story of personal and professional needs and wants”, I thought that I too would reflect on my experience of my last three #BYOD4Ls. Looking back at my Twitter Archive, I find that my first #BYOD4L contribution was a retweet on 14th July 2014: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/488631919609790466 I’m struggling to find any blog posts from what was then the 2nd run of #BYOD4L (the first looks to have been in January 2014) so I probably only engaged via Twitter and Google+.

Kate Soper reflects on her team’s year of introducing new ideas for technology enhanced learning 1 minute at a time. Source: A magic minute? Reflections on a year of 1minuteCPD

My contribution to #101 Creative Ideas

Back in January for its fifth run is the excellent Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) online CPD-fest. Covering the 5Cs, Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating and Creating, this “course” aims to share great ideas and build communities. Concentrating on portable educational technology that you can use with yourself, your colleagues and your students, you’re guaranteed to discover something that will enable you and them to be more effective. And at the same time you’ll find yourself becoming part of a growing community of like-minded souls.

The Learning Enhancement and Development team at City University London (@CityUniLEaD]) is publishing a learning enhancement and development suggestion every day up until Christmas using the twitter hashtag #eventcityunilead. https://twitter.com/CityUniLEaD/status/804032901348261888 Here they are, automatically updated as they are published: [twitter-timeline id=806119016851013633]

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804293517493338112 I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804296889629872128 In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

An unexpected consequence of moving from my self-hosted WordPress blog to WordPress.com was that my embedded Storifys stopped working, I lost some images, and several mysterious links to twitter javascript had appeared. A few minutes with the documentation confirmed what I guessed to be true that WordPress.com (for good security reasons) doesn’t allow arbitrary embedded HTML and JavaScripts to be included in posts and pages delivered from the hosted service.

It’s the first of December and in the Learning Technology world this means the launch of multiple open courses promising to introduce busy academics to 12 Apps of Christmas. I’m enrolled on the Regent’s University of London course which is being hosted on the Blackboard Open Courses platform. I’m recommending 12 Apps of Christmas to my colleagues for two reasons. Firstly because it provides useful introductions to mobile apps that they can use with students.

This blog was self-hosted on digital ocean until today. Unfortunately, issues with the database was preventing the blog appearing for some of my readers and I don’t have time at the moment to be a Sysadmin and trace the fault. Rebooting the server when I notice it’s down is not a solution either. So, I’ve forked out the £30 a year to have a site with a custom domain hosted on Wordpress.

There are some interesting events coming up over the next two months. In Swansea, the library team will again be running 7 Days of Twitter #SU7DoT. This time over the period 2nd-12th December. See the announcement and sign up here!. The team at Regent’s University London will again be running 12 Apps of Christmas (#12AoC) starting on 1st December on the Blackboard Open Learning Platform. They won’t be alone! The Association for Learning Technology will be running the third ALT Winter Conference (#altc) online from 6-8 December.

Today I had a short Twitter Conversation with James Clay which followed this tweet from JISC’s #codesign16 meeting: https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793745542572601344 I replied: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793760715882500097 https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793762172715331584 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793763365575389184 https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793765277976649728 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793866758419537920 James has also blogged about this in I know Where You Are and is following up in this JISC blog post “What does the imminent arrival of the intelligent campus mean for you and your students.” What do you think? James has published more of the discussion of the intelligent campus from #codesign16 in this storyfy.

I attended the first run of FutureLearn MOOC #FLble1 Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started last year. Because of other commitments, I couldn’t take part in the first run of the second part #FLble2 Blended Learning Essentials: Embedding Practice but it looks like I have another chance in the re-run that starts 3 October. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/778548535130226688 Highly recommended! If you missed it, the team leaders Diana Laurillard and Neil Morris gave a talk on the Blended Learning Essentials courses on Future Learn at the 2016 Alt Conference.

Fresh and Crispy has been running as a self-hosted Ghost blog for a couple of years now but today I moved it back over to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. One of the main reasons for the move is that upgrading the Ghost software is a painfully slow manual process. Other reasons include my desire to try technologies like Mike Caulfield’s Wikity which needs a Wordpress multi-site and the sheer convenience of being able to blog from the Wordpress App.

View the story “Tony Hirst on Data Wrangling” on Storify

Introduction In August 2024, I decided that I would attempt to move my old Fresh and Crispy WordPress blog to a new static website using the Hugo tool. This is a record of the process that I followed. Installing Hugo I installed Hugo by following the instructions given on the Quick Start. This is the first page that I created using hugo new content/posts/my-first-post.md This is what the new blog site looks like after this first step

Hugo is a static web generator written in Go. I’m thinking of exporting this WordPress site to Hugo so that all the posts, pages and assets are text, easily version controlled and ready for writing as I transition from academia to private life. I’ll keep notes on the process and post them in the new Hugo site.

If Johnson wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the Lights. Mashup based on Sun splash from polling day 1992 I am old enough to remember the Sun newspaper’s 1992 splash “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights” published on polling day for the 1992 General election. They repeated the same trick, and the same headline, with Ed Milliband in 2015.

Yesterday, I received my copy of Martin Weller’s book 25 Years of Ed Tech. Inspired by Chapter 2 The Web (1995), I travelled back in time to my own first attempt to teach online. I visited the Way Back Machine (web.archive.org) to discover that the first official University website (www.swan.ac.uk) was archived on 11th December 1997. Navigating through that web site, I discovered that the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering website (which I built) was archived a few months earlier.

Yesterday, I received my copy of Martin Weller’s book 25 Years of Ed Tech. Inspired by Chapter 2 The Web (1995), I travelled back in time to my own first attempt to teach online. I visited the Way Back Machine (web.archive.org) to discover that the first official University website (www.swan.ac.uk) was archived on 11th December 1997. Navigating through that web site, I discovered that the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering website (which I built) was archived a few months earlier.

On Monday I attended the launch and first public lecture of the Swansea University’s centenary celebration Swansea 2020 and the launch of the Centenary Essays site. At the lecture, Sam Blaxland, the historian appointed by the University to write the history of the University’s first 100 years, gave us an excellent overview of the highlights of that centenary and how he went about writing the book which will be released in June.

Yesterday, I received my copy of Martin Weller’s book 25 Years of Ed Tech. Inspired by Chapter 2 The Web (1995), I travelled back in time to my own first attempt to teach online. I visited the Way Back Machine (web.archive.org) to discover that the first official University website (www.swan.ac.uk) was archived on 11th December 1997. Navigating through that web site, I discovered that the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering website (which I built) was archived a few months earlier.

{{ < figure src=“2020-07-09_09-18-07.png” title=“SALT Conference 2020” title=“Conference logo” >}} Yesterday was the 12th Annual conference of the Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching (SALT) which, due to circumstances, had to be held on line. I attended but didn’t present but as usual I came away with a head full of ideas and links to follow up on. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1280789564794208256 The highlights for me were the session on formative feedback by Monika Seisenberger and Teaching Award winner Liam O’Brien from Computer Science; the Coffee Lounge where I met up with folks for the first time since March; the talk on aligning our Canvas tools to the future of assessment with Instructure’s Jonathan Perry (beamed live from Britains most boring town and Birthplace of Margaret Thatcher Grantham, Lincs.

News of several useful Advance HE guides arrived in my email inbox today curtesy of Stuart Norton of the Learning and Teaching Network of Advance HE Connect. Flexible learning comes of age. Transforming Assessment in Higher Education – if not now…? Assessment: the Game. Student-staff partnership comes of age. Launch of Internationalising Higher Education Framework Guide.

News of several useful Advance HE guides arrived in my email inbox today curtesy of Stuart Norton of the Learning and Teaching Network of Advance HE Connect. Flexible learning comes of age. Transforming Assessment in Higher Education – if not now…? Assessment: the Game. Student-staff partnership comes of age. Launch of Internationalising Higher Education Framework Guide.

I created this page as a proof of concept using CoDog’s link extraction tool on the story that was curated by Sheila McNeil. Observations, long tweetchats like this should be edited in the Text view in WordPress. Rendering the tweets in the Visual HTML editor view is not something that the WordPress can cope with, but is probably necessary if you want to add commentary to a chat rather than a straight record.

News of several useful Advance HE guides arrived in my email inbox today curtesy of Stuart Norton of the Learning and Teaching Network of Advance HE Connect. Flexible learning comes of age. Transforming Assessment in Higher Education – if not now…? Assessment: the Game. Student-staff partnership comes of age. Launch of Internationalising Higher Education Framework Guide.

Shall we Zoom? by Chris Jobling 19 May 2020 CC BY ND Inspired by Brian Mathers here’s a little sketch I made about my daily reality. I seem to spend my entire day on (or is it in?) Zoom – meetings, working groups, office hours , examples classes and even social events. Meanwhile my grey beard grows and I turn into a caricature of a mad professor. What’s your day-to-day like?

Day 36 of the first 2020 Covid-19 Lockdown I’m a bit envious of the Covid-19 journals of my friends and colleagues Chrissi Nerantzi and Sheila MacNeill so today I thought I’d try an experiment and post my Crispy Journal entry for 28th April 2020 here in my blog. There was a bit of formatting to do to convert TiddlyWiki markup to WordPress blocks which would go away if I used MarkDown in both places.

In this time when personal contact with our students is so important I have to comment: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1245441295314833411

Shall we Zoom? by Chris Jobling 19 May 2020 CC BY ND Inspired by Brian Mathers here’s a little sketch I made about my daily reality. I seem to spend my entire day on (or is it in?) Zoom – meetings, working groups, office hours , examples classes and even social events. Meanwhile my grey beard grows and I turn into a caricature of a mad professor. What’s your day-to-day like?

Shall we Zoom? by Chris Jobling 19 May 2020 CC BY ND Inspired by Brian Mathers here’s a little sketch I made about my daily reality. I seem to spend my entire day on (or is it in?) Zoom – meetings, working groups, office hours , examples classes and even social events. Meanwhile my grey beard grows and I turn into a caricature of a mad professor. What’s your day-to-day like?

Renate and I walked to the Swansea Central library today and on our way back we were fortunate enough to see the start of the Swansea 10k run. I hope everyone had a good time.

Shall we Zoom? by Chris Jobling 19 May 2020 CC BY ND Inspired by Brian Mathers here’s a little sketch I made about my daily reality. I seem to spend my entire day on (or is it in?) Zoom – meetings, working groups, office hours , examples classes and even social events. Meanwhile my grey beard grows and I turn into a caricature of a mad professor. What’s your day-to-day like?

Shall we Zoom? by Chris Jobling 19 May 2020 CC BY ND Inspired by Brian Mathers here’s a little sketch I made about my daily reality. I seem to spend my entire day on (or is it in?) Zoom – meetings, working groups, office hours , examples classes and even social events. Meanwhile my grey beard grows and I turn into a caricature of a mad professor. What’s your day-to-day like?

Day 36 of the first 2020 Covid-19 Lockdown I’m a bit envious of the Covid-19 journals of my friends and colleagues Chrissi Nerantzi and Sheila MacNeill so today I thought I’d try an experiment and post my Crispy Journal entry for 28th April 2020 here in my blog. There was a bit of formatting to do to convert TiddlyWiki markup to WordPress blocks which would go away if I used MarkDown in both places.

In this time when personal contact with our students is so important I have to comment: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/1245441295314833411

On Monday I attended the launch and first public lecture of the Swansea University’s centenary celebration Swansea 2020 and the launch of the Centenary Essays site. At the lecture, Sam Blaxland, the historian appointed by the University to write the history of the University’s first 100 years, gave us an excellent overview of the highlights of that centenary and how he went about writing the book which will be released in June.

If you take a TAGS file (I used this one: BYOD4L 2016-2017 (@cpjobling)) and sort it in time order, you can then copy column Q (status_url) and paste the data into the HTML view of a WordPress page or Post to get a similar archive to that which @Storify produces. Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit (on hosted WordPress at least) and only the first N tweets are shown (where N is to be determined).

LTHEChat returned last night with a chat on Staff and Student “Digital” Development led by Simon Thompson (@digisim) supported by the new backroom team. There will be a Storify but I thought I would provide a personal curation of the key conversations that I engaged with or noticed during and after the chat. This is made easier by a Wordpress feature that converts the URL of a tweet into an embedded tweet.

#LTHEchat is another ongoing twitter chat that takes place one hour every week during University term time (on Wednesdays at 8:00 UK time). The purpose is to discuss various issues around Higher Education. The event was launched by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) of Sheffield Hallam University and Chrissi Nerantzi (@chrissinerantzi) of Manchester Metropolitan University in October 2014. Since 2015/2016 the event has been organised by a rotating team of volunteers who run it for a semester.

Another record breaking #LTHEChat was hosted on Wednesday 16th November by @digisim Simon Thomson. The Storify was curated by @ladyculottes Haley Atkinson who had to slim down the 1500 or so tweets, side conversations and spam posts to extract the essential essence. View the story “#LTHEchat 68: What motivates us to use digital tools for learning and teaching?” on Storify Once you’ve read the story, you may like to answer this question in the comments.

As part of our preparation for our presentation for Social Media in Higher Education in December (#SocMedHE16), the team is looking at various ways to assess the impact of the weekly #LTHEchat. As part of this, I agreed to attempt to record a flavour of the excitement of the event by capturing snapshots of the growth of the network over a twenty-four hour period using Martin Hawksey’s TAGSExplorer which generated this visualisation, and Jing.

In last night’s #LTHEChat Phil Race (@RacePhil) led us on a reflection of the feedback we’ve received and given. Here are the questions and my answers: https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788817007659581441 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788818629404098560 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788819039263006721 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788819507380940800 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788820192050683910 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788822024743481344 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788822427048484867 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788823821612617728 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788824542361845760 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788825059842519045 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788827056427544576 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788829575031554049 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788830337245806592 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788830868500602881 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788831912584437762 All in all https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788832543726526464 The storify has already been published: #LTHEChat 65: Feedback and feed-forward: language and timing.

This Wednesday’s #LTHEChat was the first of this new semester’s joint monthly get togethers with the Higher Education Academy (HEA). The topic was connection for student retention (or student resilience as Vincent Tinto prefers to call “retention” which he regards as an institutionally focused word). As usual there was a lot of useful sharing. Here’s the Storify: Connection for Retention- building effective learning relationships. Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017

Robert Dragan (@robert_dragan) and Dawn Alderson (@dawn_alderson) led a very lively tweet chat yesterday on Assessment and Student Engagement. Despite Twitter itself playing up, colleagues discussed the following six thought provoking questions and you can read the full record that was captured in Storify. Here is the TAGSExplorer visualisation. https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778670656112070656 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778672665867325440 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778675169724211201 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778677683383263232 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778680210598141953 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778682731790118912 Assessment is definately on my agenda at the moment, and I’ll need some time to reflect on my own thoughts on this topic.

I am humbled at being made the 5th recipient of the prestigious #LTHEChat Golden Tweeter Award for [my] continuous commitment, valuable contributions and creative energy to the weekly LTHEchat as both a member of the community and as a volunteer member in two organising teams, from January to June 2016. My thanks to the LTHEChat community for this recognition! Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 2 #LTHEChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 1, 2017

View the story “#HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016” on Storify Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017 […] It looks like I made a story for this one: See Unofficial Storify of #HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016. […]

https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/696754703535902726 My first job will be to create the Storify for LTHEchat 45 (the first bilingual LTHEchat) which has guest facilitator Julie Tardy (@jtardy81). It takes place at 8:00 pm GMT on Wednesday 10th February. Looking forward to it. If you want to join me, these instructions may be helpful. https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/526634954630131712 Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 2 #LTHEChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 1, 2017 […] 8th February, I join the team.

Because I couldn’t attend last Wednesday’s LTHEchat on using music creatively to enhance non-music teaching faciliated by Chris Wiley (@chris_wiley) I made a Storify of it. View the story “#LTHEchat No 44 : Using music creatively to enhance non-music teaching” on Storify There’s also an official Storify story published on the LTHEchat blog.

On Monday I attended the launch and first public lecture of the Swansea University’s centenary celebration Swansea 2020 and the launch of the Centenary Essays site. At the lecture, Sam Blaxland, the historian appointed by the University to write the history of the University’s first 100 years, gave us an excellent overview of the highlights of that centenary and how he went about writing the book which will be released in June.

See also: Social Media Strike! — FAQ about the project to decentralize social media — Resources Humanity has been contemptuously used by vast digital empires. Thus it is now necessary to replace these empires with decentralized networks of independent individuals, as in the first decades of the Internet. As our participation has been voluntary, no one doubts our right to take this step. But if we are to persuade as many people as possible to join together and make reformed networks possible, we should declare our reasons for wanting to replace the old.

Microsoft has recently released the iOS version of its new Whiteboard app and I recorded this quick video to give my first impressions. There is certainly already sufficient functionality here for me to want to use it in my classes. https://youtu.be/23XokK95DAo The features that I like are: Infinite size canvas – like in OneNote. Ruler for drawing straight lines at various angles. Ink to shape. Share to OneNote (as an image).

In honour of the silver jubilee of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), ALT Conference 2018 Co-Chair Martin Weller has been compiling a personal history of the development of Educational Technology (Ed Tech) covering the years 1993 to the present. The final episode, 2018 Critical Ed Tech was published yesterday. Ranging from AI, through the web, eLearning, MOOCs, back to AI and on to blockchain – like Lasers in the 60s, surely a technology looking for an application – it’s an entertaining look at all the disrupting technologies that somehow failed to disrupt education.

In honour of the silver jubilee of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), ALT Conference 2018 Co-Chair Martin Weller has been compiling a personal history of the development of Educational Technology (Ed Tech) covering the years 1993 to the present. The final episode, 2018 Critical Ed Tech was published yesterday. Ranging from AI, through the web, eLearning, MOOCs, back to AI and on to blockchain – like Lasers in the 60s, surely a technology looking for an application – it’s an entertaining look at all the disrupting technologies that somehow failed to disrupt education.

In honour of the silver jubilee of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), ALT Conference 2018 Co-Chair Martin Weller has been compiling a personal history of the development of Educational Technology (Ed Tech) covering the years 1993 to the present. The final episode, 2018 Critical Ed Tech was published yesterday. Ranging from AI, through the web, eLearning, MOOCs, back to AI and on to blockchain – like Lasers in the 60s, surely a technology looking for an application – it’s an entertaining look at all the disrupting technologies that somehow failed to disrupt education.

This just seen on Twitter. A great resource from @teachermarija on using OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook in the classroom distributed as a OneNote notebook. https://twitter.com/mtholfsen/status/1029902658134454272

This just seen on Twitter. A great resource from @teachermarija on using OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook in the classroom distributed as a OneNote notebook. https://twitter.com/mtholfsen/status/1029902658134454272

Last month I started this sequence of posts on using OneNote Class Notebook as a VLE by posting a simple 3-question survey using Microsoft forms. There have been four submissions (one was mine), so please have a go if you want to improve these results. Here are the results. 1. Do you use a VLE? 100% of those who took the survey said yes! 2. What kinds of content do you deliver through your VLE?

At last year’s SALT conference (#SUSALT17), I ran a session on using the OneNote Class Notebook (ONCN) with the same title as this post. The title, of course, was meant to be provocative, but having used the OneNote Class Notebook for three years now, I believe that it has great potential, is getting a lot of love from Microsoft, and deserves to be more widely known. In this series of posts, I will attempt to open up my 2017 talk to a wider audience and bring in a discussion of Teams for Education, demonstrate the new ONCN plugin for Blackboard, and showcase my own use of ONCN in teaching.

This just seen on Twitter. A great resource from @teachermarija on using OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook in the classroom distributed as a OneNote notebook. https://twitter.com/mtholfsen/status/1029902658134454272

This just seen on Twitter. A great resource from @teachermarija on using OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook in the classroom distributed as a OneNote notebook. https://twitter.com/mtholfsen/status/1029902658134454272

This just seen on Twitter. A great resource from @teachermarija on using OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook in the classroom distributed as a OneNote notebook. https://twitter.com/mtholfsen/status/1029902658134454272

This just seen on Twitter. A great resource from @teachermarija on using OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook in the classroom distributed as a OneNote notebook. https://twitter.com/mtholfsen/status/1029902658134454272

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. For those who couldn’t make the 10th SALT conference held at the Bay Campus, here is a Wakelet I made of the tweets from the event. If you want to learn more about Wakelets and how to make them, the new way to curate social media posts and create stories using @wakelet by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) is an excellent introduction. Comments: Diwrnod 4 #SU5DoT: Hashnodau – su5dot - May 4, 2019

I created this page as a proof of concept using CoDog’s link extraction tool on the story that was curated by Sheila McNeil. Observations, long tweetchats like this should be edited in the Text view in WordPress. Rendering the tweets in the Visual HTML editor view is not something that the WordPress can cope with, but is probably necessary if you want to add commentary to a chat rather than a straight record.

A big news story today was the QAA’s publication of advice for universities on how to combat contract cheating. I made a Twitter moment: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/917333938774913025

Important thread on work patterns in academia. https://twitter.com/neuroimm/status/917140521524645900 I recommend that you read the whole thread! Perhaps it reflects the US experience more than the UK, but I think the pendulum might be swinging this way in the UK too. One of the replies https://twitter.com/igordownunder/status/916749458016260097 prompted this response from the Times Higher’s Phil Baty https://twitter.com/phil_baty/status/917278269669560320 What do you think?

On Friday I stumbled across #GuildChat which was discussing the Learning Management System (LMS) or what we in the UK call the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As a long-time participant in Wednesday’s #LTHEchat (@LTHEchat) I expected the chat to be “storified”, but as it wasn’t, I’ve taken the liberty of making my own record. Here it is. View the story “#GuildChat Readdress the LMS” on Storify About #GuildChat and #LTHEchat #GuildChat is a weekly Tweet Chat hosted by the eLearning Guild (@eLearningGuild)– a US membership organization that seems similar to the UK’s Association for Learning Technology (@A_L_T).

View the story “#HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016” on Storify Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017 […] It looks like I made a story for this one: See Unofficial Storify of #HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016. […]

It’s graduation next week, the official end of the University year and the start of the summer battery recharge. Inspired by a comment from my friend and colleague Chris Hall made at yesterday’s #SUSALT18 Conference, I thought that it was time to reactivate my blog with a few thoughts on what I want to achieve over the summer. So here, in no particular order, are the things on my todo list.

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. For those who couldn’t make the 10th SALT conference held at the Bay Campus, here is a Wakelet I made of the tweets from the event. If you want to learn more about Wakelets and how to make them, the new way to curate social media posts and create stories using @wakelet by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) is an excellent introduction. Comments: Diwrnod 4 #SU5DoT: Hashnodau – su5dot - May 4, 2019

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. For those who couldn’t make the 10th SALT conference held at the Bay Campus, here is a Wakelet I made of the tweets from the event. If you want to learn more about Wakelets and how to make them, the new way to curate social media posts and create stories using @wakelet by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) is an excellent introduction. Comments: Diwrnod 4 #SU5DoT: Hashnodau – su5dot - May 4, 2019

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. For those who couldn’t make the 10th SALT conference held at the Bay Campus, here is a Wakelet I made of the tweets from the event. If you want to learn more about Wakelets and how to make them, the new way to curate social media posts and create stories using @wakelet by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) is an excellent introduction. Comments: Diwrnod 4 #SU5DoT: Hashnodau – su5dot - May 4, 2019

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. For those who couldn’t make the 10th SALT conference held at the Bay Campus, here is a Wakelet I made of the tweets from the event. If you want to learn more about Wakelets and how to make them, the new way to curate social media posts and create stories using @wakelet by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) is an excellent introduction. Comments: Diwrnod 4 #SU5DoT: Hashnodau – su5dot - May 4, 2019

Renate and I walked to the Swansea Central library today and on our way back we were fortunate enough to see the start of the Swansea 10k run. I hope everyone had a good time.

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. For those who couldn’t make the 10th SALT conference held at the Bay Campus, here is a Wakelet I made of the tweets from the event. If you want to learn more about Wakelets and how to make them, the new way to curate social media posts and create stories using @wakelet by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) is an excellent introduction. Comments: Diwrnod 4 #SU5DoT: Hashnodau – su5dot - May 4, 2019

So the January 2018 run of Bring Your Own Device for Learning (BYOD4L) is over! Thanks to the team, Sheila McNeil, Alex Spiers, Neil Withnell, Debbie Baff, and Suzanne Faulkner for their expert guidance! I didn’t do the tasks, but I did do a fair amount of connecting, communicating and curating this time. My TiddlyWiki record of #BYOD4L 2018 is byod4l.cpjobling.net. It’s one HTML page (index.html) which you can copy by pressing the save button.

I created this page as a proof of concept using CoDog’s link extraction tool on the story that was curated by Sheila McNeil. Observations, long tweetchats like this should be edited in the Text view in WordPress. Rendering the tweets in the Visual HTML editor view is not something that the WordPress can cope with, but is probably necessary if you want to add commentary to a chat rather than a straight record.

It’s time for Bring Your Own Device for Learning 2018 (my 6th) and this year there are 5 additional C’s (Confidence, Capability, Copyright, Community and Celebrating) to add to the usual menu of Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating, and Creating. I’m probably not going to have the freedom that I had last year to contribute as much as I would like, but I will be using a new curation tool – TiddlyWiki – and its mobile editing app Quine.

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. It’s new year. Winter seems to be coming. The students are busy. Time for some useful CPD? On Monday 16 January 2017, the five day short online course Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) starts its fifth run. Structured around the five Cs: connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating, this course aims to provide you with practical experience and ideas of how you and your students might exploit your mobile devices in your teaching to enhance your students’ learning.

In advance of the fifth run of bring your own device for learning (#BYOD4L) and inspired by Sheila McNeil’s post “#BYOD4L A story of personal and professional needs and wants”, I thought that I too would reflect on my experience of my last three #BYOD4Ls. Looking back at my Twitter Archive, I find that my first #BYOD4L contribution was a retweet on 14th July 2014: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/488631919609790466 I’m struggling to find any blog posts from what was then the 2nd run of #BYOD4L (the first looks to have been in January 2014) so I probably only engaged via Twitter and Google+.

Back in January for its fifth run is the excellent Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) online CPD-fest. Covering the 5Cs, Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating and Creating, this “course” aims to share great ideas and build communities. Concentrating on portable educational technology that you can use with yourself, your colleagues and your students, you’re guaranteed to discover something that will enable you and them to be more effective. And at the same time you’ll find yourself becoming part of a growing community of like-minded souls.

I created this page as a proof of concept using CoDog’s link extraction tool on the story that was curated by Sheila McNeil. Observations, long tweetchats like this should be edited in the Text view in WordPress. Rendering the tweets in the Visual HTML editor view is not something that the WordPress can cope with, but is probably necessary if you want to add commentary to a chat rather than a straight record.

I created this page as a proof of concept using CoDog’s link extraction tool on the story that was curated by Sheila McNeil. Observations, long tweetchats like this should be edited in the Text view in WordPress. Rendering the tweets in the Visual HTML editor view is not something that the WordPress can cope with, but is probably necessary if you want to add commentary to a chat rather than a straight record.

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/943807725955301376

If you take a TAGS file (I used this one: BYOD4L 2016-2017 (@cpjobling)) and sort it in time order, you can then copy column Q (status_url) and paste the data into the HTML view of a WordPress page or Post to get a similar archive to that which @Storify produces. Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit (on hosted WordPress at least) and only the first N tweets are shown (where N is to be determined).

Yesterday, Storify announced the retirement of its Storify service. This leaves a lot of users, including myself, with Storify stories linked into their blog sites and nowhere to host them when the service closes. Storify has provided an export feature, which can output a whole Storify store as a static HTML5 webpage, and GitHub provides a way to host static websites via its free GitHub pages feature. I, therefore, yesterday tweeted about a proof of concept trial:

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - an annual celebration of women in STEM. To mark the occasion I used Storify to make a personal curation of the tweets and blog posts that I liked on #AdaLovelaceDay 2017 (#ALD17) https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/917726864491335680

As part of our preparation for our presentation for Social Media in Higher Education in December (#SocMedHE16), the team is looking at various ways to assess the impact of the weekly #LTHEchat. As part of this, I agreed to attempt to record a flavour of the excitement of the event by capturing snapshots of the growth of the network over a twenty-four hour period using Martin Hawksey’s TAGSExplorer which generated this visualisation, and Jing.

View the story “#HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016” on Storify Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017 […] It looks like I made a story for this one: See Unofficial Storify of #HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016. […]

I created this page as a proof of concept using CoDog’s link extraction tool on the story that was curated by Sheila McNeil. Observations, long tweetchats like this should be edited in the Text view in WordPress. Rendering the tweets in the Visual HTML editor view is not something that the WordPress can cope with, but is probably necessary if you want to add commentary to a chat rather than a straight record.

If you take a TAGS file (I used this one: BYOD4L 2016-2017 (@cpjobling)) and sort it in time order, you can then copy column Q (status_url) and paste the data into the HTML view of a WordPress page or Post to get a similar archive to that which @Storify produces. Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit (on hosted WordPress at least) and only the first N tweets are shown (where N is to be determined).

It’s time for Bring Your Own Device for Learning 2018 (my 6th) and this year there are 5 additional C’s (Confidence, Capability, Copyright, Community and Celebrating) to add to the usual menu of Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating, and Creating. I’m probably not going to have the freedom that I had last year to contribute as much as I would like, but I will be using a new curation tool – TiddlyWiki – and its mobile editing app Quine.

It’s time for Bring Your Own Device for Learning 2018 (my 6th) and this year there are 5 additional C’s (Confidence, Capability, Copyright, Community and Celebrating) to add to the usual menu of Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating, and Creating. I’m probably not going to have the freedom that I had last year to contribute as much as I would like, but I will be using a new curation tool – TiddlyWiki – and its mobile editing app Quine.

It’s time for Bring Your Own Device for Learning 2018 (my 6th) and this year there are 5 additional C’s (Confidence, Capability, Copyright, Community and Celebrating) to add to the usual menu of Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating, and Creating. I’m probably not going to have the freedom that I had last year to contribute as much as I would like, but I will be using a new curation tool – TiddlyWiki – and its mobile editing app Quine.

[Cross posted from my Work Blog.] https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/949747428848295936 [caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“439”] Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull (photographer: James Lafayette, c. 1885–1900). Image from Wikimedia Commons as published in Hamlet (Wikipedia).[/caption] I’ve had a work blog, courtesy of my employer Swansea University, for a number of years, but rarely use it. Instead, I tend to post most often in this personal blog. So, at the start of this new year, a time for reflection and resolutions, I find myself asking myself should I keep this blog and start using it more systematically or should I abandon it?

Fresh and Crispy has been running as a self-hosted Ghost blog for a couple of years now but today I moved it back over to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. One of the main reasons for the move is that upgrading the Ghost software is a painfully slow manual process. Other reasons include my desire to try technologies like Mike Caulfield’s Wikity which needs a Wordpress multi-site and the sheer convenience of being able to blog from the Wordpress App.

[Cross posted from my Work Blog.] https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/949747428848295936 [caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“439”] Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull (photographer: James Lafayette, c. 1885–1900). Image from Wikimedia Commons as published in Hamlet (Wikipedia).[/caption] I’ve had a work blog, courtesy of my employer Swansea University, for a number of years, but rarely use it. Instead, I tend to post most often in this personal blog. So, at the start of this new year, a time for reflection and resolutions, I find myself asking myself should I keep this blog and start using it more systematically or should I abandon it?

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

On Wednesday, I chaired a presentation session at Swansea University’s annual SALT conference “Reaching for Teaching Excellence” (#susalt17). In the session the three speakers all presented examples of what might be summarized as authentic assessment of students engaged in content co-creation through problem based learning. First up we had Tanya May from Modern Languages who presented “Start where you are, use what you can: an online professional portfolio in the Spanish Class.

At Wednesday’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

https://flic.kr/p/8CBBk5 As an engineer with a keen interest in software development and the web I suppose I come to “Open” with a philosophy formed from my exposure to the Open Source Software movement. I remember reading Raymond’s The Cathedral to the Bazaar, and being fascinated by Richard Stallman, the Gnu Project, and his idea of Copyleft introduced by the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL). When it came to YouTube and Flickr, making my works available via a CC-BY licence seemed the right thing to do.

Inspired by friend and colleague Debbie Baff’s “Homeless blog posts”, I’ve just had a look at my own Wordpress draft posts folder. I clearly had things that I wanted to say 3 months ago and I had a critique of HEA fellowship (still not resolved) a month ago. I also haven’t posted anything that wasn’t a tweet since March 2. Perhaps we should all share our drafts (suitably redacted) from time to time, if only to spark us to get back on the blogging-bike.

In advance of the fifth run of bring your own device for learning (#BYOD4L) and inspired by Sheila McNeil’s post “#BYOD4L A story of personal and professional needs and wants”, I thought that I too would reflect on my experience of my last three #BYOD4Ls. Looking back at my Twitter Archive, I find that my first #BYOD4L contribution was a retweet on 14th July 2014: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/488631919609790466 I’m struggling to find any blog posts from what was then the 2nd run of #BYOD4L (the first looks to have been in January 2014) so I probably only engaged via Twitter and Google+.

In last night’s #LTHEChat Phil Race (@RacePhil) led us on a reflection of the feedback we’ve received and given. Here are the questions and my answers: https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788817007659581441 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788818629404098560 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788819039263006721 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788819507380940800 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788820192050683910 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788822024743481344 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788822427048484867 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788823821612617728 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788824542361845760 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788825059842519045 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788827056427544576 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/788829575031554049 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788830337245806592 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788830868500602881 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788831912584437762 All in all https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/788832543726526464 The storify has already been published: #LTHEChat 65: Feedback and feed-forward: language and timing.

My adventures of Domain of One’s Own with Reclaim Hosting continues. I’ve just resurrected the Dokuwiki that I used for various modules related to Internet and Communications Technology (ICCT). You’ll find this at its new home at dokuwiki.cpjobling.net. I’ve also set up a new development blog using the static-website generation tool Nikola. You’ll find Crispy Dev hosted at dev.cpjobling.net as well as on GitHub at cpjobling.github.io/dev.cpjobling.net.

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/943807725955301376

If the twitter hashtag (#SocMedHe17) I followed today was anything to go by, the 3rd Annual Social Media in Higher Education conference, held today at Sheffield Hallam University, was a great success. I made a twitter moment and a Storify story (plus archive) of the event, but from my remote vantage point, the highlights were: The build your own conference (or BYOC) The Lego Serious Play session (lots of ducks) David Webster and Lucy Cadbury on Saying no to fun The mince pies Sue Beckingham and Simon Horrock’s expose of University leaders who tweet The twalk.

As part of our preparation for our presentation for Social Media in Higher Education in December (#SocMedHE16), the team is looking at various ways to assess the impact of the weekly #LTHEchat. As part of this, I agreed to attempt to record a flavour of the excitement of the event by capturing snapshots of the growth of the network over a twenty-four hour period using Martin Hawksey’s TAGSExplorer which generated this visualisation, and Jing.

If the twitter hashtag (#SocMedHe17) I followed today was anything to go by, the 3rd Annual Social Media in Higher Education conference, held today at Sheffield Hallam University, was a great success. I made a twitter moment and a Storify story (plus archive) of the event, but from my remote vantage point, the highlights were: The build your own conference (or BYOC) The Lego Serious Play session (lots of ducks) David Webster and Lucy Cadbury on Saying no to fun The mince pies Sue Beckingham and Simon Horrock’s expose of University leaders who tweet The twalk.

If you take a TAGS file (I used this one: BYOD4L 2016-2017 (@cpjobling)) and sort it in time order, you can then copy column Q (status_url) and paste the data into the HTML view of a WordPress page or Post to get a similar archive to that which @Storify produces. Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit (on hosted WordPress at least) and only the first N tweets are shown (where N is to be determined).

If you take a TAGS file (I used this one: BYOD4L 2016-2017 (@cpjobling)) and sort it in time order, you can then copy column Q (status_url) and paste the data into the HTML view of a WordPress page or Post to get a similar archive to that which @Storify produces. Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit (on hosted WordPress at least) and only the first N tweets are shown (where N is to be determined).

Today, was day one of the 2017 ALT Winter Conference (#altc) and I was supposed to chair the 10:00 am session “The Great Sussex Podblast” to have been delivered by Pete Sparx, George Robinson and Tab Betts from Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) at the University of Sussex. Unfortunately, problems with the Conference Webcasting platform (Blackboard Collaborate Ultra) and it’s back up (Blackboard Collaborate Classic) meant that the session had to be cancelled.

Today, was day one of the 2017 ALT Winter Conference (#altc) and I was supposed to chair the 10:00 am session “The Great Sussex Podblast” to have been delivered by Pete Sparx, George Robinson and Tab Betts from Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) at the University of Sussex. Unfortunately, problems with the Conference Webcasting platform (Blackboard Collaborate Ultra) and it’s back up (Blackboard Collaborate Classic) meant that the session had to be cancelled.

Though signed up to the EdX Course in good time, I’ve only just today, already half-way through week 2, gotten around to exploring the resources and activities for Week 1 of George Siemens’ and David Wiley’s (or is the attribution the other way round) open course on an Introduction to Open Education (hashtag #OpenEdMOOC). On first viewing, the structure is interesting. The course is available as an xMOOC (with the possibility of an optional certification) on the EdX platform.

#LTHEchat is another ongoing twitter chat that takes place one hour every week during University term time (on Wednesdays at 8:00 UK time). The purpose is to discuss various issues around Higher Education. The event was launched by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) of Sheffield Hallam University and Chrissi Nerantzi (@chrissinerantzi) of Manchester Metropolitan University in October 2014. Since 2015/2016 the event has been organised by a rotating team of volunteers who run it for a semester.

As part of my maintaining my professional registration as a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.), I am now required to record and reflect on my CPD and have my training records for 2016 audited by the IET. This has meant going back through my calendar and trying to recall all the CPD events and activities that I was involved with for the last 18 months so that I can populate my historic data and then hopefully continue to record events in more real time thereafter.

In this article published by Turning Technologies - makers of audience response system TurningPoint, clickers and ResponseWare - Professor of Chemistry Education at the University of East Anglia and National Teaching Fellow Simon Lancaster (@S_J_lancaster) discusses how he is encouraging his colleagues to use Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to engage students in lecture theatres. Here is a video of Simon’s keynote from the 2015 Sheffield Hallam University Learning and Teaching Conference in which he expands on and demonstrates these ideas.

On March first, Prof Sally Brown, recognised expert in Assessment and Feedback for HE, delivered a Webinar on Getting Started with Assessment and Feedback as part of the Transforming Assessment series. The recording of the seminar, both as a Blackboard Collaborate session and on YouTube is now available and well worth watching as part of your CPD. The link to the seminar page provides access to the many resources for beginners in HE assessment mentioned in the Webinar.

Back in January for its fifth run is the excellent Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) online CPD-fest. Covering the 5Cs, Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating and Creating, this “course” aims to share great ideas and build communities. Concentrating on portable educational technology that you can use with yourself, your colleagues and your students, you’re guaranteed to discover something that will enable you and them to be more effective. And at the same time you’ll find yourself becoming part of a growing community of like-minded souls.

There are some interesting events coming up over the next two months. In Swansea, the library team will again be running 7 Days of Twitter #SU7DoT. This time over the period 2nd-12th December. See the announcement and sign up here!. The team at Regent’s University London will again be running 12 Apps of Christmas (#12AoC) starting on 1st December on the Blackboard Open Learning Platform. They won’t be alone! The Association for Learning Technology will be running the third ALT Winter Conference (#altc) online from 6-8 December.

I attended the first run of FutureLearn MOOC #FLble1 Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started last year. Because of other commitments, I couldn’t take part in the first run of the second part #FLble2 Blended Learning Essentials: Embedding Practice but it looks like I have another chance in the re-run that starts 3 October. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/778548535130226688 Highly recommended! If you missed it, the team leaders Diana Laurillard and Neil Morris gave a talk on the Blended Learning Essentials courses on Future Learn at the 2016 Alt Conference.

I am humbled at being made the 5th recipient of the prestigious #LTHEChat Golden Tweeter Award for [my] continuous commitment, valuable contributions and creative energy to the weekly LTHEchat as both a member of the community and as a volunteer member in two organising teams, from January to June 2016. My thanks to the LTHEChat community for this recognition! Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 2 #LTHEChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 1, 2017

Though signed up to the EdX Course in good time, I’ve only just today, already half-way through week 2, gotten around to exploring the resources and activities for Week 1 of George Siemens’ and David Wiley’s (or is the attribution the other way round) open course on an Introduction to Open Education (hashtag #OpenEdMOOC). On first viewing, the structure is interesting. The course is available as an xMOOC (with the possibility of an optional certification) on the EdX platform.

Though signed up to the EdX Course in good time, I’ve only just today, already half-way through week 2, gotten around to exploring the resources and activities for Week 1 of George Siemens’ and David Wiley’s (or is the attribution the other way round) open course on an Introduction to Open Education (hashtag #OpenEdMOOC). On first viewing, the structure is interesting. The course is available as an xMOOC (with the possibility of an optional certification) on the EdX platform.

Though signed up to the EdX Course in good time, I’ve only just today, already half-way through week 2, gotten around to exploring the resources and activities for Week 1 of George Siemens’ and David Wiley’s (or is the attribution the other way round) open course on an Introduction to Open Education (hashtag #OpenEdMOOC). On first viewing, the structure is interesting. The course is available as an xMOOC (with the possibility of an optional certification) on the EdX platform.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - an annual celebration of women in STEM. To mark the occasion I used Storify to make a personal curation of the tweets and blog posts that I liked on #AdaLovelaceDay 2017 (#ALD17) https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/917726864491335680

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - an annual celebration of women in STEM. To mark the occasion I used Storify to make a personal curation of the tweets and blog posts that I liked on #AdaLovelaceDay 2017 (#ALD17) https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/917726864491335680

A big news story today was the QAA’s publication of advice for universities on how to combat contract cheating. I made a Twitter moment: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/917333938774913025

https://flic.kr/p/Yrprxv I’ve been a teacher in engineering and technology for over 30 years. I love computing, coding, and ed tech. I spend hours on-line watching videos to increase my understanding of the technologies that I love. I love engaging with my personal learning networks, particularly #LTHEChat and #CreativeHE. I take part in MOOCs and am curious about teaching and learning and how to do it. I’m a course leader and want my students to have the best experience possible.

My reciprocal post on Enthusiastic HE.

I’m going to say it: I hate maths. Well, not the sexy stuff that’s super interesting like zero, infinity, chaos, or probability but the easy stuff that ties your brain in knots when working in a shop - long division! (Still can’t do it…) Why do I hate maths? Many fears and dislikes are rooted in bad childhood experiences. My fear of maths is down to Mrs Nameless, who physically dragged me out of class on more than one occasion, calling me out in front of all my classmates and using my full name to boot - the horror!

LTHEChat returned last night with a chat on Staff and Student “Digital” Development led by Simon Thompson (@digisim) supported by the new backroom team. There will be a Storify but I thought I would provide a personal curation of the key conversations that I engaged with or noticed during and after the chat. This is made easier by a Wordpress feature that converts the URL of a tweet into an embedded tweet.

LTHEChat returned last night with a chat on Staff and Student “Digital” Development led by Simon Thompson (@digisim) supported by the new backroom team. There will be a Storify but I thought I would provide a personal curation of the key conversations that I engaged with or noticed during and after the chat. This is made easier by a Wordpress feature that converts the URL of a tweet into an embedded tweet.

LTHEChat returned last night with a chat on Staff and Student “Digital” Development led by Simon Thompson (@digisim) supported by the new backroom team. There will be a Storify but I thought I would provide a personal curation of the key conversations that I engaged with or noticed during and after the chat. This is made easier by a Wordpress feature that converts the URL of a tweet into an embedded tweet.

I’m going to say it: I hate maths. Well, not the sexy stuff that’s super interesting like zero, infinity, chaos, or probability but the easy stuff that ties your brain in knots when working in a shop - long division! (Still can’t do it…) Why do I hate maths? Many fears and dislikes are rooted in bad childhood experiences. My fear of maths is down to Mrs Nameless, who physically dragged me out of class on more than one occasion, calling me out in front of all my classmates and using my full name to boot - the horror!

I’m going to say it: I hate maths. Well, not the sexy stuff that’s super interesting like zero, infinity, chaos, or probability but the easy stuff that ties your brain in knots when working in a shop - long division! (Still can’t do it…) Why do I hate maths? Many fears and dislikes are rooted in bad childhood experiences. My fear of maths is down to Mrs Nameless, who physically dragged me out of class on more than one occasion, calling me out in front of all my classmates and using my full name to boot - the horror!

I’m going to say it: I hate maths. Well, not the sexy stuff that’s super interesting like zero, infinity, chaos, or probability but the easy stuff that ties your brain in knots when working in a shop - long division! (Still can’t do it…) Why do I hate maths? Many fears and dislikes are rooted in bad childhood experiences. My fear of maths is down to Mrs Nameless, who physically dragged me out of class on more than one occasion, calling me out in front of all my classmates and using my full name to boot - the horror!

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

On Wednesday, I chaired a presentation session at Swansea University’s annual SALT conference “Reaching for Teaching Excellence” (#susalt17). In the session the three speakers all presented examples of what might be summarized as authentic assessment of students engaged in content co-creation through problem based learning. First up we had Tanya May from Modern Languages who presented “Start where you are, use what you can: an online professional portfolio in the Spanish Class.

At Wednesday’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

At Wednesday’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

At Wednesday’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

At Wednesday’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

At Wednesday’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

On Wednesday, I chaired a presentation session at Swansea University’s annual SALT conference “Reaching for Teaching Excellence” (#susalt17). In the session the three speakers all presented examples of what might be summarized as authentic assessment of students engaged in content co-creation through problem based learning. First up we had Tanya May from Modern Languages who presented “Start where you are, use what you can: an online professional portfolio in the Spanish Class.

On Wednesday, I chaired a presentation session at Swansea University’s annual SALT conference “Reaching for Teaching Excellence” (#susalt17). In the session the three speakers all presented examples of what might be summarized as authentic assessment of students engaged in content co-creation through problem based learning. First up we had Tanya May from Modern Languages who presented “Start where you are, use what you can: an online professional portfolio in the Spanish Class.

On Wednesday, I chaired a presentation session at Swansea University’s annual SALT conference “Reaching for Teaching Excellence” (#susalt17). In the session the three speakers all presented examples of what might be summarized as authentic assessment of students engaged in content co-creation through problem based learning. First up we had Tanya May from Modern Languages who presented “Start where you are, use what you can: an online professional portfolio in the Spanish Class.

As part of my maintaining my professional registration as a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.), I am now required to record and reflect on my CPD and have my training records for 2016 audited by the IET. This has meant going back through my calendar and trying to recall all the CPD events and activities that I was involved with for the last 18 months so that I can populate my historic data and then hopefully continue to record events in more real time thereafter.

This Wednesday’s #LTHEChat was the first of this new semester’s joint monthly get togethers with the Higher Education Academy (HEA). The topic was connection for student retention (or student resilience as Vincent Tinto prefers to call “retention” which he regards as an institutionally focused word). As usual there was a lot of useful sharing. Here’s the Storify: Connection for Retention- building effective learning relationships. Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017

View the story “#HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016” on Storify Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017 […] It looks like I made a story for this one: See Unofficial Storify of #HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016. […]

In this article published by Turning Technologies - makers of audience response system TurningPoint, clickers and ResponseWare - Professor of Chemistry Education at the University of East Anglia and National Teaching Fellow Simon Lancaster (@S_J_lancaster) discusses how he is encouraging his colleagues to use Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to engage students in lecture theatres. Here is a video of Simon’s keynote from the 2015 Sheffield Hallam University Learning and Teaching Conference in which he expands on and demonstrates these ideas.

In this article published by Turning Technologies - makers of audience response system TurningPoint, clickers and ResponseWare - Professor of Chemistry Education at the University of East Anglia and National Teaching Fellow Simon Lancaster (@S_J_lancaster) discusses how he is encouraging his colleagues to use Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to engage students in lecture theatres. Here is a video of Simon’s keynote from the 2015 Sheffield Hallam University Learning and Teaching Conference in which he expands on and demonstrates these ideas.

In this article published by Turning Technologies - makers of audience response system TurningPoint, clickers and ResponseWare - Professor of Chemistry Education at the University of East Anglia and National Teaching Fellow Simon Lancaster (@S_J_lancaster) discusses how he is encouraging his colleagues to use Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to engage students in lecture theatres. Here is a video of Simon’s keynote from the 2015 Sheffield Hallam University Learning and Teaching Conference in which he expands on and demonstrates these ideas.

https://flic.kr/p/8CBBk5 As an engineer with a keen interest in software development and the web I suppose I come to “Open” with a philosophy formed from my exposure to the Open Source Software movement. I remember reading Raymond’s The Cathedral to the Bazaar, and being fascinated by Richard Stallman, the Gnu Project, and his idea of Copyleft introduced by the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL). When it came to YouTube and Flickr, making my works available via a CC-BY licence seemed the right thing to do.

On March first, Prof Sally Brown, recognised expert in Assessment and Feedback for HE, delivered a Webinar on Getting Started with Assessment and Feedback as part of the Transforming Assessment series. The recording of the seminar, both as a Blackboard Collaborate session and on YouTube is now available and well worth watching as part of your CPD. The link to the seminar page provides access to the many resources for beginners in HE assessment mentioned in the Webinar.

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. It’s new year. Winter seems to be coming. The students are busy. Time for some useful CPD? On Monday 16 January 2017, the five day short online course Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) starts its fifth run. Structured around the five Cs: connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating, this course aims to provide you with practical experience and ideas of how you and your students might exploit your mobile devices in your teaching to enhance your students’ learning.

There are some interesting events coming up over the next two months. In Swansea, the library team will again be running 7 Days of Twitter #SU7DoT. This time over the period 2nd-12th December. See the announcement and sign up here!. The team at Regent’s University London will again be running 12 Apps of Christmas (#12AoC) starting on 1st December on the Blackboard Open Learning Platform. They won’t be alone! The Association for Learning Technology will be running the third ALT Winter Conference (#altc) online from 6-8 December.

The Learning Enhancement and Development team at City University London (@CityUniLEaD]) is publishing a learning enhancement and development suggestion every day up until Christmas using the twitter hashtag #eventcityunilead. https://twitter.com/CityUniLEaD/status/804032901348261888 Here they are, automatically updated as they are published: [twitter-timeline id=806119016851013633]

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804293517493338112 I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804296889629872128 In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

It’s the first of December and in the Learning Technology world this means the launch of multiple open courses promising to introduce busy academics to 12 Apps of Christmas. I’m enrolled on the Regent’s University of London course which is being hosted on the Blackboard Open Courses platform. I’m recommending 12 Apps of Christmas to my colleagues for two reasons. Firstly because it provides useful introductions to mobile apps that they can use with students.

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804293517493338112 I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804296889629872128 In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804293517493338112 I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804296889629872128 In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804293517493338112 I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804296889629872128 In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804293517493338112 I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804296889629872128 In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

On Friday I stumbled across #GuildChat which was discussing the Learning Management System (LMS) or what we in the UK call the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As a long-time participant in Wednesday’s #LTHEchat (@LTHEchat) I expected the chat to be “storified”, but as it wasn’t, I’ve taken the liberty of making my own record. Here it is. View the story “#GuildChat Readdress the LMS” on Storify About #GuildChat and #LTHEchat #GuildChat is a weekly Tweet Chat hosted by the eLearning Guild (@eLearningGuild)– a US membership organization that seems similar to the UK’s Association for Learning Technology (@A_L_T).

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804293517493338112 I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804296889629872128 In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

It’s the first of December and in the Learning Technology world this means the launch of multiple open courses promising to introduce busy academics to 12 Apps of Christmas. I’m enrolled on the Regent’s University of London course which is being hosted on the Blackboard Open Courses platform. I’m recommending 12 Apps of Christmas to my colleagues for two reasons. Firstly because it provides useful introductions to mobile apps that they can use with students.

Another record breaking #LTHEChat was hosted on Wednesday 16th November by @digisim Simon Thomson. The Storify was curated by @ladyculottes Haley Atkinson who had to slim down the 1500 or so tweets, side conversations and spam posts to extract the essential essence. View the story “#LTHEchat 68: What motivates us to use digital tools for learning and teaching?” on Storify Once you’ve read the story, you may like to answer this question in the comments.

As part of our preparation for our presentation for Social Media in Higher Education in December (#SocMedHE16), the team is looking at various ways to assess the impact of the weekly #LTHEchat. As part of this, I agreed to attempt to record a flavour of the excitement of the event by capturing snapshots of the growth of the network over a twenty-four hour period using Martin Hawksey’s TAGSExplorer which generated this visualisation, and Jing.

Today I had a short Twitter Conversation with James Clay which followed this tweet from JISC’s #codesign16 meeting: https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793745542572601344 I replied: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793760715882500097 https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793762172715331584 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793763365575389184 https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793765277976649728 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793866758419537920 James has also blogged about this in I know Where You Are and is following up in this JISC blog post “What does the imminent arrival of the intelligent campus mean for you and your students.” What do you think? James has published more of the discussion of the intelligent campus from #codesign16 in this storyfy.

Today I had a short Twitter Conversation with James Clay which followed this tweet from JISC’s #codesign16 meeting: https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793745542572601344 I replied: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793760715882500097 https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793762172715331584 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793763365575389184 https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793765277976649728 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793866758419537920 James has also blogged about this in I know Where You Are and is following up in this JISC blog post “What does the imminent arrival of the intelligent campus mean for you and your students.” What do you think? James has published more of the discussion of the intelligent campus from #codesign16 in this storyfy.

Today I had a short Twitter Conversation with James Clay which followed this tweet from JISC’s #codesign16 meeting: https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793745542572601344 I replied: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793760715882500097 https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793762172715331584 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793763365575389184 https://twitter.com/jamesclay/status/793765277976649728 https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/793866758419537920 James has also blogged about this in I know Where You Are and is following up in this JISC blog post “What does the imminent arrival of the intelligent campus mean for you and your students.” What do you think? James has published more of the discussion of the intelligent campus from #codesign16 in this storyfy.

This Wednesday’s #LTHEChat was the first of this new semester’s joint monthly get togethers with the Higher Education Academy (HEA). The topic was connection for student retention (or student resilience as Vincent Tinto prefers to call “retention” which he regards as an institutionally focused word). As usual there was a lot of useful sharing. Here’s the Storify: Connection for Retention- building effective learning relationships. Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017

This Wednesday’s #LTHEChat was the first of this new semester’s joint monthly get togethers with the Higher Education Academy (HEA). The topic was connection for student retention (or student resilience as Vincent Tinto prefers to call “retention” which he regards as an institutionally focused word). As usual there was a lot of useful sharing. Here’s the Storify: Connection for Retention- building effective learning relationships. Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017

Robert Dragan (@robert_dragan) and Dawn Alderson (@dawn_alderson) led a very lively tweet chat yesterday on Assessment and Student Engagement. Despite Twitter itself playing up, colleagues discussed the following six thought provoking questions and you can read the full record that was captured in Storify. Here is the TAGSExplorer visualisation. https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778670656112070656 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778672665867325440 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778675169724211201 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778677683383263232 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778680210598141953 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778682731790118912 Assessment is definately on my agenda at the moment, and I’ll need some time to reflect on my own thoughts on this topic.

Robert Dragan (@robert_dragan) and Dawn Alderson (@dawn_alderson) led a very lively tweet chat yesterday on Assessment and Student Engagement. Despite Twitter itself playing up, colleagues discussed the following six thought provoking questions and you can read the full record that was captured in Storify. Here is the TAGSExplorer visualisation. https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778670656112070656 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778672665867325440 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778675169724211201 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778677683383263232 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778680210598141953 https://twitter.com/LTHEchat/status/778682731790118912 Assessment is definately on my agenda at the moment, and I’ll need some time to reflect on my own thoughts on this topic.

I attended the first run of FutureLearn MOOC #FLble1 Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started last year. Because of other commitments, I couldn’t take part in the first run of the second part #FLble2 Blended Learning Essentials: Embedding Practice but it looks like I have another chance in the re-run that starts 3 October. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/778548535130226688 Highly recommended! If you missed it, the team leaders Diana Laurillard and Neil Morris gave a talk on the Blended Learning Essentials courses on Future Learn at the 2016 Alt Conference.

I attended the first run of FutureLearn MOOC #FLble1 Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started last year. Because of other commitments, I couldn’t take part in the first run of the second part #FLble2 Blended Learning Essentials: Embedding Practice but it looks like I have another chance in the re-run that starts 3 October. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/778548535130226688 Highly recommended! If you missed it, the team leaders Diana Laurillard and Neil Morris gave a talk on the Blended Learning Essentials courses on Future Learn at the 2016 Alt Conference.

Renate and I walked to the Swansea Central library today and on our way back we were fortunate enough to see the start of the Swansea 10k run. I hope everyone had a good time.

Renate and I walked to the Swansea Central library today and on our way back we were fortunate enough to see the start of the Swansea 10k run. I hope everyone had a good time.

Fresh and Crispy has been running as a self-hosted Ghost blog for a couple of years now but today I moved it back over to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. One of the main reasons for the move is that upgrading the Ghost software is a painfully slow manual process. Other reasons include my desire to try technologies like Mike Caulfield’s Wikity which needs a Wordpress multi-site and the sheer convenience of being able to blog from the Wordpress App.

Fresh and Crispy has been running as a self-hosted Ghost blog for a couple of years now but today I moved it back over to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. One of the main reasons for the move is that upgrading the Ghost software is a painfully slow manual process. Other reasons include my desire to try technologies like Mike Caulfield’s Wikity which needs a Wordpress multi-site and the sheer convenience of being able to blog from the Wordpress App.

You’ve just upgraded to the latest version of Ghost and we’ve made a few changes that you should probably know about! Woah, why does everything look different? After two years and hundreds of thousands of users, we learned a great deal about what was (and wasn’t) working in the old Ghost admin user interface. What you’re looking at is Ghost’s first major UI refresh, with a strong focus on being more usable and robust all round.

An important message in Sue Beckingham and Simon Lancaster’s pre-conference blog post the four dimensional conference: using social media at conferences, recently published by the Higher Education Academy (HEA), was the value of post-event interactions that can occur afterwards. Here is my story of the “after party” which I’ll add to over the next few weeks. View the story “HEA STEM Conference 2016 After Party” on Storify

Here’s the story of Day 2

I attended the HEA STEM Conference in Nottingham last week and I am preparing records of the tweet stream using @storify. Here’s the first episode which covers the end of the joint #HEAchat and #LTHEchat on tweeting at conferences to the end of Day one on Thursday 28th January. Here’s the story of Day 1.

Cross posted from My Work Blog The fourth iteration of the short course Bring Your Own Devices for Learning (#BYOD4L) started today and as this will be my third iteration, I have decided to volunteer as a participant and mentor. The course is hosted on Wordpress at byod4l.wordpress.com and it can also be followed by watching hashtag #byod4l on Twitter and other social networks. You can also contribute by joining the BYOD4Learning Community pages on Google+.

Readers may be interested in joining me in participating in #BYOD4L again next week 11-15 January 2016. I hope to be participating both as member of the Google+ community, on Twitter (Hashtag #BYOD4L) and as a mentor. See BYOD4L is Back Next Week for the announcement and joining instructions.

I have just joined the newly launched FutureLearn online course on Blended Learning Essentials. Any posts related this course will be posted on my work blog under category #FLble1.

I have just established a new home page on www.cpjobling.me. The site itself is generated by Jekyll and I’m using Octopress 3.0 for the content.

You may have noticed some differences to Fresh and Crispy since your last visit. The most significant is that my blogging platform is now Ghost rather than WordPress. I’m also now hosting my domain on DigitalOcean rather than CastIron coding. This means that I have my stuff on a complete virtual machine rather than space on a shared server. I’ll be gradually moving my other resources over to my new domain over the next few weeks.

My personal view after two weeks: edX – enrolment and discussion forum and the certification of learning via self-assessment (thanks to Matt Crosslin (@grandeped) for the clarification). Course content … seems to be hosted outside edX in a WordPress blog. Visual syllabus … not sure that it adds much but it looks nice. Dual layer MOOC – more confusing than helpful — at least at first. ProSolo – as the prime aggregator for the course it’s flawed; many of the daily digested materials are off-topic because it’s a contributor’s whole blog (and optionally comments) feed that is aggregated rather than posts tagged DALMOOC.

The biggest barrier to exploiting data analytics for teaching and learning at my institution is lack of access to the actual data. The useful stuff that we are required to analyse and reflect on is packaged for us either in PDF reports or as unstructured tables on web pages. Presumably this is done to make our analysis easier, but it also has the effect of aggregating and filtering the data into forms that the University finds useful, or assumes that we will find useful, or perhaps are most useful for national statistics agencies.

Why can’t the developers of educational platforms create a decent forum? You’d think that there’d be several decades of experience of what works and what doesn’t to call on. However, like most of the (Managed/Virtual) Learning Environments I’ve had to use, and MOOCs that I’ve tried, the edX forum which being used for the Data, Analatics and Learning MOOC (#DALMOOC) is broken. The particular issues that I have are 1) that there’s no mark all items as read button and 2) no way to edit your own posts.

Cloud9 is a cloud-based interactive development environment (IDE) with some killer features. Amongst these is the possibility of creating and hosting a WordPress blog completely free. The blog runs in a Ubuntu instance on Docker and you have complete access to the WordPress’s PHP files using the very capable browser-based IDE. No need for virtual hosting, FTP, or any of that arcane stuff. The IDE provides terminal access to the Docker instance over ssh through the browser and there’s a MySQL database, Git support and built-in support for Bitbucket and GitHub.

So, yesterday I was browsing my twitter feed and favourited a post from Helen Keegan tagged #whyIteach accompanied by the #ccourses hashtag. Today I noticed a tweet from DML Research Hub “Channelling Engelbart: Augmenting Human Education” in which Howard Rheingold interviews Gardner Campbell — also tagged #ccourses. Digging a little deeper I find that #ccourses refers to the Connected Courses course and realised that it’s another connected MOOC-like thing facilitated by some of the usual suspects.

I am very excited by Smallest Federated Wiki (SFW) – the latest project from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. I’ve been watching the videos and playing with the software most of yesterday and today. I’ve also been inspired by Mike Caulfeild‘s explorations of the teaching and learning applications of SFW on his blog and on YouTube. Follow up After a bit of a struggle, I have managed to install my own copy of SFW as a node app, backed by a MongoHQ database on Heroku.

I’ve watched and found two videos the week by Greg Wilson to have been very instructive. The first, presented and recorded (slides) at PyCon 2014, introduces lessons learned in developing the Software Carpentry (teaching lab skills for scientific computing) movement. This was slightly revised and presented again at SciPy 2014 (the videos have just gone up on YouTube). I’ve embedded the recording of the latter talk here. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e26rp6qPbA?rel=0]Greg’s talks are not really about programming or software carpentry but rather are about teaching and the fact that very little of the large body of research about teaching actually informs what goes on in the class or training room.

There is a Google Apps for Education User Group running today at the University of York. There are live hangouts to be found on YouTube (search for GEUG14) and here is the Twitter feed for: #GEUG14 Tweets!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?‘http’:‘https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,“script”,“twitter-wjs”);

I’ve just joined the 2014 (second) run of the Open Course on Technology Enhanced Learning that is being supported by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). You should expect to see the hashtag #ocTEL in my posts on this site until mid June, but hopefully that will be compensated for by an increase in activity and reflection. Amongst the Week 0 (induction) activities we are asked to reflect on your work experience and ambitions for developing your teaching

In Blackboard, the title of an assignment submission is black and it looks like an ordinary heading. When you mouse over it, the underline appears and it looks like a link. But if you just look at it, it’s not obvious that it is a link! In response to feedback, I’ve now changed the colour of my assignments to dark blue. (See example). Colour assignment title so It Looks More Like a Link

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb4XDzjPS_4]I attended a Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series webinar on Monday which discussed how Blackboard Learn can be used to support Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education [1]. This was a very nice presentation from Ronald Scott Wennerdahl and Crystal Sheu of the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And there are some good ideas that I will need to think about in relation to my own teaching coming up next semester.

Having dealt with the reading list, my next consideration was the course description. This has been published in the course catalogue so I have to stick to the sense if not the letter of the published description. Here’s what the catalogue entry currently says. EG-247 Signals and Systems Module Aims To develop further methods of representing and analysing dynamic systems, to extend these concepts to sampled-data systems, to introduce concepts in signal processing and to use computer-aided methods for modelling and analysis.

The course reading list in iFind Reading My second step in setting up my new module was to update the reading list. There are a large number of books on Signals and Systems and some, like the ones recommended by my colleagues last year, are considered seminal. However, they are also very expensive and available in the library in small numbers and only on short-term loan. They also take a somewhat mathematical approach to the subject.

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.

Guide to HTML5 Boilerplate for Rails Developers This is a guide to HTML5 Boilerplate for Rails developers. Like Rails on the server side or “backend”, HTML5 Boilerplate provides structure and conventions for setting up HTML5, CSS3 styles, and Javascript for front-end development. It is a popular starting point for many front-end developers. However, some aspects of HTML5 Boilerplate are not useful for Rails projects. Sorting through the HTML5 Boilerplate documentation to find what’s useful for Rails can be confusing.

Understanding The Password « family coding @codecademy comes to the rescue when my son’s e-mail account is hacked! http://t.co/bQD7uYne #codeyear tags:codeyear - TEDxMuskegon — Maria Andersen — Recipe for Free Range Learning – YouTube Carve out 20 minutes and listen to @busynessgirl’s TEDx talk on free range learning: http://t.co/sXHmlrWb #eLearning tags:eLearning - Assessment Marking and Feedback using iPad, iAnnotate, and Dropbox | ELEVATE@UCS Assessment Marking and Feedback using iPad, iAnnotate, and Dropbox http://t.

Beyond marks: new tools to visualise student engagement via social networks | Badge | Research in Learning Technology RT @hopkinsdavid: Reading @jobadge and @ajcann : “New tools to visualise student engagement via social networks” http://t.co/mfqGzooU Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Here’s the thing. You take your tablet PC to lunch with the intention of reading the latest on the RSS feeds. You open your news reader, you like an article, you want to share. One option is twitter. You try it, but the embedded web browser doesn’t know your twitter password. You open the article in the browser, and it doesn’t either. The app that does, the official twitter app, is not available as an option for tweeting.

In my courses on Web Design, EG-146, EG-153, EG-259 and EG-253 I have long advocated the use of Firebug as must-install developer tool. Over recent years, Google’s Chrome Browser, Apple’s Safari, Opera and even the new Internet Explorer have built developer tools into their standard browser offering. In Firefox 10, released on 31st January 2012, Firefox has finally built-in developer tools too, and they look pretty slick. And more is to come in Firefox 11 to be released in March.

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2011. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.

Dive Into HTML5 Mark Pilgrim wrote Dive Into Python (bookmarked elsewhere in this collection) and here he is writing an emerging O’Reilly Book called “HTML5: up and running” which will be released in a similar way … in paper with on-line version available under Creative Commons. It is now being maintained by the community. tags:html5 book free online mark.pilgrim dive.in eg-259 tutorial ebook html resources eg-146 eg-153 - A long digression into how browsers handle unknown elements

BBC – WebWise – a beginner’s guide to using the internet I asked for suggestions for a replacement for Netskills TONIC and Chris Hall (@chris_hall) passed on this recommendation from one of his students: BBC WebWise. This is a beginner’s course aimed at adults who are new to computers and the internet. It has a very wide brief which seems to be the closest to TONIC in it’s range of topics.

Tutorial: Case Study with Html5 + CSS3 | Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials “Last month I did a talk at the Campus Party, one of the biggest technology events of the world, talking about Fireworks, HTML5 and CSS3. It was very nice, the receptivity of the audience was sensational, and thinking that many of you would also like to see the contents of the workshop, so decided to write a full case study and share here on the blog.

Better than Time Machine: backup your Mac with rsync » Hay Kranen tags:howto tools rsync backup mac Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My Progress on the Code Academy Code Year Open Course As mentioned earlier, code and how to create it has become a bit of an early meme this year. As reported by the BBC and The Guardian, UK Education Secretary Michael Grove has announced a shake up of the Schools ICT curriculum which will allow schools to teach programming. The Guardian newspaper has also just launched a Digital Literacy Campaign, co-sponsored by Google, with the aim of creating a new generation of coders, and Michael Kölling and the Code Academy launched open courses in Java (with Greenfoot) and JavaScript (see 2012: Year of Code?

I’ve just started another 366 photos project and I’ve also got a “366 days of origami” calendar. In addition, Alan Levine and Jim Groom are about to launch a “Daily Create” project. I think it’s in testing (there’s a hint about it in Thinking in Photos on the CogDogBlog). In anticipation, here’s a video I made of one of my dad’s oldest and worse jokes: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJzxa8MaSLc]If I manage to keep all these extra curricula balls in the air it should be a busy year!

As it’s Friday, and it’s lunchtime, more Google fu As it’s Friday, and it’s lunchtime, more Google fun – here’s one i used to like: confidential “internal use only” filetype:pdf site:ac.uk - mik’s blog – Thoughts on Programming Education Out now: Joy of Code, Episode 4: Finally – some code! http://t.co/wdA0o1pa Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Last October Aleks Krotoski, presenter of of The Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast, chaired a series of special “Tech City” talks. The first of these was on Skills and Education (Audio recording here) and the panelists, which included David Willets, all criticised to current Schools ICT Curriculum by stating that it didn’t actually include any coding. This issue has been raised recently by many commentators but was highlighted by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s criticism of British Education at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, and the fact that it was the “Google View” perhaps gave it more prominence than it would otherwise have had.

Why 3D TV Went From CES Darling to Consumer Reject | Gadget Lab | Wired.com It’s CES season, so of course we’re forced to talk about 3D TV. Again. Sigh … http://t.co/waviFU72 - Greenfoot An interesting experiment in a development tool for teaching Java programming. Aimed at Pre-University students and teachers it is similar in to Squeak and Logo in that it aims to “grab” interest by geting kids to program game-like simulations.

JavaScript Reference – MDN Definitive reference to the JavaScript language. Bookmark so you have somewhere to lookup the properties and methods of the JavaScript objects you are working with. Part of the Mozilla Developer Network, which is a useful resource in itself. The “learning” resources are worth a look. tags:javascript mozilla mdn reference resources eg-259 Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

haz.io › HTML5 & CSS3 Browser Capabilities A site which tests and reports your browser’s support for new and forthcoming Html5, Css3 and JavaScript APIs and presenting the results in a simple grid. Where a feature is missing, haz.io links to a fallback resource. tags:eg-259 html5 testing browser - HTML5 Forms Readiness Chart · Wufoo Nice test page for HTML5 form support. Includes browser charts and fallback (graceful degredation) resources in JavaScript and using widget libraries.

RSC Wales Teaching and Learning Blog Improving accessibility: don’t leave it to the fairies! http://t.co/0Ipmy1eg. My thoughts, with links to some training opportunities. Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Doceri Remote – The Interactive Whiteboard for the iPad – iPads in Education Wow! You have got to try Doceri Remote for the iPad and Doceri Desktop for the PC/Mac. This app has one feature that I have not found on any other desktop remote. It allows you to annotate on anything. Basically, your iPad, PC/Mac and Projector becomes your digital smart board. There is no need to pay for expensive and bulky smart board systems.

Foundation: Rapid Prototyping and Building Framework from ZURB An easy to use, powerful, and flexible framework for building prototypes and production code on any kind of device. As heard on The Changelog http://bit.ly/vxND7J. tags:zurb foundation css javascript framework examples eg-259 HTML5 boilerplate responsive Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. Comments: read write or think - Nov 4, 2013 the point about coursera is the enormous publicity value…i think the report from the previous edcmooc said that most participants had heard about the course via coursera

The Learning Black Market – David White Thought provoking blog post from David White. Some interesting ideas that have come out of interviews related to his Digital Residents and Natives and Open Edducational Resources research, viz the “emergency collaboration” 24 hours from coursework submission (I’m sure that goes on a lot in Swansea) and Google> Wikipedia> References which is a popular technique with students but is kept hidden because of the overt discouragement of academics for Google and Wikipedia as valid academic research tools.

I am going to teach a large online class in the Fall (650 students), what suggestions do you have? | LinkedIn Interesting discussion on the Higher Education Teaching and Learning (HETL) group on LinkedIn (itself an interesting resource). You may need to be a LinkedIn member and join the HETL group to access the discussion. tags:group discussion [large class teaching](http://www.diigo.com/user/cpjobling/large class teaching) linkedin large class suggestions Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

JISC RSC > JISC Regional Support Centres tags:jisc rsc [wales RSC](http://www.diigo.com/user/cpjobling/wales RSC) Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Here’s a more useful set of ideas for exploring technology in e-learning for your personal development that the usual ones I see. “TEN WEB 2.0 THINGS YOU CAN DO IN TEN MINUTES TO BE A MORE SUCCESSFUL E-LEARNING PROFESSIONAL” a presentation by Stephen Downes, National Research Council Canada remixed by jago2009 [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akAfCrOVhrM]Blogging this is related to tip 1 “Listen to a Conference Presentation” and 10 “watch a YouTube video”.

InfoQ: “Post-PC Computing” Is Not a Vision Allen Wirfs-Brock discusses the various computing eras and the change we are currently going through, leaving the PC era and entering a new one characterized by mobility, clouds, HTML and content. tags:computing pc programming [ambient computing](http://www.diigo.com/user/cpjobling/ambient computing) javascript cloud - Plagiarism | Common Craft “An introduction of the basics of plagiarism and how to avoid it, told via a story of a student completing an assignment” as shared by the Wales RSC

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32″ Cited in Mike Sharples’ keynote for Theme 2: Navigating Pathways of the 2011 JISC Innovating e-Learning Conference tags:jiscel11 jisc educase web2.0 longtail education2.0 [open education](http://www.diigo.com/user/cpjobling/open education) future toread Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Improving deep learning with MCQs and EVS Abstract — Staff and students in the UK often dismiss MCQs (Multiple Choice Questions) as being associated with rote learning, but not understanding. However one of the biggest results ever published in education shows how mistaken this attitude is. The most important aspect of deep learning is probably being concerned with reasons rather than only with conclusions. If you want to test for knowledge of reasons then you can easily design MCQs to give the facts and ask about reasons.

As noted in Innovating e-Learning 2011 : JISC and Poacher turned gamekeeper I am attending the Innovating E-Learning Online Conference during the gaps in my full calendar. Today there was a quite large gap between the morning session (on Work-based Learning) and the final plenary session on Theme 1: Learning Landscapes and I was able to fill in a locally arrange Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching (SALT) seminar lunchtime seminar on Multiple Choice: The smart choice or dumbing down?

FASTECH: Feedback and Assessment for Students with Technology : JISC “FASTECH is designed to use readily available technologies to support the systemic enhancement of assessment and feedback strategies and practices at programme, faculty and institutional levels. A key aim is to provide evidence of, and guidelines for, technological improvements and change processes that can be used to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of assessment and feedback at these levels throughout the sector.

I think that this is my third JISC Enhancing e-Learning conference. During the first one I was definitely a lurker. By the second, I’d been involved in a MOOC (Plenk) and a couple of the streamed ALT-C events so I was more comfortable with the asynchronous forums and Elluminate and contributed more. (Though I haven’t had the nerve to press F2 yet.) In all cases, I was attending as an academic looking for ideas that I could use in my own practice: and there’s been a rich seam of good ideas to mine.

This is the first of a planned short series of screencasts that I am creating to help my colleagues at Swansea and further afield do more with Blackboard. One thing we ask staff to do is provide a receipt for coursework submissions. But if the classes are large, this can be difficult to do. Blackboard has an assignment tool that can be used by students to upload electronic documents. If provides a receipt; can enforce submission deadlines; and the submissions can be graded and feedback provided all from the same interface.

Learning about Moodle with the help of a couple of books and a lynda.com training course (which is really rather good!) Watching the recordings of Moodle Moot UK 2011 on YouTube (tag mootuk11) Signing up for the 2011 JISC Innovating e-Learning online 2011 conference Thinking about Non-Barking Dogs Re-evaluating Ning (Elesig) and Cloudworks And looking forward to migrating some of my Blackboard courses to Moodle. I have also just downloaded an e-copy of Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age and will be reading it over coffee.

It’s that time of year again. I just signed up for the Innovating e-Learning 2011 : JISC online conference subtitled “Learning in Transition”. Is anyone I know going to be attending? If there’s anyone at Swansea Um shall we try to arrange a group viewing of one or more of the keynotes?

With the hype following the demise of Steve Jobs, this news item slipped under the radar, and I only picked up the news that Dennis Ritchie has died aged 70, when I listened to the Tech Weekly Podcast of 19th October this morning. Here’s the opening of the Guardian Obit: “The American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer and heart disease, was one of the co-inventors of the Unix operating system and the C programming language.

Today I reached enlightenment via the Ruby koans. Today I completed the “path to ruby enlightenment” with Ruby Koans. Ruby Koans is a test-driven tutorial produced by Edgecase.com that explores some of the basics as well as the darker corners of the Ruby Programming language. It took the best part of 3 days to complete, and was quite challenging in parts. But I’m glad I did it. Thanks to Charles Max Wood’s Teach Me To Code screencast Ruby Koans for the inspiration.

Swansea Airshow 2011, a set on Flickr. A splendid photo opportunity! Beautiful weather, stunning displays, decent camera. What more could you ask for.

Sunset at Glastonbury, a photo by Chris P Jobling on Flickr. At Glastonbury 2011 we had rain and mud, then the sun came out on Saturday afternoon, and Elbow was singing “On a Day Like Today” on the Pyramid Stage as the sun went down. Glorious! More pictures on Flickr.

Just installed extended php-markdown plugin and this post is written in markdown as a test. Here’s some emphasisstrong emphasis and code. A bulleted list another item A numbered list another item The code: Just installed extended [php-markdown](http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/) plugin and this post is written in markdown as a test. Here's some *emphasis* **strong emphasis** and `code`. * A bulleted list * another item 1. A numbered list 2. another item I’ve turned off the visual editor but WordPress still shows the simple HTML icons.

Two heads are better than one. Helen Davies, one of our Learning Support Team, has put out a call for the annual top 10 tools at Swansea University. A now annual survey that was inspired by Jane Hart’s long-running survey. As I’ve just come out of a busy teaching term, my list reflects the tools that have dominated my course preparation, delivery and assessment. My browser (Firefox or Chome used about equally!

I’ve just launched a new blog called Crispy Development in which I hope to document my various open-source projects that are hosted on GitHub. This is likely to be on the technical side, and is mostly to help me plan, document and remember stuff. But it may be of interest to someone.

Zaid Ali Alsagoff shared his discovery of schoology.com at last week’s Wednesday presentation on #CCK11 so I’ve posted the link in a blog post “You’ve got an “Ology”? on the Swansea Learning Lab community blog. We also discussed lecture capture at a pan-Wales meeting today, and I included a postscript about the CCK11 model of meeting capture with Elluminate. Brits of a certain age, will need no explanation for the title of this post.

Don Knuth, another of my heroes, recently gave the 2011 Turing Lecture at the IET in Savoy Place using an interesting approach: “Ask me Anything!”. I wish I’d been there. Turing Lecture 2011: An evening with Don Knuth – all questions answered Professor Don Knuth This years Turing Lecture is delivered by Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. 2011-01-26 00:00:00.0 IT Channel

I saw Downes’ commentary Networked Blogs ~ CCK11 on the CCK11 discussion page which talks about someone who suggested in the CCK11 Facebook group that NetworkedBlogs could syndicate from my Blog to the CCK11 group. So I thought I’d set it up as a trial. If it has worked, this post should appear on my Facebook wall, in my Twitter stream and in the CCK11 group. This may not be so useful if the NetworkedBlogs app only works in the FB walled garden because, as Downes says in a comment to his original thread on getting RSS feeds out of Facebook for syndication into the CCK11 MOOC: “This is the major problem with Facebook – data goes in, but it never comes out.

I’ve been gorging on new technology this week. It all started with Episode 6 of Doug Crockford’s “Crockford on JavaScript“, an excellent series of evening Yahoo! technical talks that on the history of programming and the JavaScript language that originally ran between January and March 2010. Episode 6, “Loopage”, recorded last August, is a sequel of sorts that covers the JavaScript event-loop, (one of my heros) Grace Murray Hopper, and the problems of concurrency and network latency.

I’ve been gorging on new technology this week. It all started with Episode 6 of Doug Crockford’s “Crockford on JavaScript“, an excellent series of evening Yahoo! technical talks that on the history of programming and the JavaScript language that originally ran between January and March 2010. Episode 6, “Loopage”, recorded last August, is a sequel of sorts that covers the JavaScript event-loop, (one of my heros) Grace Murray Hopper, and the problems of concurrency and network latency.

I have moved my blog using the instructions How to Move from blogger to wordpress with permanent 301 redirection provided by Aaslin Sathrak on SenseHow.com. In outline, I created a special template page on http://blog.cpjobling.org that redirects to a special WordPress page. This page interprets the redirected URL and finds the reference to the original blogger page permalink that was stored in the page metadata when I exported my blogger pages to WordPress.

Just a quick post to remind you that Fresh and Crispy is moving to this self-hosted WordPress blog Fresh and Crispy II (blog.cpjobling.me) on Monday 28th February. Using the resources of Google, I’ve discovered a way to set up redirection so that regular visitors will hardly notice the move. (I’ll post a how-to after the move.) Discussions have also been redirected. However, if you are following me via RSS or Google Friend Connect you may have to make some adjustments.

This statement from Eric Schmidt’s keynote at the Mobile World Congress 2011 as quoted by Charles Arthur in the Guardian Tech Blog as some key implications for the future of internet app development. He said some other things too, but this stood out for me. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/eIu1B9

In my move from Blogger.com to this self-hosted WordPress there are a couple of things that I have had to do that I thought would be worth documenting. These fall into the general headings of Comments, Permalinks, Feeds, and Categories and Tags. Comments. I was using disqus.com as my commenting system. There’s a WordPress plugin for this but to move the threads to the new blog I had to use the URL mapping method.

I’m planning to move Fresh and Crispyy to this blog on the 1st March 2011. Consider this an early warning. Inspired by Jim Groom’s Digital Story Telling Course (DS106), I purchased this domain and it hosts my own WordPress blog. I’ve already exported my posts from Blogger.com and moved my disqus.com discussion threads over. Now it only remains to cut the cord. Until the cut-off point, I’ll be blogging in both places in parallel.

I’ve just imported my posts from Fresh and Crispy on Blogspot using the WordPress Blogger blogs importer tool. Seems to have worked fine, but the comments in disqus.com where not carried over. I wonder if i) disqus.com can be used to manage comments in WordPress ii) If not, can comments be exported? In any case, I’m not yet ready to cut the cord! Answers i) Yes there’s a disqus plugin for wordpress and there’s a domain transfer tool.

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.

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2011. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.

A couple of small things: I’ve created an open public Diigo group for Connectivism and Connected Knowledge 2011 which you can use to share useful bookmarks (http://groups.diigo.com/group/cck_2011) and a team Pearltree (http://pear.ly/JgB5). I won’t have much time to contribute to CCK11, but I’m hoping that my network will help me by curating the must see resources that I might not have time to do for myself. As Karen Stephenson (cited in Siemens 2005) says:

A couple of small things: I’ve created an open public Diigo group for Connectivism and Connected Knowledge 2011 which you can use to share useful bookmarks (http://groups.diigo.com/group/cck_2011) and a team Pearltree (http://pear.ly/JgB5). I won’t have much time to contribute to CCK11, but I’m hoping that my network will help me by curating the must see resources that I might not have time to do for myself. As Karen Stephenson (cited in Siemens 2005) says:

This is my new blog. Created as part of Assignment 1 of week 1 of Digital Storytelling 2010. It is hosted on Cast Iron Code and the domain cpjobling.me is registered with godaddy.com.

As part of the first week’s assignment we’ve been asked to set up our own webhost and domain. I’ve registered a new domain cpjobling.me with Godaddy.com and a signed up for the minimum hosting package from cast iron coding (CIC). I’m waiting for my confirmations to come through, then I’ll be setting up my name servers using the instructions provided here and WordPress blog using the instructions given here. Everything went fine and now I have a new Word Press blog which may one-day replace this one: blog.

I’ve just joined the Evaluation of Learners’ Experiences of e-learning Special Interest Group (ELESIG) which is based around a Ning site (elesig.ning.com). After Chris Hall and David Williams launched a Gwella group, I’ve noticed an increase in activity and the community that is developing looks to be quite exciting. Was I wrong to reject Ning when they removed free access? Should we have stuck with Ning for SALT and the Learning Lab?

2011 apparently marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. To mark the occasion, the BBC made a bit of a splash last week with a sequence of three forty-five minute documentaries fronted by James Naughtie on the commissioning, translation and legacy of the bible. These were followed by 7 hours of readings from the King James Bible made by the great and the good of the acting professions and introduced by well-known luminaries of literature and history.

Just read Stephen Downes’ article on the Huffington Post that announces that registration for Connectivsm and Connective Knowledge 2011 (cck11) — starting 17th January — is open. I definitely won’t have the personal resource to do much there, but it’ll be interesting nonetheless.

Jim Groom is getting ready to launch another massive open online course (MOOC). Tony Hirst, who drew my attention to Jim’s course Digital Storytelling (ds106.us) with this post: Massive Open Online Courses all you need to know, has curated a few videos from PLENK2010 facilitator Dave Cormier on the philosophy of a MOOC. I’ve signed up for Digital Storytelling, but I expect my role to be more as a lurker than turned out to be the case on PLENK.

Next year I’ve got a fairly busy schedule. Here are some things that I might be blogging about. I record them here as an aide memoir: Large group assessment The “Flip” Socratic questioning Peer Instruction, Assessment and Support LiveScribe Echo Social networks Student employability and entrepreneurship. Technically, I expect to be playing with Drupal, WordPress, BuddyPress, Moodle and Elgg and maybe, if there’s time, Ruby on Rails 3. I might submit something (probably a poster) to ALT-C 2011.

In the media, as the shortest day approaches and with it the end of the old year, it’s traditional to look back. Here is the first of my retrospectives on 2010. My tool of the year is Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com), which I discovered during PLENK2010. I’ve used this as both a curation tool (see my Plenk2010 collection) and as an exploratory learning object builder but it also has a social network discovery and connection building capability and recently added a group/team curation feature.

There’s an interesting debate forming around this post from George Siemens (My Personal Learning Network is the most awesomest thing ever!!) and a response from Jenny Mackness (In defence of lurking). George’s stance is that you can’t really learn in a community unless you are contributing something, Jenny’s that it’s OK to observe and not contribute. There are lot’s of other interesting points of view expressed in the comments. To me, I feel I got more out of PLENK2010 by being an active contributor, although in the end I wasn’t sure if I’d learned that much.

Stump Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling Winter has come early this year. No snow yet in Swansea, but cold enough for frost. For more see Frost on Flickr, and listen to Dylan reading his poem A Winter’s Tail (curated by Poetictouch.com), which seems quite appropriate.

Via OLdaily, November 2010. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hj1COx

Alan Cann today announced the availability of the alpha release of the new distributed social network Diaspora. It’s seems to be available without the need for invitations and you can get an account by registering at http://diasp.org. Once registered, you’ll have a handle: mine is cpjobling@diasp.org. One unique selling point (USP) is that Diaspora has ways of organizing your various networks around aspects of your social networks. In my case, as well as the default Work and Family aspects, I’ve created an aspect for PLENK2010 and e-Learning folks.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I spent 10 weeks from September to November immersed (almost literally) in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge (PLENK2010). As already reported, one of the highlights for me was the guest appearance of Maria Andersen and her intriguing proposal for developing SOCRAIT, a Socratic questioning layer on the internet consisting of a Learn This button, a social gaming-like motivation and reward system, and channeled expertise designed to provide a personalized learning for the masses.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I spent 10 weeks from September to November immersed (almost literally) in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge (PLENK2010). As already reported, one of the highlights for me was the guest appearance of Maria Andersen and her intriguing proposal for developing SOCRAIT, a Socratic questioning layer on the internet consisting of a Learn This button, a social gaming-like motivation and reward system, and channeled expertise designed to provide a personalized learning for the masses.

This week I am attending the JISC-sponsored online conference Innovating eLearning 2010. Any posts I make here or in the Community Blog are likely to be on my reflections from this conference. The conference is for paying delegates only, but some materials are out in the public Internet, and I’ll refer to them where appropriate. The twitter back-channel is using the hash-tag #jiscel10.

Short answer … not much. At least that’s how it appears to me at the moment. I do know that I’m all PLENKED out, somewhat depressed and not looking forward to immersing myself in #jiscel10. Perhaps it’s a symptom of SAD, or maybe I’m just in mourning.

Socrates Week 7 in PLENK2010 was concerned with PLE/N tools (What Exists, What is Being Built?): Many of the tools that fit under the PLE/N umbrella have been appropriated by educators from other fields. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does reflect a sense that educators are not building tools for themselves. The software that we use in this course is a bit of an exception. We [the facilitators] rely on various open source tools (Moodle, WordPress), proprietary tools (Elluminate), and tools that have been developed with feedback from facilitators and experiences in other open courses (i.

At PLENK2010 participant Heli Nurmi’s request (see Test Your Blog Please), I submitted the URL of this blog to http://www.typealyzer.com/ to have it subjected to a Myers-Briggs personality test. It turns out that these scribblings reveal me to be an INTP type (The Thinker) The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

Week 7 in PLENK2010 Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling Week 7 of PLENK2010 is all about the tools. I subject about which I believe I actually have some expertise. Though the concept of the personal learning environment has been around for the last five years, there has not been a comprehensive summation of what has been developed in the field. We would like to build that summation this week.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. – Inigo Montoya, the (film of) The Princess Bride. Novel and screenplay by William Goldman. This week, I was in Gegynog at the final meeting of the Gwella participants. While there, a few people mentioned the phrase digital literacy. A variation of the phrase cropped up in the introduction to the readings for Week 6 of #PLENK2010 (see the Wordle above).

On Sunday, I finally found the time to listen to the recording of guest Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, from Wednesday’s #PLENK2010 live Elluminate session. In this session, Will gave a short presentation Using PLE’s Successfully and a couple of things came up. First was a summary of the recommendations on 21st Century* *Literacies from the US National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) [1]:

The title of this occasional series is a bit of a joke as it’s been several weeks since my last Podcast of the Week post. Nonetheless, it’s worth breaking my silence this week because this month‘s podcast of the week has local and professional interest. I’m a committee member of the Wales South West Network of the Institution of Engineering Technology (IET). Serving in the Young Professionals Network is ‘young’ Rhys Phillips who broadcasts a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) podcast called Pythagoras’ Trousers on Sunday mornings on Radio Cardiff (7.

The college newsagent had sold out of The Guardian, so I bought a copy of the latest Times Higher. There were two main features of interest. The first, mostly bad news for the UK academy, were the reports of the likely impact of the Browne review that was published this week “Lord of the market: let competition and choice drive quality.” The future looks dark indeed, with strong hints (see Leader: A gamble on the Market) of a 70% reduction in teaching budgets and the decimation of funding for non Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.

Today’s live #PLENK2010 session was ostensibly about assessment in a Personal Learning Environment but it seemed to be more about how PLENK2010 (the research project) could assess whether the participants (us) could assess their own learning or indeed whether or not it was possible to assess what learning actually happens or could happen in a Massive Open Online Course. In other words, we PLENKers are lab rats running the maze of a completely unstructured learning experience so that the people in white coats can observe us and form theories about how lab rats learn so that they might build the personal learning environment of the future.

Losing Contact! The faciltators said we couldn’t possibly read everything, but I feel like I’ve not read anything from Weeks 4 and 5. As you can see there’s a huge amount of discussion going on in the Week 4 forum and it’s already building up in Week 5 which has just started. And that’s not even counting the twitter feed and The Daily. I feel like a marathon runner who went too fast for the first 3rd and is not going to make the 13 mile marker.

Apart from multitasking through the two Elluminate sessions this week and “curating” the course materials in my Week 4 Pearltree, I’ve hardly participated in #PLENK2010 this week. It’s not because of the week four effect discussed in Dave Comier’s blog posting Cluster and Focus -> Surviving week 4 of a MOOC, neither is it the “painful and confusing” nature of this week’s topic PLE/PLN and learning theories. Rather its the imposition of real life.

This week’s PLENK2010 topic is an exploration of what Steve Wheeler has called Web 3.0, Stephen Downes has christened Web X, George Siemens calls xWeb and Rita Kop calls the eXtended Web. I prefer Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s name of the Data Web introduced in this TED talk and discussed here (Pivot My Data) back in March. Out of interest, I present the Wordles of, clockwise from top left, Berners-Lee’s TED talk, Siemens’ xWeb, Kop’s eXtended web and Wheeler’s Web 3.

At the end of the Beatles’ seminal Sergeant Pepper album is the track “A Day in the Life.” Those who’ve heard it will know that right at the end of the track, and therefore the album, is the climax in which an orchestra works itself up into a frenzy of noise before a single piano chord brings the whole thing to an end. PLENK2010 has been like being in that orchestra this week.

Earlier today, over in PLENK2010, Eduardo Peirano started a discussion Personal Learning and the […] Seven Principles of Good Practice in which he linked to a paper by Chickering and Gamson (1987) with the suggestion that the seven principles might be used to evaluate Personal Learning and the whole MOOC experiment. What are the principles? Good practice in undergraduate education: 1. encourages contact between students and faculty, 2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students, 3.

I’ve just finished reading Martin Weller’s paper The Decentralition Dillema in Education IT (one of the PLENK2010 week 2 readings) and I thought I’d use audioBoo.fm to say a few words about what we have at Swansea. Here’s the recording: http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf Martin will be a guest presenter at the Wednesday Elluminate session later today and it will be interesting to see what he has to say and how the course facilitators and course members respond.

… and that’s a problem because it makes RSS feed aggregation harder than it should be. Once upon a time, Tim Berners-Lee and a few of his close friends, invented the concept of a URL1, and in the early days of the web, the ‘U’ in URL could be taken to stand for Unique (although it’s always stood for Uniform). Thus, if you typed a URL into a browser address field, it would take you to one, and only one, destination.

The first week of #PLENK2010 is nearly over. Just one Elluminate discussion to go (16.00 Zulu, 17.00 BST). This is my first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) (it’s actually my first experience of any form of formal learning for quite some time) but despite all the dire warnings about information overload issued at the start, I actually think I’ve settled in quite nicely. I have read all the readings (and made notes!

At Tony Hirst’s suggestion (see comments to previous post), I followed Alan Levine’s instructions and created a custom google search engine derived from Stephen Downes ‘feed of feeds’ OPML file. It took a couple of attempts as it’s not clear on the Google Custom Search Engine creation page just what you have to do, and the order you have to do it, but with Alan’s post and a bit of perseverance I worked it out.

I have started putting together a personal learning environment for the Massively Open Online Course PLENK2010. Taking my inspiration from mashup-meister Tony Hirst, I have created an Aggregator using Yahoo! Pipes. This takes the OPML file (connect.downes.ca/feeds.xml) from the PLENK2010 Participants Feeds page, feeds it through a filter to extract posts with #PLENK2010 in the body or title, and produces a simple feed reader. The output of this can be obtained in various formats including iGoogle feed reader gadget, Google Reader, netvibes widget, JSON and RSS.

Today a Massively open Online Course (MOOC) on Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge (PLENK2010) is starting. The course is being facilitated by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, our own Rita Kop and Dave Cormier and is being used in various was to research PLEs and their effectiveness. Personally, I am hoping to learn more about Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks (aren’t they the same thing?); how I might exploit them in my own personal learning; and how I might adopt the ideas in my teaching.

Philip Larkin was the Librarian at the University of Hull and while I was a student there, I think I actually saw him once, striding imperiously through the Brynmor Jones Library. He was also a famous poet who died in 1985 and the City of Hull is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his death with a number of special events. One of the more bizarre events is Larkin with Toads, the temporary invasion of 40 giant fibre-glass toads, a public art installation which celebrates Larkin’s poems of working life ‘Toads’ and ‘Toads Revisited’ (See Wikipedia article).

Personal success but failure for mobile technology! 8.27 (BST 7.27 GMT): On the Bus at Bracelet Bay, Mumbles. First trip report filed with Audioboo.fm: http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf #### Stage One: Rhossilli to Port Eynon, 7 Miles 09.22: Rhossilli, at the start of the walk, I filed my second report filed on AudioBoo.fm. There was no reception for quite a while! http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf The first stage of the walk, the coastal path between Rhossilli and Port Eynon is a distance of seven miles.

Report from Times Higher which covers recent announcements of Marc Prensky, due to speak in Bournemouth University next week, and Martin Hall, invited speaker at the ALT-C Conference this week. My summary … the “nouns are changing but the verbs remain the same”. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/d3hIF3

The 17th annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology ALT-C 2010 has just ended. And though I did not attend, I was fairly fully engaged with the keynote and invited sessions that were streamed via CrowdVine in Elluminate and will be made available on the ALT-C channel on YouTube. Reflection starts now and I thought that I would use my newest e-learning gadget, my [LiveScribe Echo](http://www.livescribe.com/uk/) pen, and trial copy of [MyScript for LiveScribe](http://www.

Geek heaven … ShowOff — a keynote/powerpoint alternative that’s a Sinatra web app with slide markup in Markdown and special effects in JavaScript. I’ve got to try this! From Scott Chacon, GitHubber and author of Pro Git. Mentioned during an interview on InfoQ. See this Amp at [http://bit.ly/aTNldj](http://bit.ly/aTNldj)

One advantage of not being at the ALT-C conference is that I can only attend the keynotes and invited speaker sessions on Eluminate. I therefore have a lot of time to watch the twitter stream and curate the links. Cloudworks has a “cloud” for all the talks at this year’s ALT-C gathering (in Nottingham) and I’ve been busy adding references and links to the cloud for Donald Clark’s keynote — a lecture on the evils of lectures that really got the attendees — present and remote — going!

Digital Planet from the BBC World Service was one of the earliest podcasts that I picked up when I got my first MP3 player — which wasn’t an iPod! I’ve been listening to it every week for several years and it’s never short of informative. It’s a technology podcast, similar to The Guardian’s TechWeekly (see POTW #2), so it covers the latest news from Google, Apple and Microsoft and the various technology shows and conferences.

Video of Steve Jobs revealing the new tools. My take: iPod — not interested; Ping — why not link to Facebook/Twitter rather than inventing something new? I’ll be sticking with Spotify and last.fm. Plus there are privacy/spam issues already! Apple TV … now that could be a winner!

It’s a repost, but I thought I’d remind my faithful readers that I’ll be taking part in the Gower Macmarathon in a week’s time. Renate and I have been doing some training in West Yorkshire (where coincidentally there where a number of excellent real-ale pubs) and both expect to be fit enough. The Gower Macmarathon is a sponsored 22 mile walk from Rhossilli to Mumbles in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.

Git sounds like an insult, but it’s actually a distributed version control system which was originally invented by Linus Torvalds, the developer of the Linux kernel. GitHub is a phenomenally successful open-source code hosting site build around Git. GitHub is also a community and the unofficial voice of the GitHub community is The Changelog, a blog and weekly podcast which highlights developments in Open Source by monitoring GitHub. The podcast is hosted by Wynn Netherland and Adam Stokoviac who regularly get to speak to the developers whose code is being developed in the open on GitHub*.

Really liked this story that was a small item on Today’s Today programme. Students on A level computing course being let into The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park to programme the BBC micro (in BBC Basic) in order to learn how computers really work. Visit the link for a more detailed article, background to the BBC Micro, and video from BBC News team. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/aXRzxQ

I like this idea. Mainstream newspaper The Guardian takes the twitter feeds of its tech journalists to produce a daily snapshot of it’s tech coverage. Could easily adapt this idea for a University or a teaching module — although a monthly might be more useful in the latter context! See this Amp at http://bit.ly/bwZemj

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/cfsTTw

I was wandering aimlessly across the internet, as you do, when I came across an interesting SlideShare Presentation The Real Life Social Network from Paul Adams (@padday) who works as the user research lead for social on the User Experience (UX) team at Google. He works on projects like Buzz and YouTube (and maybe even Google Me). The [SlideShare is well worth going through in its entirety](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2) as it brings forth some issues that all of us who are keen to maximise our use of social networks in our work and play.

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/bkHmS8

Nice presentation made to students at the University of British Columbia as part of “JumpStart 2010″ UBC’s international orientation by former student Andre Malan (andremalan.net). Includes a very good presentation. As well as an orientation presentation (in Prezi) of Personal Learning Environments from a student’s Point of View (POV), it concludes with some suggestions of suitable tools. Would be worth Student Support Services taking a look and adapting for the Swansea University case.

Today is the day that A levels results are released to students and their parents. For the first time in as long as I can remember, the news media has not been obsessed with grade inflation. The estimated 175,000 students who won’t get a place has moved that old chestnut off top spot. That said, universities which told a Guardian poll last week that they were full are suddenly able to take well qualified students (Clearing 2010: Universities offer lifeline to top students, The Guardian).

An odd one this … but bear with me. Sprachbar is part of the Deutsch for Ausländer (German for foreigners) programming of Deutsche Welle, the German equivalent to the BBC World Service. To quote from the website Sprachbar is an offering that introduces you to the subtleties and secrets of the German language. You will listen to explanations of current headlines, quotes from literature, figures of speech and grammar. I like it because my wife is German and though my writing and speaking skills are minimal, my aural comprehension is quite good, and I can actually understand these short, humorous explanations of the idioms of modern German.

Simon Wardley introduces cloud computing with an interesting history lesson on the commodization of technology. Includes an introduction to the OSCON 2010 Cloud Computing Summit. Memorable quote: the only [service providers] who call their customers “users” are drug dealers and software vendors. Update: Simon has posted his own introduction to the Summit in Arguably, the best cloud conference in the world?, Bits or Pieces. [blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYH11lsC] Released by http://oscon.com under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

As part of my training for the Macmillan Gower Macmarathon, Renate and I walked to Verdi’s in the Mumbles yesterday. Across Singleton Park and down to Mumbles Road via Derwyn Fawr, up to Verdi’s and back to the bus stop at Oystermouth, this is a total of 5.3 miles. We did it in 1 h 50 walking time. Still need to build up some strength before September 11, including some more challenging walks in Gower, but feeling pretty good.

In a circular email from the EPSRC forwarded to Engineering and Physical Sciences staff at my Institution via our Research Office, it seems like the public engagement of science is going to be an early victim of the Government’s new austerity package. > As part of an ongoing review of how we allocate our resources, EPSRC will no longer be funding public engagement activities via the **Partnerships for Public Engagement (PPE)** Scheme.

In four week’s time, on the 11th September, Renate and I will be taking part in the Gower Macmarathon Walk from Rhossili to Mumbles. A distance of 22 miles. We’ve set up a page to help collect sponsorship (see widget to right) and hopefully some of my readers, followers, friends and colleagues will be able to contribute. I’ll be posting more news here and on the JustGiving sponsorship page as I get into training for this event.

URL: [http://www.makeitgreat2010.com/](http://www.makeitgreat2010.com/ “http://www.makeitgreat2010.com/”) Office 2010 will be tightly linked with your social networks. Follow this link and login with your Facebook account. It’ll make a promotional video with you as the star and your public Facebook network and photos as the co-stars! Pretty and potentially viral. Seriously, if MS Office 2010 can deliver, it might be a Google Docs killer! Caveat: maybe not so great if mobile access only works on Windows phones.

Thinking Aloud, a long running BBC Radio 4 show, is a weekly discussion of the latest research in social science. It might seem an odd choice for a lecturer in engineering. But since it’s been a Podcast, I’ve been hooked! It may be the host, Prof. Laurie Taylor, who’s erudition and humour is infectious, but it’s more probably the subject matter. When couched in academic language “discussion of the latest research in social science” seems a dull dry subject.

Last week I wrote a blog posting on the Swansea Learning Lab about the new-to-uk Amazon Kindle and a followup in Reflections about textbook availabilty and prices. I’ve actually been a long term subscriber to O’Reilly’s Safari Books online service (http://www.safaribooksonline.com/) , which for $42.99 (about £27) per month (which includes VAT), gives me access to the entire O’Reilly catalogue as well as many offerings from Addison Wesley, John Wiley and other familiar textbook publishers.

I’ve been a long-time admirer of the [Head First](http://www.headfirstlabs.com/index.php) series of books since the dim and distant days of [Head First EJB](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596005719/). I have quite a collection of these books myself and often recommend them to students who want to do some self-directed learning, say to learn [Java](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009205/) or [HTML and CSS](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101978/). Every book starts by explaining the pedagogical principles (developed by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates) behind the books and these principles are [enumerated](http://www.

On the theme of mobile web accessibility (#thereisawebappforthat) I did some more exploration of the BBC’s mobile (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile) web site and discovered that there is a mobile version of iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer which streams video in MP4 format suitable for the iPhone. Thus, I’d have to regrade the BBC’s mobile accessibility to A+ … providing that you enter the site from the root URL. In the spirit of research, and because I teach some of this stuff, I dug a little deeper and discovered that if you visit the BBC with a conventional browser, the pages are returned using the XHTML 1.

Interesting follow-up to yesterday’s mobile web accessibility post (#thereisawebappforthat). When demonstrating mobile web page accessibility to my wife, I went direct to the BBC web site (http://www.bbc.co.uk). Interestingly, this page recognizes that I was using a mobile device and switched to a presentation suitable for a mobile (See http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/web/ for a live demo). Clicking through from here gets you to the news site http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/ and this is accessible to mobiles. The question is then why doesn’t a link to http://www.

There should be a web app for that! Earlier today I tweeted A bit disappointed to be finding that major media outlets like the BBC make apps instead of making website mobile browser compatible. After that outburst I felt some explanation was called for. I also felt a campaign coming on. So here goes. The Explanation If you have an internet enabled smart phone, then you almost certainly have a mobile web browser.

I’m thinking that I need to optimize my social network sharing strategy. Ideally, I’d like to reach the maximum number of people with the minimum effort and I think that I may have too many channels. There is also some duplication that I want to eliminate. To achieve my aims, I think that I first need to analyze my sharing habits and who sees what I share. This might take several posts to untangle.

I participated in my first #lrnchat session on Twitter this afternoon. I found it difficult to cope with the volume of information coming in – hence the allusion to fire hoses in the title. While I was composing my next 140 characters of wit and wisdom, 27 messages would scroll by! But I did discover Tweetchat. There were some stand out moments such as the comparison of Google Wave (topical on the day) with Pet Rocks1 and the comic reflection on the Twitter chat experience: “I once was lost, but now, profound.

One of the best responses so far to today’s news on Google’s wave was this reminder us of what it could be good for Tweeted by Jack Schofield. Warning: the embedded video contains language (in spoken and written form) that may offend! I guess the problem was that for every creative that found a new medium there were hundreds of the rest of us who just saw the question marks!

Although I missed the original announcement, I am indebted to Jane Hart who shared the announcement Update on Google Wave (posted by Urs Hölze on the Official Google Blog) of Google’s decision to cease development of Google Wave: We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

My University has invested in a license for Learning Objects Campus Pack 4 and I’ve created a new blog in my new Personal Learning Space. I’m calling it Reflections for now and I’ll be using it to record ideas and thoughts on my personal learning and teaching experiences. I’ve changed the permissions to make the blog public with open comments. I can always change this later if it turns out to be a bad idea.

It’s actually a fortnight since the last one but … this week’s Podcast of the Week is The Guardian’s excellent Tech Weekly podcast. Every Wednesday, regular host Aleks Krotoski along with regular contributors Guardian Technology Editor Charles Arthur and Digital Media Reporter Jemima Kiss, discuss the big technology news items of the week. Since the demise of The Guardian’s Thursday Technology supplement, the podcast is the quickest way to keep up to date.

Learning Objects Campus Pack, used to provide for blogs, wikis and podcasts in Swansea University’s VLE, was updated at the same time as Blackboard. If you have one or more Learning Objects blog(s), wiki(s) or podcast(s) in your Blackboard (learning portal) module sites, they will be upgraded the first time you or your students visit them. If you have a large number of these installed in a module site, as I have for some of my modules, you may want to do the upgrade before your course is opened for new enrolments.

Today is the day when Blackboard 9.1 was rolled out at Swansea University as the new Learning Portal. I haven’t logged in to check my courses yet, but I’m sure they’ll be fine. Clive and his team promised to deliver the update on July 30th, and that’s what they’ve done. I know a lot of planing and work has gone into this and it’s been done with minimum fuss and negative impact.

I love this video from the first lecture of [CS 106A Programming Methodology](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/) (Recorded in Fall 2008). Apart from the enthusiasm of the lecturer Mehran Sahami, which is infectious, it’s a great source of inspiration for learning and teaching: - Grading without numbers - The Stanford Honour Code (approach to Plagiarism) - Use of undergraduates for peer/mentor support (even grading!) - Use of sugary snacks as rewards for contribution - Use of continuous assessment with later work given more marks to encourage work to the end - Midterm tests - Personalized feedback via “interactive marking” - 2 Free days for late submission of coursework – avoids extensions.

This code snippet on calculating the first n Primes using the Python programming language fell into my RSS feed this morning. Very nice I thought, but then it occurred to me, what would be really fast would be to ask the internet. Or more specifically WolframAlpha. So I did: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=primes+less+than+1,000,000,000. The first 20 of 50,847,324 prime numbers less that 109 are displayed in the internet equivalent of a blink of an eye.

The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON 2010) took place last week in Portland Oregon. Videos of the talks are being published on YouTube and Blip.TV. Taken with the convention site, the various related blog postings and twitter feed, there’s lots of useful information. What stood out for me in the video feed was Daniel Recordon’s talk “Today’s Lamp Stack” which describes how Facebook’s has been implemented on the LAMP stack. It’s a talk that will be useful as a learning resource for my course on Web Applications Technology.

I read a lot of blogs and I listen to a lot of podcasts, so I thought I’d use this blog to tell you about some of my favourites. Here’s the first of an occasional series of recommendations: It’s e-Learning Stuff and the associated e-Learning Stuff podcast from James Clay, ILT & Learning Resources Manager at Gloucestershire College, and 2009 winner of the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year. I am an early adopter and self-confessed geek.

I’ve just got back to work after breaking my ankle five weeks ago and I’ve just started catching up with things in e-learning and beyond. I thought I’d enumerate a few things that are on my radar. Just a list with links for now: - Blackboard 9 coming soon to Swansea U. - [Delicious Bookmark Browse feature](http://cogdogblog.com/2010/07/07/delicious-browsing/) (thanks to CogDogBlog). Useful for creating a presentation based on web sites. Try this one for resources I’ve collected on [plagiarism](http://delicious.

The Guardian league table claims to rate Universities by student satisfaction. It gives higher scores to “value added”, overall satisfaction and feedback (the latter two by results from the National Student Survey), money spent per student, entry grades, careers prospects and staff-student ratio, than other ratings such as research quality which other newspapers (and Universities themselves) like to emphasize. It does this because, as it says in yesterday’s article supporting the release of its 2011 league tables “Oxford tops Guardian’s 2011 university league table“

The Guardian league table claims to rate Universities by student satisfaction. It gives higher scores to “value added”, overall satisfaction and feedback (the latter two by results from the National Student Survey), money spent per student, entry grades, careers prospects and staff-student ratio, than other ratings such as research quality which other newspapers (and Universities themselves) like to emphasize. It does this because, as it says in yesterday’s article supporting the release of its 2011 league tables “Oxford tops Guardian’s 2011 university league table“

The second part of the Day 2 Google I/O 2010 keynote introduced Google TV. Google seemed very excited about this and rolled out the CEO and representatives of Sony and Logitech who will be first to market with the technology, BuyMore, who hope to make millions selling it in the run up to Christmas 2010, and a US satellite company (not Sky) that will have some support for it. I have to admit to being somewhat underwhelmed.

If you are like me you like Google chrome because it’s fast, up-to-date, standards compliant and fast. But if you are a web developer, you need to use Firefox because it has Firebug, the best web development browser extension there is. Well, it turns out that Chrome provides some built-in web developer features extensions that I stumbled upon the other day quite by accident. The image shows the developer tools open and at the code view and CSS inspector.

More from Google I/O 2010. **Google Android ** ** ** See keynote video [part 1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89xc_1Vv69k): - An alternative to iPhone and its single device, single carrier model, single source of applications model. Some stats: 100,000+ new activations per day; 2nd in US smart phone sales but first in US web an app usage; 1 billion miles navigated with turn-by-turn navigation app; 5x increase in google search on smart phones; 50,000 apps available; Did I lock myself into the wrong phone on the wrong network when I bought my iPhone last year?

Watching the first day keynote and blogging the announcements. There’s more on the web of course from better and more experienced journalists, so this is my personal record. **HTML5** - HTML5 reaching critical mass? On Mozilla, Safari and Chrome yes, but not on IE yet. - Open Video. New codec (VP8) announced with open container WebM. Open video included in YouTube for HTML5 browsers. The tag will become a next big thing.

Just remotely attended Jane Hart’s keynote Social Learning = New Toolset + New Skillset + New Mindset at EdTech 2010 which was streamed live from the Athlone Institute of Technology on Thursday 20th May, 2010. It was very interesting because Jane encouraged the audience, both in the room, and logged in from the Internet, to help her to deliver the keynote by tweeting answers to some key questions as she went along.

I worry about the teaching of mathematics. Lack of student confidence in the application of mathematics is one of the biggest problems we have in Engineering: it hampers the development of our courses, limits how far we can go, and is a primary source of lecturer concern when we have to deal with the consequences at examination boards. Yet the attitude is too often “the quality of the students is at fault”.

Yesterday I received an email from Ning’s CEO Jason Rosenthal announcing the “exciting new developments in Ning” (which include the phasing out of free Ning) which will be rolled out in July. The mid-range price plan Ning-plus at $19.95 per month works out cheaper than the current offerings. The equivalent of the current Free Ning (Ning mini) will now cost $2.95 per month, is limited to 150 members and no groups, but will allow you to have no or your own advertising.

Tomorrow’s finally election election day (an event that seems to have been coming since May 2009) and we know that whoever gets into power will have some very difficult decisions to make. None of the three parties have really told us were the money’s going to come from or the cuts are going to be made, but here are my predictions: There will be a hung parliament … I’m hoping that it will be lib-lab ruling coalition, but fear a lib-con one.

… 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.

April fool’s jokes rounded up in the News Blog at The Guardian: I confess that I didn’t spot the “Was Shakespeare French” hoax — if indeed it was a hoax — on today’s Today Program!

Stone the crows Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling It’s April first but this is no joke. I spotted this dead crow in the front area of a house in Alexandra Terrace, Brynmill. What killed it I wonder?

Just posted my last post and I noticed that I’d typed it’s when I meant its. This is a common error that I pick up my students on all the time, but it’s one that I make myself quite frequently. [Its](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its) is the possessive adjective form of the pronoun *it* used in the post in question as “YouTube has changed **its** user interface”. [It’s](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/it's) is a contraction of *it is* as used in “*First impressions*: **it’s** [that is YouTube’s new interface *is*] certainly much less cluttered”.

Visited YouTube today to rate Stephen Fry’s “unboxing my iPad” video (thanks to Digital Inspiration for the link) and noticed that YouTube has changed its user interface. If you visit the site, “Take the Quick Tour” (highlighted middle right) will show you what’s new. First impressions: It’s certainly much less cluttered. Do I like it? Time will tell.

Recently I’ve been catching up with the the excellent new blog/podcast The Changelog which covers what’s fresh and new in open source Listening to [episode 0.0.8](http://thechangelog.com/post/334287138/episode-0-0-8-marshall-culpepper-from-appcelerator-titan) (you have to be a geek to appreciate the episode numbering!), I became aware of an interesting new application development platform called [Appcellerator Titanium](http://www.appcelerator.com/). Inspired by products like Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight, Titanium leverages the open source WebKit web-browser engine (used in Safari, Chrome, iPhone and Android) to create a software development kit (SDK) that allows the development of native desktop and mobile networked applications (or apps).

A couple of TED 2010 highlights that I stumbled on today. First Tim Berners-Lee reports on year one of his “More Data Now” campaign. Next I finally got around to watching Gary Flake on the data visualization features of Microsoft Livelabs Pivot (which I first saw reported on Swansea Yammer network a few weeks ago). Try to find 30 minutes to watch all three videos then reflect like I did on what might be possible when Pivot and linked data colide!

This last week or so I’ve been watching a lot of Yahoo! YUI Theatre videos on JavaScript, starting with Douglas Crockford’s excellent five-part series Crockford on JavaScript and ending yesterday with Christian Heillman’s inspiring talk on YQL and YUI. This has inspired me to explore how I can use YUI (a JavaScript library) in the next version of my Proman dissertation project management application which will be needed for 2010-2011 allocation round in May.

This last week or so I’ve been watching a lot of Yahoo! YUI Theatre videos on JavaScript, starting with Douglas Crockford’s excellent five-part series Crockford on JavaScript and ending yesterday with Christian Heillman’s inspiring talk on YQL and YUI. This has inspired me to explore how I can use YUI (a JavaScript library) in the next version of my Proman dissertation project management application which will be needed for 2010-2011 allocation round in May.

Just a quick post to tell you about a new (to me) social network notification service called ping.fm. Just by connecting to your favourite services you can update them all from a single web site. I’m using it in the HEFCW Peer Support project to post messages to Ning, Facebook and Twitter. Many other services are available including LinkedIn, Yammer, Flickr, Posterous, Blogger, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. Other features: - You can also distinguish between micro-blogging, status updates and blogging, - ping.

Today I got a reminder from Google that the annual domain registration for my semi-defunct Google Apps account was due. Having also seen a service email from Blogger.com telling me that FTP support was being withdrawn and suggesting that I consider using a custom domain, I thought I’d take the opportunity to renew my domain and use it to host this blog. Sort of like a vanity plate for the Internet age!

Sometimes you stumble upon things on the web that are quite breathtaking in their simple cleverness and sheer elegance. I discovered one such resource today while reading the current draft of what may well become a seminal text on the emerging HTML5 standard. Chapter 2 of Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into HTML5 is all about supporting the transition as browsers start to support the new HTML5 elements canvas, video, local storage, web workers, offline web pages, geolocation, input types, placeholder text, form auto focus and microdata.

A new BBC/Open University documentary series on the World Wide Web started last Friday on BBC 2. It is called “The Virtual Revolution” and is hosted by Guardian Technology journalist Dr Aleks Krotoski. It is interesting not so much for its technical depth (which quite frankly is quite shallow) but for its introduction to the social/political/commercial issues surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web. Plus it has interviews with many of the pioneers and entrepreneurs who were involved in its development.

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2010. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.

I found this fascinating quote today. Regarding TurnitIn: Recycling and repurposing of text online is becoming so ubquituous that the noise is casuing a problem in the interpretation of originality reports. They used to save us time in investigating cases of plagiarism, now I’m not so sure.Nick Sharratt, DrBadgr, Nov 2009 As we are about to use TurnitIn for dissertation theses, this arrives as a timely warning!

Yesterday I installed Windows 7 on a virtual machine on a MacBook Pro with no problems (see previous post). Today I’m attempting to do the same thing on my office desktop. Yesterday I ran the compatibility checker and no real problems were found. Today, at around 10.00 am, I stated the upgrade from Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional and it’s still not finished. First I had to remove Zone Alarm.

This is a screen-grab from my new MacBook Pro and it’s running Windows 7 in a OS/X window. It’s not magic, it’s the free open-source VirtualBox virtualizer from Sun Microsystems. At less than half the price of Parallels! It works. It took no time to set up. And it means that I can continue to run some of the essential windows-only software (such as Camtasia Studio), Windows Live Writer, etc, during my transition from PC pragmatist to Mac Zealot.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started getting comment spam attacks on this blog via my comments stream. There’ll be comment like “I visited your blog and I’ve saved to read later” from a (presumably) bogus user. But the comment will include a number of links to dubious services. I use Disqus for my comment handling and I’ve had to gradually turn up the moderation settings so that now all comments have to be moderated.

I’ve just spent the afternoon with the wonderful celebration piece A people’s history of the internet: from Arpanet in 1969 to today that was published last Friday on the Guardian Technology website. What’s amazing to me is how recent it all really is! I started at Swansea University in 1985 and electronic communications was a difficult issue then. I remember the protocol wars of 1986 when JANET wanted to use X25 when the US was about to standardise on TCP/IP (I recall the our LIS wanted to toe the party line, but that Computer Science wanted to go the Internet route); I remember trawling Gopher for software to download using FTP and putting together tar files from shell archives of multiple USENET messages.

The BBC encourages the sharing of this video from Dame Shirley Bassey’s recent appearance on the electric Proms. So here it is, with the “Girl from Tiger Bay” (which Shirley is of course) composed by James Dean Bradfield, who’s playing guitar. It’s a good song! Enjoy! http://www.bbc.co.uk/emp/external/player.swf

Clive on Learning: E-Learning Debate 2009 as mentioned by Jane Hart, a recent debate at the Oxford Union “This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow.” has been summarized by Clive Shepherd. The debate (including video clips of the speakers is here: www.epic.co.uk/elearningdebate and there’s a tweet feed here. Which side would you be on?

http://youtube.com/v/vmaUW86RqbY Giving lectures on code is pretty tedious for both students and staff and it occured to me that more interactivity is required. So I wondered if I could liven up my JavaScript lectures by using Firebug’s JavaScript console. As you can see from this quick “proof of concept” video that I [made with Screenr](http://screenr.com/juH), it might just work (and will require little extra effort on my part). I’ll blog again about how it went!

Today I attended a pleasant hour at e-learning and cakes. Saw a demo of QR codes and Paper Show two technologies that have real potential (although I will have to think more about how to use the former than the latter). If nothing else, QR-codes may convince me to actually try the mobile internet! (A nice side affect of using the mobile internet is that I might be able to use TwitPic to get my photos off my phone!

I have just uploaded an updated version of my Health and Safety and Project Planning presentation to SlideShare. The soundtrack is a bit School-of-Engineering-at-Swansea specific, but if you can make use of the slides, please be my guest. [H&S And Project Planning](http://www.slideshare.net/cpjobling/hs-and-project-planning-presentation “H&S And Project Planning”)http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=hs-and-project-planning-1223491503611174-8&stripped_title=hs-and-project-planning-presentation View more [presentations](http://www.slideshare.net/) from [Chris Jobling](http://www.slideshare.net/cpjobling).

While working at home I wondered why I couldn’t connect to the new Plagiarism Awareness site recently announced by RSC Wales. Later I decided I’d do some work on Blackboard and found that I couldn’t connect. Odd, I thought! So I did a ping/traceroute and discovered that the Swansea.ac.uk domain is cut-off from the Internet (see Twitpic image below). My only choice is to walk in to work! A couple of minutes later

Appropriately enough added to my own [posterous.com](http://posterous.com) blog posting about Sidewiki. Unexpected, but perhaps not suprising, was the discovery that as a Google “customer”, you can post your comments to your Blogger blog(s)! Twitter, Facebook and other social sharing possibilities surely must be close behind. in reference to: > “In the latest update of the Google Toolbar (IE and FireFox …” > - [Google Sidewiki – Half baked but crispy](http://cpjobling.posterous.com/google-sidewiki-14) ([view on Google Sidewiki](http://www.

http://youtube.com/v/AusOPz8Ww80 I have a lecture next week which will discuss HTML markup. I have lots of notes and examples for XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2 which I think students should read through for some deeper learning rather than be presented in a lecture. I have instead decided to show [this video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siOHh0uzcuY). On searching,I also found this presentation from Google I/0 2009 (the Google developer’s conference) which talks about what’s coming next!

Last year I started my photo a day project with a snap of the flooded path from the University (where I work) to Brynmill (where I live). Here we are in a new year and once again it’s raining and the path across Singleton Park has become a river. A day to be enjoyed by only by Labradors. Autumn has come early this year and I’m wondering what happened to the summer!

Year 2: 1/365: Saint Barbara Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling It would appear that I am addicted! After taking a couple of days off from my first 365 photos project, I am, like the best American television series, back for season two. So here is the first upload from a second year of “a photo a day”. The image, of Saint Barbara, parton saint of artillerymen, military engineers, miners and others who work with explosives …, and also of mathematicians [Wikipedia]

[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpjobling/2780567935/ “photo sharing”) [Day 1: Another rainy day in August](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpjobling/2780567935/) Originally uploaded by [Chris P Jobling](http://www.flickr.com/people/cpjobling/) My first year’s “photo-a-day” project ended, as it started, on a rainy day in August. In between, there were many highlights such as Shane Williams’ testimonial with the Ospreys, the Great Dorset Steam fair, Queen Nefertiti, Parties, Christmas in Berlin, a holiday in Yorkshire and the U2 concert in Cardiff. There are also lots of self portraits, pictures of the cat and images of furniture and furnishings that fill in when no other inspiration beckoned.

It’s the day when students who took A-levels in May find out what grades they got and whether they have gotten in to their first choice university. Every year, the number of students getting the top grade (A) goes up and every year the media reports this and speculates on whether or not standards are falling – because children can’t be more intelligent than their parents can they – after all their brains have been rotted by electronic games and social media!

I’ve just read Don Tapscott’s critique of the modern university (The Demise of the University, The Edge) and I’ve decided that I don’t want to be that lecturer who mainly broadcasts his lectures anymore. I know I’ve dabbled with all kinds of technology assisted media over the years: I’ve played with wikis, blogs, podcasts and Blackboard … but always as a source of information that is sent to students. There’s been little or no information exchange, it’s been largely a one-way, rarely a two-way conversation.

As reported in Mashable Google Reader Updates: Share News on Twitter, Facebook, and More is a feature that I’ve wanted in Google Reader for ever! Now you can have a send-to link in your Reader Page and send items you want to share to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, delicious etc. Greeeaaaat!

“Four Office Applications will be on the web” according to to Abel Avram reporting for InfoQ. They will be Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote and they will run inside the Browser. Whether this is a reaction to Google’s Chrome O/S announcement or an extension to the general, slow, development of Windows Live, is unclear. What’s interesting is that they will be free, will use native web browser technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) rather than Silverlight and will presumably compete directly in the space currently occupied by Google and Zoho docs.

Today I installed Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” on my Acer Aspire One netbook. The version is the Netbook Remix version and it looks really nice, as the screenshot above will testify. Hopefully it will be easier to link to the University wireless network than the original Asper Aspire (based on Fedora I think) was. The most difficult part of the installation was getting the image file onto a USB data stick.

http://youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ I’m probably a few days late in bringing this to your attention, here goes anyway! In the Google IO Conference 2009, Google previewed a really interesting new, open-source, open-potocol platform for collaboration called Google Wave ([wave.google.com](http://wave.google.com)). This video recording of the keynote, published on the 28th May on YouTube, is well worth a look. The presentation takes about 90 minutes, but it’s worth watching it all because some of the more interesting possibilities (for example simultaneous translation) come later on in the presentation.

Today The Guardian published its 2010 University League table which it bases on the national student satisfaction survey (assessment and teaching), staff student-ratio, spend per student, graduate employment, and “value added”. On this basis, which is highly focussed on the Student’s learning experience, Swansea comes way down in the “conference league”, 95th out of 117 places, with a season score of 48.1 points out of the maximum 100. If we were in the football league, we’d be fighting relegation!

As noted yesterday here and on the Learning Lab Community blog, yesterday was declared “Ada Lovelace Day” (ALD09) by Suw Charman-Anderson. Thousands of people blogged and tweeted about a woman (or women) in technology who they admire. Suw even interviewed Ada herself (at the Science Museum) and appeared on BBC News 24 and BBC Radio 5Live to promote women in technology. Albeit in a very small way, It was great to be part of this global celebration and the social networks that surrounded it.

Google Summer of Code 2009 is open for applications. I think that GSoC, which is an annual event in which Google pays students 4,500 USD to work on an open source project of their choice, is a great project and dream of the day when one of my students takes on this challenge. I try my hardest by ensuring, so far as is possible, that only open source software is used in my courses: so my students have experience as users of LAMP, Drupal, WordPress, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Netbeans and even the Google Code hosting service.

In honour of “Lady Lovelace Day” I had pledged to write a post on computing pioneer Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, one of first programmers of the Harvard Mark I Calculator and designers of the Cobol programming language. Grace is always remembered for finding a real bug in one of her computer programs (in the days when computers were made with thermionic valves and relays) and taped it into her log book along with the wry comment:

Spring is sprung The grass is riz I wonder where the birdies is? – Original source unknown. Spring is springing up all over as this picture of a magpie (“one for sorrow”) on the Faraday Building lawn with the daffodils shows.

I’m sure I’ll not be the only one, but let me add my congratulations to Sir Tim and his wonderful, annoying, ubiquitous invention. [Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web](http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2009/03/happy-20th-birthday-world-wide-web.html) via [Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day](http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/) by Jane Hart on 3/13/09 Scientific American has a great feature on Tim Berners Lee and the Web. The reason? “CERN on March 13 celebrates the 20th anniversary of a proposal entitled, “Information Management: A Proposal,” by Tim Berners-Lee, which would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web”

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/)

<img src=“http://blog.swansea.ac.uk/blog/eechris/2009/01/30/reflections-on-some-e-learning-feedback-part-1/" alt=“Sample chart](http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=350x150&chd=t:60,40&cht=p&chl=Strongly Agree|Strongly Disagree) In one of my [current projects " title=”” />I am publishing the results (in blog form) of the first assessment of my use of e-learning that I have ever formally tried. The majority of the questions use the Likert scale (where respondees are asked to rank their response to a statement along the scale of Strongly-agree to Strongly disagree) and I want to present the results with pie charts like this one.

[](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/SYHIHm_Z8dI/AAAAAAAAJFo/qjEpFiZ8TeE/s1600-h/IMG_0003.JPG) Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2009. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

This (partial) history of the Internet (from Arpanet to Internet) has been created as a show case for a German student’s diploma project to develop a visual language for electronic communication called PICOL. I picked it up from Lee Lefever at CommonCraft. The video itself is hosted at VIMEO. I may us it in my upcoming module on Comunications for the Internet. http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2696386&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1 History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Today, just as I sat down to eat my lunch of a bowl of soup and a sandwich, the fire alarm went off in Fulton house. It wasn’t a drill, but it wasn’t a fire either! Apparently, a fire detector has been sited too near to a steam outlet in one of the kitchens. Nonetheless, we all had to stand around outside in the cold until the alarm had been cancelled by the fire brigade.

In a past life I used to teach Java as a first programming language to Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Information and Communication Technology students so I was interested when news of [this article](http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/studentdevs/index.html) (published in [java.sun.com](http://java.sun.com/developer) [/developer](http://java.sun.com/developer)) was received via Geertjan Wielanda of the [Netbeans Educational Resources](http://edu.netbeans.org/) site. Two pieces of advice that I’d pass on are: 1. Knowledge of a subject doesn’t end when the exam finishes: a soup tastes better if the pot is left simmering for a long time after the meat is added!

At midnight the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) released the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). All the newspapers will be busy analysing the results (although only the Guardian and the Times Higher seem to have gone to press with any great detail today) and will be publishing new League Tables and University Vice chancellors will be busy putting the best spin on the results. The key issue will be how the research ratings will affect funding and most University’s have been desperately playing the transfer market over the last five years (to the detriment of teaching perhaps) in order to get the best possible score.

Jumping on the bandwagon, I though I would share this picture taken last year of the Eich Mühle, on the Regen in Regesnstauf in a very Christmassy Bavaria. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a safe and prosperous New Year!

Today it was foggy. Possibly the first fog of the winter. I was too late out of bed to capture the best of it, but this shot over the lake in Brynmill Park, added today to my Autumn and Weather collections on Flickr, was the most authentic “Foggy” picture that I managed to get. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

Day 100: A Linear Perspective Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling On day 100 of my 365 photos project and it’s getting harder all the time! Short days and long nights make it especially tricky to find interesting subjects! Still I quite liked this view of the Swansea University campus that I spotted on the way in to work this morning. I cropped it quite severely to emphasize the lines and shapes.

The annual Guy Fawkes celebrations went off with the usual big bang with a fantastic display from St Helen’s Rugby/Cricket ground. We watched from across the road, on the promenade above the beach. And plenty of people had their fire, mini fireworks display, wine and baked potatoes on the sands. I had my camera and many more pictures have been published on Picasa and Flickr. Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927 < p>I’ve been taking a photograph a day to post on Flickr for 66 days now, and to celebrate I thought I’d post the slide show. Rugby, Rain and the views on the way to and from Work are the recurring theme so far. I wonder what’s to come! There are a number of these 365 photo a day groups on Flickr, but if you want to join the group I’m in, head over to Project 365.

Today’s 365 Photos Project choice came down to this abstract view of the new student accomodation and an autumnal view of fallen leaves taken in Singleton park. The leaves won out today, but I liked this too and thought it was also worth sharing. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

The Indian Summer ended today when high winds and torrential rain arrived. Within minutes, there was minor flooding on my path home across Singleton Park to Brynmill. It was also nearly dark at 5.00 pm so winter’s almost with us. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

Since I discovered them a month or so ago, I have been tuning in to the webcasts of Brian Harvey’s course “61A Introduction to Computer Science” from the University of California Berkeley. A couple of things struck me. First, the breadth of this introductory *course which seems to take in the whole of computer science from functional programming through to logic programming and seemingly all types of programming in between. Second, the length of the semester in the US: from August 27 through to December 10 (about 5 weeks longer than the *Michaelmas term in Swansea).

There are all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies on campus. Here’s a mock gothic window in Singleton Abbey. I like the heads had the bas of the arches. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

Today I introduced blogging to my students in EG-259.

As noted in a previous post, I am working on a 365 photos project and that means that I always have a camera with me and need to find a suitable subject every day. This one didn’t make it into today’s selection but I still quite like it. Your mission, should you choose to accept, it is to identify the spot in the University where this historic entrance to the Arts faculty is located.

The BBC Proms Season ended with a bang in Singleton Park last night as the Fireworks, launched during the Welsh National Anthem, brought to an end a great concert of Italian Music and Neopolitan songs. The BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, conducted by David Charles Abell and Soloists Rebecca Evans (Three Costume Changes!) and Alfie Boe kept us all entertained for the three hours of the concert itself and the rehersals, which as early arrivals, we also got to see.

[](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/SMl2tc3bsOI/AAAAAAAAEnM/mPFuLuq56Q8/s1600-h/Beach,+Sea+and+Clouds.jpg) Today we took a walk along the Beach. It was late evening, just before sunset and the clouds, sea and sand made for some dramatic images. The full set are to be seen on [Picasa](http://picasaweb.google.com/cpjobling/BeachSeaAndClouds). [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

One of the nice features of the newly released beta of Google Chrome is the feature that makes it easy to convert a tab into a standalone desktop application shortcut which you can add to your desktop, quick launch and start menu. I’ve already gotten Google Reader, Flickr and Zoho Docs “application-i-fied”, and no doubt Facebook, Google Docs, and my other frquently-used web apps will follow. A major advantage of this is that the applications launch in their own independent windows whereas links launch in tabs in a separate instance of the Chrome browser.

Day 3: Legitimate Ospreys Fan Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling Today, I picked up my first Ospreys season ticket (actually the first season ticket of any description) so I’m all set for a year of live Magner’s League, Anglo-Welsh and European cup rugby at the Liberty Stadium. First game is Shane William’s testimonial against Leicester Tigers tomorrow!

Another rainy day in August Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling Here’s the first real 365 Project photo. It puts into pixels what I feel about August so far! Follow the rest of this series by visiting Crispy’s 365 Photos Project.

A popular subject on Flickr is the so called 365 pictures project in which individuals or groups take and upload a picture a day. I’ve decided to have a go myself, but couldn’t add the snaps taken at the 30th Pontardawe Festival last Sunday, because that would have left two days without a photo! However, the Sunday night headliners, Transglobal Underground, were just too good to ignore, so here’s a mosaic from Flickr which you can click on to go to the Album.

Nat Torkington lives in New Zealand and has spent the last couple of years volunteering as a sysadmin, computer club organizer, and teacher at his local primary school. He shares his experiences of teaching programming to 8-12 year olds in his blog (and also on O’Reilly Radar) as well as in this inspirational talk from OSCON 2008. His conclusion, a call to arms for geeks everywhere to help their local schools, is inspirational.

Today was first day back “at work” and I’ve spent much of it catching up on OSCON 2008, O’Reilly’s annual open source conference, which was this year held in Portland Oregon between July 21-25. Greg Pollack of the RailsEnvy Podcast has made a nice video introduction to the conference (OSCON in 37 minutes) in which he gets various luminaries and speakers to introduce their talks and so provide a nice lead-in to the presentations, most of which are on-line, and the keynotes which were video-recorded and made available for syndication via blip.

This video, from the YouTube series “Simon’s Cat” was featured on last week’s Culture Show on BBC 2 [in the UK]. There are two others, equally great and hopefully more to come. All cat lovers will get a shiver of recognition when watching this! http://widgets.vodpod.com/w/video_embed/Groupvideo.1409152 more about “Simon’s Cat ‘TV Dinner’“, posted with vodpod

In an new post from the Swansea Learning Lab we are pointed to some videos from Blackboard which showcase new features in the planned 2009-2010 release of Blackboard. I watched the videos, and in a comment on the videos, I noted a trend within Blackboard that reminds me of the famous 1994 memo “Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet” sent by J Allard to Microsoft executives. This memo was a call to embrace, extend, and innovate [the Internet] in order to make Windows the platform of choice in the newly visible “wired up” world.

[](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/SH98H-euYiI/AAAAAAAACm4/yQocPgrn5Cg/s1600-h/DSC_0023.jpg) Pictured L-R: Matt Smith BSc, Mark Davies BSc, Mark Ireland BSc, Russell Morris BSc. Today was graduation day for the students in the Information, Computing and Communcations Technology discipline at the School of Engineering at Swansea University. Congratulations to the new Bachelors of Science Matt, Mark, Mark and Russell. Russell was also presented with the W.G. Isaacs Prize for best project. Congratulations and good look to you all! More pictures from the day will be posted on Facebook and Flickr.

As [reported yesterday](http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-io-day.html), I’ve been catching up with a number of presentations from the [Google I/O 2008 conference](http://sites.google.com/site/io/google-io-sessions). However, I just had to draw particular attention to one of the highlights which is this recording of a very entertaining presentation from Chris di Bona who is Open Source Programs Manager at Google. In an engaging, anecdotal style, Chris covers the history and philosophy of Open Source (which includes a name check for Swansea’s very own [Alan Cox](http://en.

Today, I discovered Blog Networks after reading Sarah Parez’s posting “Blog Networks like MyBlogLog for Facebook” on ReadWriteWeb. Blog Networks is a new Facebook application that allows you to embed your favourite blogs (including your own) into your Facebook profile so that your friends can read and rate your thoughts and the thoughts of others that you value. An interesting feature is that the easiest way to claim ownership of your own blog is to get your friends to verify that you own it which is both a social and viral way of getting the word out.

Last month Google hosted the first of its Google I/O conferences in San Francisco. I’d like to report that I was there, but I wasn’t (although I did watch the keynote the day after it was given). The video recordings of the speakers (hosted on YouTube) and their slides (mostly shared on Google Docs) that have been on-line for a few weeks now. With term finally over, I can become a virtual conference delegate and today was my first chance to catch up with some of the more interesting talks.

More travels with my bike … this time a swift 15 minute ride to Verdi’s at Mumbles for an espresso after dinner. Sunny day (not many of those this June) and lovely views over the Bay towards the University, Swansea and Port Talbot. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

Following on from Chris Hall’s discovery of Wordle, here’s the Wordle-art tag cloud for my del.icio.us bookmarks. Interestingly this indicates that I’m a typical geek (look at the size of the programming and development tags). Interestingly my courses EG-259 and EG-146 (both on Web Development) feature largely. I’m also apparently keen on the Web and self-improving tutorials! Of course these are only my public tags!

[](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/SF690u0DyfI/AAAAAAAACiY/k3QrN4aeNJA/s1600-h/IMG_0006.jpg) Took a trip up [National Cycle Route 43 ](http://www.sustrans.org.uk/default.asp?sID=1099392474390)from Swansea to Pontardawe and back. It was a very windy day and the last 3 miles along Swansea bay was into the wind and a bit of a killer. In other news, my wife Renate got a puncture and had to push her bike home from the Liberty Stadium while I went on ahead to cook the dinner. Puncture repair kit will be next on my shopping list (some would probably say it should have been first).

After today’s *lunch and learn* session on [Web2.0 at the Chalkface](http://swansea-learninglab.blogspot.com/2008/05/swanevent-lunch-learn-web-20-at.html), Paul Latreille inspired me to have another look at [Netvibes](http://www.netvibes.com/). I’ve been playing with it on and off since I got home this evening and I’ve launched another version of [my life online](http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2008/05/stalk-me.html) as a Netvibes public page. See [www.netvibes.com/crispyj](http://www.netvibes.com/crispyj) for more. Come on over and be my friend. [](http://www.flickr.com/photos/51214457@N00/2571254960) My new public “stalk me” page on Netvibes Not sure which of T[umblr](http://cpjobling.

My wife and I took our new bikes along National Cycle Path number 4 from Brynmill to the Mumbles (Verdi’s) then back to Blackpill and up the Clyne Valley to the Railway Inn. A pint of Three Cliffs Gold then back to the Bay Cycle path and home. Comfortable ride, but it is flat! Gorgeous weather today: hope it stays that way. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

After a long hiatus during which our last pair of bikes have been rusting away in the corner of the garden, my wife and I splashed out on a new set of two wheeled touring machines today. Fitness is low: a short trip to the new Swansea Library in the former Guildhall (now “Civic” Center) nearly killed us! Still the wind was blowing in our faces on the way back!

I agree to some extent with Jack Schofield (Apple’s Safari gives Windows users another problem, Guardian Technology Blog, 30th May 2008) when he states that “Apple’s ability to program Windows is a bit of a joke.” There are at least three things wrong with iTunes (especially on Windows Vista): the arrogance of the assumption that when you import your media library you want it to translate all your Windows Media Player files into AAC files!

In today’s Guardian and Media Guardian there where three articles about how Web technologies are having disruptive effects on traditional media and even (in one case) on one Web 2.0 poster-child technology itself. Here’s a quick summary with links to Guardian On-Line: In the Financial Pages Katie Allen discusses the potential effects on sales based on downloading might have on the DVD. In short, it might go the way of the VHS in as little as 10 years!

I have a FaceBook account, but find its walled garden too restrictive, and hate having to login to share something. I’m a child of the World Wide Web (man) and all the sites that I want to share with my social network are out there. Inspired by Dean Shareski’s “Lesson #1: Share“, I got myself an account on FriendFeed.com and added all my available accounts. So now you can stalk me (and become my friend) on the interweb.

I have just finished watching the keynote of the [Google I/O 2008](http://code.google.com/events/io) conference that took place at 9.30 am Las Vegas time yesterday and was posted on [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk1HvP7NO5w) almost straight away afterwards. The conference is aimed at developers, but there’s a lot that is of general interest and gives insight into Google’s aims for the future. The main message is that Google wants to - make the cloud more accessible; - keep connectivity pervasive; - make the client (browser) more powerful.

One of the highlight’s of yesterday’s History of Computing Collection launch was Steve William’s presentation of the history of the University’s web site which he gathered from the Way Back Machine at the Internet Archive. As I developed the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering’s web site from 1996 through to around 2006 I thought I’d visit the Way Back Machine to look at how that web site http://www-ee.swan.ac.uk/ developed. I will probably have to write down the technical details one day, but for now, here are the key development stages:

One of the highlight’s of yesterday’s History of Computing Collection launch was Steve William’s presentation of the history of the University’s web site which he gathered from the Way Back Machine at the Internet Archive. As I developed the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering’s web site from 1996 through to around 2006 I thought I’d visit the Way Back Machine to look at how that web site http://www-ee.swan.ac.uk/ developed. I will probably have to write down the technical details one day, but for now, here are the key development stages:

The British Computer Society (BCS) was founded in 1957 so this is the tail end of its half century celebration year. As part of its local contribution to celebrations, Professor John Tucker took the opportunity of using the Annual General Meeting of the South Wales branch of the BCS to launch his History of Computing Collection (HOCC), which is being developed in conjunction with Library and Information Services (LIS) here at Swansea University.

Continuing the saga of the Firefox 3 (FF3) trial, I just installed the beta version of the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox 3 (see previous post). Bookmarks are one of the key new features of have FF3 (see Top 10 Firefox 3 Features (Lifehacker) and Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks on Cybernotes), and I was interested in seeing how they worked with the new plugin. I made a small Jing screencast (sorry no sound) which shows that the del.

A problem with Firefox 3 is that not all plugins are ready for deployment. The attached image shows my current set (on my laptop I have a couple more). Of particular note are del.icio.us, ScribeFire (for in-browser blogging) and Zotero (bibliographic database). Google gears is also not yet compatible so support for offline working for Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs will not work. I find that I don’t travel enough with my lap top for this to be an issue.

I installed release candidate 1 of Firefox 3 today. I will be giving it a trial run and reporting on any nice features in a future blog. First impression: nice sexy Windows Vista look and friendly welcome page (illustrated). I’ve only installed it on my office desktop so far because my laptop is my main machine and it has a few plug-ins that might not work. So I’m hanging fire there which gives an opportunity for comparison.

I have just posted an article with demo screencasts on my work blog @the.coalface. The article is concerned with using a new feature of Google Docs Spreadsheets: web form data entry. I intend to use it for project allocation this year, but there are loads of other uses both within education and without. To get some additional context, read the following articles first. Stop Sharing Spreadsheets, Start Collecting Information. Google announces its “fill out a form” feature.

Number 1: Put your new Nikon D40X into continuous shooting mode and make cheap animated movies of birds feeding and post the results to YouTube. Well why not! Selected stills at Picasa.

On returning to work after the bank holiday I found that my email inbox was full of phishing attempts. Unfortunately for the phishers, I have no accounts with the banks I was being phished by, so it was easy to delete them. But I have to ask, why are phishing scams so random? Furthermore, why don’t email phishing filters put on a big notice “DODGY” on such emails? They seem to recognise the links as false, so why can’t they be a bit more proactive at marking the messages themselves?

Swansea University, where I work, has quietly established a WordPress blogging system that anyone who has a University login can use to create a blog. This means that I no longer need to worry about providing something myself and should also make introducing blogging to my students a breaze. I created my blog, which I’m calling @the.coalface, and I intend to use it for reflective issues around e-learning, my teaching, research and University life in general.

[](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/SB899gWLtvI/AAAAAAAABb0/HZmxUV064fw/s1600-h/DSC_0065.JPG) It’s May Bank Holiday today and we went for a stroll around Clyne Gardens which is always at its best at this time of year. Azaleas and Rhododendrons are in full bloom and are a riot of reds, purples, yellows and pinks. As usual, more pictures have been posted to [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpjobling/sets/72157604901590749/). [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

[](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/R-k0sl76N7I/AAAAAAAAA7k/edIIkJtL61o/s1600-h/DSC_0027.JPG) Today it was Easter Tuesday and we beat the weather and managed a stroll along the coastal path from Mumbles Pier to Langland Bay. Here’s a view along the path towards the coastguard station at Bracelet Bay. More photos on [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpjobling/sets/72157604243690444/). [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/) Comments: iwoods2807 - Nov 1, 2010 Love it!! Not a day goes by where I don’t think … hey, where’s the “Learn This” button. The peril of being a futurist!

In a report in this week’s Technology Guardian (March 13, 2008), Tim Anderson discusses Microsoft’s announcement that Internet Explorer (IE) 8 will be standards compliant by default after all. This is a reversal of its previous position which was that it would be IE 7 compliant by default to avoid “breaking the net”. (To become standards compliant, web authors would have to set a tag in their code: this is known as Version Targetting and was seen by some Web Standards Advocates as a minor threat while others were less sanguine.

Michael Kölling is a Senior Lecturer in Computing at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He was one of the the key developers of the [BlueJ](http://www.bluej.org/) programming environment and is one of the authors of [Objects First with Java](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Objects-First-Java-Practical-Introduction/dp/013197629X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205426224&sr=1-1). His demonstration to folks at Google HQ of [Greenfoot](http://www.greenfoot.org/) , his new Java programming environment for young learners, has just been published on [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcwx-I6Arwk). By providing a programming environment based on graphical objects that move in artificial worlds, Kölling hopes to make programming compelling to high-school-age kids and thereby reverse the current UK trend of students thinking that ICT is only about office programs and spreadsheets (and thereby convincing most of them that computing is boring).

In another experiment in Web 2.0 for learning technologies I recorded a soundtrack for a presentation that I make annually to my first, second and final year students, and put it up on Slideshare. This wonderful site is a social sharing site for PowerPoint files. It allows the usual social networking features. So you can upload a PowerPoint presentation, tag it, share it, and comment on others. You can also link it to an MP3 track, and there’s an easy to use tool for synchronizing the audio track to the slides.

[](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__bnNGgqRugY/R7dEmxprjwI/AAAAAAAAA3o/-oVyNuQgATw/s1600-h/DSC_0380.JPG) A lovely day today (though cold!) so my wife and I took a stroll from Brynmill to Swansea via the seafront and the marina. Nice pint of Tanglefoot in Eli Jenkins on the way back and stiff muscles for the rest of the week! Took a few pictures of which this breaking wave was my favourite. More on Flickr. Comments: Kathleenannjohnson - Oct 1, 2010 This is a great post.

Once again Tony Hirst’s [OUseful Info](http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59) blog has led me to three new pieces of brilliant web technology. In his blog entry [RESTful Image generation – When Text Just Won’t Do](http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/013114.html), Tony describes how MathTran (a Mathematics rendering service developed by the Open University) could be mashed up with with the Google Charts service to provide an easy way to get mathemattical results onto web pages. Lots of interesting stuff to follow up on but here are the highlights: - Jonathan Fine’s blog entry on [MathTrans and Google Charts](http://jonathanfine.

Applied patches suggested by users of my Command Line Interface (CLI) plugin for DokuWiki. This was my first real experience of distributed development in the open source sense. Thanks to Stephane and Andy for the suggestions: it’s nice to know that my minor contribution has been useful enough to someone that they’ve improved it! The new version of the [plugin](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/plugin:cli) is available here. Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

Welcome to my Blog, maybe you’d like to add a link to your blog in the comments!

Back in June I blogged about Steve Yegge’s port of Ruby on Rails to Rhino (the JavaScript engine for the JVM) and his claim that JavaScript was the Next Big Language (NBL). In related news, Dion Almaer has just posted a new video interview (in the Google Code Blog series) of Steve Yegge himself talking about the Ruby on Rhino project, server-side and client side JavaScript. Its always nice to be able to put faces and voices to the names of people who have interesting ideas, and whose Blogs I am following.

While visiting InfoQ to read the article on Project Zero that prompted my last blog entry, I noticed that there was a video on Fortress (the new scientific programming language for the Java Virtual Machine that I first blogged about some time ago). In the video, recorded at the JAOO 2006 Conference, Guy Steele’s keynote The Soul of a New Programming Language gives a nice overview to the language and its philosophy.

While going through my feed-reader today, I came across another potential framework, which I can add to the list mentioned earlier. This is Project Zero, an incubator project being developed by IBM. It uses the Java platform and the scripting languages Groovy and/or PHP and seems to be directly targetted at RESTful services development but with support for traditional web applications, AJAX and mashups. I guess that I am going to have to I develop a data model and evaluate the choices that I have before I get even more confused!

For a web application that I am developing as part of a research project I have decided on using [Python](http://python.org/) for the business logic. The reasons being that the application will use fixed-point binary arithmetic, units, and data output as line-graphs. Python seems to have the libraries that I’ll need for this and is better suited for rapid development than Java. Part of the requirements that I have been researching this last week have been concerned with the identification of a suitable web application framework for Python.

Some new features (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting) were added to my institution’s Blackboard in the last upgrade. It’s very early days but I managed to try some of these out and blog about my first impressions. Here’s my [blog entry](http://blackboard.swan.ac.uk/webapps/lobj-journal-bb_bb60/blog/LOTOOLS/_332089_1/20080115_2). It’s hosted on Blackboard so I’m not sure if it will be publicly visible. My apologies if it isn’t! Some of my views are probably influenced by [this Slideshare presentation](http://www.

Today my wife and I took a walk in Singleton Park and the botanical gardens and I snapped one or two interesting views with my new camera. I love the dramatic silhouettes that large deciduous trees make in the winter! This image has been converted to Black and White. There are more pictures on Flickr. [](http://picasa.google.com/blogger/)

jing-test-cmd Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling I am grateful to OUseful.info for the post that lead me to try out a new Screencasting tool from TechSmith called Jing. Made by the same company that makes SnagIt (an indispensable screen caspture tool) and Camtasia Studio (a screencasting tool that I covet but can’t afford), Jing is a “couldn’t be simpler” tool for making screencasts that you can share. The results can be shared with others as videos via (charged for service) Screencast.

André Roberge has created three screencasts on the use of Crunchy. Crunchy is an interactive Python interpretor that runs inside the Firefox browser and can be used to create interactive Python tutorials, library documentation, demos and tests. The principle is similar to “docucentric design” which was explored by one of my PhD students. The key benefit of the Crunchy approach is that documents are just web pages with embedded tasks. It is worth investigating whether Crunchy can be combined with a wiki to add some value to my current research project.

It’s been a while since I blogged, but the reason is that I’ve been on holdiday with the in-laws in Regensburg (Bavaria: see picture) and am undergoing the always time consuming task of catching up with RSS feeds and email. Nearly three weeks worth this time! I’ve spotted a few interesting things in the feeds that deserve further investigation and commentary, for now just check out the links that are tickling my fancy.

A useful survey of the top 10 programming languages used in web development by Stephen Ward of dailybits.com has been published on ReadWriteWeb. In addition to HTML and CSS, my students have some experience of Java, JavaScript, PHP, ASP.NET/C# and SQL and they see Ruby on Rails in action. So we’re doing a good job of building up a good portfolio of marketable skills at Swansea University.

The [Swansea Learning Lab](http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk) had planned that tomorrow there would be a “lunch and learn” [E-Learning Showcase](http://swansea-learninglab.blogspot.com/2007/10/e-learning-showcase-come-and-find-out.html) at which I was going to present the “Blackboard Quest”. Unfortunately, due to lack of interest, this session has been postponed. However, as I already had the slides ready, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and share what I was going to say anyway and test-drive a nifty new Web 2.

Harvard College Extension School’s “Introduction to Computer Science” is running again. This course, run by David J. Malan, is an excellent example of the use of multimedia for distance learning. The 12 week programme (which recommenced on 17th September) is designed for adult learners and distance learning and goes from bits and bytes through algorithms, programming and the web. David invites the world to follow along by making audio and video recordings of his lectures, his notes and additional golden nuggets of content that are provided by his teaching assistants, all available through an RSS feed.

After reading OpenLearn Unit Content Feeds via OPML and Click On Series 2 by Tony Hirst (both of which use Grazr: “Easy feed grazing and sharing”), I was today inspired to create a del.icio.us bookmarks and RSS feed aggregator for one of my courses which starts in a week and a half. Here’s a report on my experiences! First-off I should say that Grazr is a web tool that takes either an RSS feed or an OPML file and, through the magic of Javascript, creates a dynamic feed viewer that can be embedded into any web page.

And Common Craft tells you why it matters! On on Tuesday 18th September, Google [announced](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html) the arrival of a new collaborative presentation tool which they call simply *presentation *. Annew member of the [Google Docs suite](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html) (which already includes a collaborative Word Processor and a Spreadsheet application), *presentation* provides a web-based tool for creating and developing presentations. It’s not as capable as PowerPoint, but probably passes the 80-20 rule. Plus it’s collaborative (you can share presentation development duties with others) and web publishable.

I have just created my first [DokuWiki](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki) plugin (in fact it’s my first PHP program!). It provides a way to mark-up Command Line Interface (CLI) transcripts, such as UNIX shell sessions, etc for user documentation. I’m using it to format a [UNIX tutorial](http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=eg-253:unixtut) for my students, but it could be used for other things. For some examples see: [test:cli](http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/dokuwiki/test:cli). For the plugin itself see [plugin:cli](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/plugin:cli) at the DokuWiki [plugins repository](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:plugins).

Just a quick blog to note a couple of articles on effective note taking for students from [lifehack.org](http://lifehack.org): - [Taking notes that work](http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/advice-for-students-taking-notes-that-work.html) - [Using a wiki for note taking.](http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/advice-for-students-use-a-wiki-for-better-note-taking.html) Link from Wendy Boswell on [lifehacker](http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/156848762/how-to-take-killer-notes-299928.php). Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

I was at a “lunch and learn” session on Monday talking about Personalized Learning Environments and someone asked a question about custom searches for research and RSS feeds. I just found this [article](http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/09/06/creating-google-custom-search-engines.html) cited in [Lifehacker](http://lifehacker.com/software/google/step-by-step-guide-to-making-a-custom-search-engine-297785.php) which may answer those questions. Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

Renate and I watched the Red Arrows from Swansea Beach today. The display was part of a two day Air Display put on by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and Swansea City and County Council. I took a little bit of footage on my little Canon IXUS 50 and I edited the footage into a little movie which I uploaded to YouTube. I’ve also uploaded a few photos to Flickr. Enjoy!

Howard Lewis-Ship has blogged about the [recommendation of Java as a First Language](http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2007/08/blindness-of-james-gosling-java-as.html). This is a topic that has been exercising me for a couple of years (although I no longer teach an introductory programming course). Howard is right when he states that: > Java is extremely monolithic: in order to understand how to run a simple Hello World program, you’ll be exposed to: > > > - Classes > - Java packages > - Static vs.

Discovered yesterday in my massive “first-day back” trawl of my RSS feeds was this interesting visualization of the most important web destinations shown as an underground or metro map (actually based on Tokyo’s I believe). One version is a clickable image (with pop-up snap shots of the sites themselves) that you can use as a browser start page which should provide hours of fun. You can also get PDFs that print the map in A3 size as well as the possibilty to buy A2 posters, use it as a desktop image or a screen saver (Mac OSX only!

It’s been a while but I’m sort of back in harness after my vacation (even if actually at home in my pyjamas). One of the issues that always occurs after a period away is dealing with the email after a period away. To this end, this video by Merlin Mann of 43folders may help. It provides some useful tips about how to deal with after-vacation email as well as the ongoing problem of dealing with email on a daily basis.

At yesterday’s School of Engineering Graduation Reception, Multimedia Technology graduate Andrew Robinson was awarded the Arthur Austin Prize. Andrew is accompanied by Professor Nigel Weatherill (Head of School), Jim Lindley, Honorary Treasurer of the Wales South West Local Branch of the Insitution of Engineering Technology, and me. Arthur Austin was a long serving member of the South West Wales Branch of the IEE and was a pioneer in cinema. The award is named in his honour and is a gift of the Wales South West Branch of the IET.

Like any proud father I was happy to have helped my Institution deliver another batch of ICCT graduates. Yesterday, it was gradutaion day and some of the “class of 2007” are pictured here. Good luck chaps and don’t forget me, particulary when you’re rich.

An interesting article “Why TV on demand insists you use its chosen browser” by Kate Bevan in today’s TechnologyGuardian indicates that it is not only the BBC that has wedded itself to a Microsoft Windows XP/IE/Media Player solution to its Video on Demand (VOD) service. Apparently Channel 4’s 40D service has the same limitations, and I can report first hand that SKY Anytime doesn’t work on Vista either. Apparently it’s all a question of reaching the most users while satisfying the distribution restrictions of the rights holders.

In my pursuit of procrastination (I’m supposed to be writing supplementary [summer resit] examinations) I’ve been through my feeds and am now watching Stephanie Booth’s excellent Google Tech Talk on Localization (which incidentally is a trickier problem than most English speakers realise). Whilst listening, I was following the links to Stephanie’s blog Climb to the Stars and from there to her del.icio.us link collection and discovered a useful tip. She bookmarks links to the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) record for the films that she’s seen and tags them films seen cinema , films seen dvd, etc.

You may have heard about the BBC’s plans to release iPlayer which will allow license fee payers to watch BBC programs on their computers. Unfortunately, the system is targeted at Windows and uses Microsoft Media Player and Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect the content. While the use of some form of DRM to protect the content seems to me eminently sensible (I don’t see how the BBC, which outsources most of its production, could offer any form of Video on Demand (VOD) without protecting the Artistic Property of itself and its partners), the choice of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Media Player and Microsoft DRM does potentially disenfranchise a small but significant minority of computer users.

In a knowing echo to Edward R. Murrow’s indictment of Senator Joe McCarthy (recently immortalized in George Clooney’s film film), Keith Olbermann has used the closing of his eve-of-July 4thMSNBC Countdown program (link includes video) to publicly castigate the current President and Vice President of the United States – suggesting that they both resign. To paraphrase the tag line: “I didn’t vote for him,” [John Wayne referring to JFK] once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.

Tom Johnson strkes a chord with his latest [blog](http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2007/07/03/motiviations-for-switching-from-desktop-to-online-tools/) posting on [i’d rather be writing](http://www.idratherbewriting.com) wherein he talks about moving from desktop to online tools. Here’s his list which of tools, many of which I find I am already using (but not exclusively yet): - Instead of Microsoft Outlook, use Gmail. - Instead of FeedDemon, use Google Reader. - Instead of Microsoft Word, use Google Docs and Spreadsheets (if only!). - Instead of to-do lists and other notes stored on Word documents, use Mediawiki Todoist and Dokuwiki.

I’ve been reading a lot recently about Yahoo! Pipes so I thought I’d give it a try myself. I created a simple feed aggregator by merging the RSS feeds for my Google reader starred items, del.icio.us, and the RSS feed for this blog together and output as a new feed. I had to do some minor manipulation, for example to remove duplicates (which you get when you star, bookmark or link-blog the same item) and to sort the merged feeds into descending order of publication date.

In a follow-up to his blog article on Digital Media (reported in my article about serendipity), OU Educational Technologist Tony Hirst has used the web 2.0 site SplashCast to mash up a presentation with the cited videos. Here’s Tony’s blog article, and here is the presentation. The end result serves both as an interesting introduction to the educational possibilities of digital media and an interesting case study of what can be done with access to video sharing sites and the web.

Seen in today’s Guardian is news of the impending July 27th release of the BBC’s new content-on-demand iPlayer. Unfortunately, acording to the article and Guardian blogger Bobbie Johnson, it won’t run on Vista which adds it to a growing list of essential software (which includes Quicktime and iTunes) which won’t run on my newly upgraded laptop. Still, we still have XP on the computer at home so next time we miss an episode of Dalziel and Pascoe because of a recording clash on the Sky+ box, all will not be lost!

It’s not technology related, but the arrival of new Gordon Brown as new PM, ought to be marked somehow, even if a day late! My personal Brown story: I was once within three feet of Gordon in the ticket hall of the Paddington Station underground. He was in the opposition then, so got around using public transport. I don’t suppose he’d remember me. (image originally published on the BBC news web site.

So we’re all agreed. Blogs: good; email: bad. Wikis: good; sending round attachments to a dozen people and then having to merge all the changes by hand afterwards: bad. This one goes out to all my colleagues who really do want to send out attachments by email and merge changes manually. (No, I tell a lie, they want to send out printouts of documents and merge red-lined versions back into the electronic documents manually!

Just published by Lee LeFever on the CommonCraft site is a new “paper works” video on Web 2.0. This time its social networking: which apparently is all about finding a life partner or finding a job. Since, in my case, I’m happy with both, I fear that social networking has little to offer. Still, enjoy the video. Comments: AJCann - Apr 4, 2010 Yeh, English is a bitch, ain’t it? (Just noticed I made exactly thre same known error in an email I sent).

Following a link in Stefan Tilkov’s blog to another blog entry by John Lam which claims that Rails has been ported to JavaScript by Steve Yegge of Google, I came across this intriguing article by Mr Yegge published back in February. He gives a lot of hints but doesn’t actually name the NBL: but from the speculation in the comments and now this announcement, it looks like it might have been JavaScript!

### Serendipity: or the fundamental interconnectedness of all things > [The World Wide Web is] the only thing I know of whose shortened form — www — takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for. – Douglas Adams When reading [my river of news](http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2007/06/day-in-20-life-part-2.html), I often come across interesting cross-links and related ideas. (I guess because I am reading lots of sources there are *bound *to be some that are related.

A couple of interesting articles were posted on [Read/WriteWeb](http://www.readwriteweb.com) on Friday. In the first, Richard MacManus [discusses ](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20_all_you_need_to_know.php)the support platforms (including [Elgg](http://elgg.org/) which we use at my [institution](http://oremi.swan.ac.uk)). In the second Josh Catone [discusses](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_20_backpack_web_apps_for_students.php) the range of Web2.0 tools that are available to students as a sort of portable, always connected “backpack”. Although the first article provides a useful overview of some of the key ideas and platforms being used in “e-learning 2.

[Roumen Strobl](http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/) is a Netbeans “evangelist” who works for Sun in Prague. He produces the [Netbeans Podcast](http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/category/Podcasts) and numerous screencast demos of the [Netbeans IDE](http://www.netbeans.org). In this very [useful article](http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/recording_high_quality_demos_screencasts) he explains how he creates screencasts (like [this one](http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/why_netbeans)) and it’s well worth reading to find out how a professional does it! Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

If you want to share URLs with your students, tag your del.icio.us bookmarks with a module code. If you publish the link to the tag, your students will get up-to-date access to your links and it’s easy for you to add more. I find it much more more flexible and convenient than the External links feature in Blackboard! You can even create an RSS feed for your links! Here’s one I made earlier: del.

In my previous article in this series, I described how I use the All Items mode in Google Reader to efficiently wade through a large number of articles from my subscribed-to RSS feeds. In this article I show you how I mark, bookmark and occasionally blog about interesting items that I find in my daily news. The underlying justification for this process is an attempt to supplement my memory with minimum effort!

This is Part 2 in a planned series of essays on living life online. Part 1 is here. The whole series is tagged mylifeonline for ease of access. Reading the News I read the news today, oh boy – John Lennon In the previous article I showed you my Firefox start up page. In this article I’m going to drill down into my iGoogle portal concentrating on a typical news reading session.

Just announced on the [Efficient Academic Google group](http://groups.google.com/group/The-Efficient-Academic/browse_thread/thread/87d95a64a0c4b8b3/1a89504865a94f33?#1a89504865a94f33) is this “Link Blog” on the [101 Best Teaching Resources](http://101teachingresources.blogspot.com/). An interesting source of ideas and worth keeping an RSS feed on. Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

Richard McManus of the Read/WriteWeb blog has published an article on [Firefox browser add-ins](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefox_add-ons_all_you_need_to_know.php) which includes the top ten list, links to reviews of the “officially” recommended add-ins and some discussion of what will be coming in Firefox 3. Comments give lists and links to other add-ins. My personal list of addons that I use every day: - [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/) addin for blogging. - The [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension) addin for tagging web pages. - The [del.

Introduction Over the last year or so I have been dipping my toes more and more into the on-line world and experiencing first-hand the Web 2.0 phenomenon. I thought it was time I formally started to report my experiences and reflect on how I am using Web 2.0 technologies. So this is part 1 in a planned series of essays on living life online. Hopefully there’ll be something that others, particularly colleagues at Swansea University, will be able to pick up.

Announced on the W3C news site yesterday (13th June) and just today spotted while trawling my RSS feeds, is the news that Sir Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) has been appointed as a member of the Order of Merit by H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth II. Sir Tim, as you know, invented the World Wide Web, which made this blog possible, and so changed the world as we know it ;-). He’s definitely a hero of mine.

I’ve been trying to attend the JISC innovating e-learning conference 2007 but what with final year assessment and external examination boards coming up, it’s been difficult to participate, even as a lurker! However, one thing that occurs to me is that sticking the letter e in front of a real-world concept does not give it magical powers! So we have e-learning, e-portfolios, e-assessment, e-etc, but what are they really? Aren’t they just the real-world concepts supported by technology?

Came across a recommendation of another Web-based To Do List application while going through my RSS feeds this morning. This application was recommended by Lachlan Hardy on Read/Write Web blog and so I signed up. One feature that immediately sets it apart is that it can link to gmail via a Firefox plug-in, so if you come across an email that needs action you can tag it inside gmail and it is added to your to do list.

I have subscribed to this Blog in Oremi (Swansea University’s implementation of Elgg) so this entry should appear both in my RSS aggregator (called Resources in Oremi) and also as a Blog entry inside my Oremi space. I have similarly added by del.icio.us bookmarks to the same feature, so if I bookmark this item, it should also appear as a Blog entry inside Oremi. I have been less than impressed by Oremi’s blogging and wiki features so far.

I’m indebted to Brady Forrest on O’Reilly Radar for the link to this cool video by Lee & Sachi LeFever that explains how Wiki works. There’s also a companion video RSS in Plain English that I haven’t embedded here, but which is just as good.

I now have a del.icio.us “[link blog](http://feeds.feedburner.com/Delicious/cpjobling)” feed like (Dion Almaer’s) courtesy of [feedburner.com](http://feedburner.com). Check it out! Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

Jon Udell has [blogged](http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/05/24/restful-web-services/) about the new [RESTful web services](http://www.crummy.com/writing/RESTful-Web-Services/) book by Richardson and Ruby (see [New book ordered](http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-book-ordered.html)). In his post refers to an [interview](http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/08/25.html) he did last year with Roy Fielding and another with the authors that was then in post production but was [published](http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1830.html) today. I’ve got a coffee in my hand and I’m off to listen to them both. [p.s. I picked up the [link](http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/05/23/Link-Bait) to Jon’s piece from Sam Ruby’s [blog](http://intertwingly.

Today, my colleague Dr John Mason and I interviewed one of my MEng students who has submitted a research dissertation on Free and Open Source Software in Engineering Education. Just prior to the interview, John showed me this site which he had picked up by Googling “open source education brazil“. It wasn’t picked up by my student in his literature review (which to be fair was directed to the more “professional” search engines on-line like IET Inspec and IEEE XPlore) but it looks like a great resource and I shall need to add it to my list of sites worthy of a longer look.

After an announcement on the Learning Lab blog, I had signed up for the on-line REAP (Re-Engineering Assessment Practices) conference that took place between 29th and 31st May last week. And then with examination assessment and other distractions, promptly forgot all about it. Because I also neglecting my email, I also missed all the reminders that appeared in my in-box until Thursday lunchtime. So I was only able to catch part of the final on-line discussion session!

Eric Amstrong has published a nice summary of some of the main topics that caught his attention at this year’s JavaOne. The topics are listed as: Scripting Languages on the JVM Improved JRE Insallations Java Quick Start Service Java Modules Java 7 Language Java 7 Tools User Interface Testing with FEST Sun ID System DITA Pod Writing DSLs in Ruby and I have highlighted the ones of particular interest to me.

Dion Almaer has provided a nice new portal to the Google Tech Talk Showcase of tech videos that are hosted on Google Video. I’ve been picking these up from a search feed that looks for the engEdu tag on Google Videos and watching the videos for a couple of months now. Dion’s new showcase site now puts everything in one place. Of course, there’s also an RSS feed that in Google Reader shows you the videos right there in your feed.

Dion Almaer [blogs](http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/05/google-developer-day-fantastic.html) about the Google Developer Day which took place at several locations worldwide on 31st May. I stumbled upon the announcement of [Google Gears](http://youtube.com/watch?v=cQyha30nm6k) yesterday among the growing collection of [YouTube](http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=GoogleDeveloperDay&p=r) videos recorded at the various events. Expect to see follow-ups and links to comments on this event and the technologies announced at Dion’s [Google Code Updates](http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com) blog and reviews of some of the key videos here. Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.

Charles Nutter has today [blogged](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/06/jruby-100rc3-released-and-this-is-it.html) that JRuby 1.0.0RC3 has been released and that this is expected to be the final release candidate before the release of 1.0 which will follow later this week. Time to try it out I guess! Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

I’ve just ordered RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby (Published May 2007, O’Reilly Media Inc). I plan to have at least one lecture on REST (representational state transfer) and up to now the only definitive reference was Roy Fielding’s PhD thesis. I was going to buy this book anyway but an interview with the authors and a free chapter available was made available yesterday on InfoQ prompted me to take action.

Just published on [InfoQ](http://www.infoq.com/) is a video recorded at last year’s [Java and Object-oriented](http://jaoo.dk/conference/) (JAOO) software engineering conference. Rod, Enterprise Java guru and original developer of the Spring Framework gives a “[state of the union](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/rod-johnson-are-we-there-yet)” statement on Enterprise Java in which he states that progress has been made but we still have a ways to go. In particular he points to the need to put Domain Objects and Domain Driven Design at the centre of our enterprise applications and argues for an architecture that in some sense inverts the traditional service-layered model of enterprise applications.

Version 2.0 of the RTS Specification (JSR 1.0) was announced in one of the Keynotes at JavaOne 2007. In Podcast #124, The Java Posse interview Greg Bollella and Dave Hofert of the Java RTS team. The interview gives a nice overview of what real-time means in the Java context. I’m now looking forward to the release of the recorded lectures. (The slides are already available.) You have to join the Sun Developer Network to access these, but registration is free.

MS Frontpage was long known (and often derided) for its tendency to walk all over web standards. It looks like this is about to change. [Best Tech Videos On The Net](http://www.bestechvideos.com/) (which incidentally is a great place for finding new Tech Videos) has just published a set of videos and demos from [Microsoft MIX07](http://visitmix.com/). One of these that I’ve just watched concerns how the new version of [Microsoft Visual Studio (ORCAS)](http://www.

Another hero on video. This time Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the WikiWikiWeb, interviewed by John Gage of Sun Microsystems at the Computer History Museum. As well as Wiki, Ward discusses other key developments, such as Class-Resources-Collaboration (CRC) cards, Software Design Patterns and Extreme Programming. http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-7739076742312910146&hl=en-GB

While doing some vaguely formulated research today (it is a Bank Holiday so vagueness is allowed!), I did a search for Wiki on [Google video](http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=wiki) today and came across this video of a presentation by Jeremy Ruston (developer of [TiddlyWiki](http://www.tiddlywiki.com/)) recorded (I believe – the video description is a bit unclear) at a meeting on social software held in Vienna last year. You can’t see the slides, but it is clear that, for documentation, Jeremy has no love for the standard office tools and makes a good case for [wikis](http://www.

[](http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/cpjobling/FreshAndCrispy/photo?authkey=heoth6zZyFY#5066259224770454226) Me wearing my birthday present Ahlem sent me a Birthday present which I’m wearing in this picture. I’m watching the FA cup final. The text, which comes from an episode of the Simpsons is: C:/DOS C:/DOS/RUN RUN/DOS/RUN Renate took the photo!

Today, I’ve been mostly watching Google videos! Aside from the previously blogged video on the death of the desktop I’ve also watched Brion Vibber’s Google Tech Talk on Wikipedia and the MediaWiki software that drives it. Also from Google Video was this Documentary on Open Source available on Google Video: > “Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, and the open source and free software movements.

In this video, recorded at Google and released as a [TechTalk Video](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6856727143023456694), Aza Raskin from [Humanized](www.humanized.com), the company behind [Enso](http://www.humanized.com/products/), tells us what the next user interface technology may look like. http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6856727143023456694&hl=en Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

Just a quickie to note that this blog has had a name check in the Swansea Learning Lab Blog in an article about Bloggers at Swansea U. It’ll be interesting to see if I get any more visitors and comments. And for those of you who are wondering, the the title is a pun!

I have created a Google Code project for the continued development of one of my project student’s projects (A Module Catalogue for my School). This is the first of (I hope) many Google Hosted projects that will provide my students with valuable experience in the use of modern software project development tools.

Just watched a [fascinating video](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5078334075080674416) of a new gesture-based writing system called Dasher on Google Tech Talks. Dasher is a writing system which uses information theoric concepts to allow the user to steer through an emerging web of possible word completions. Developed at Cambridge University and demonstrated by Dave McKay, [Dasher](http://www.dasher.org.uk/) is seen as a tool with immediate applicability for mobile phone users as an alternative to predictive texting and for people with disabilities.

I completed the installation of Ubuntu 7.04 [started yesterday](http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2007/05/upgrading-ubuntu.html) and it worked across the network just fine. I then installed [Automatix2](http://www.getautomatix.com/) as recommended by [Geertjan](http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/entry/ubuntu_7_04_beryl_streaming) and installed a bunch of development tools (Java 6, Eclipse, Netbeans). Interesting to note that the Automatix2 Eclipse bundle seems to have been tuned for Linux development and comes with PyDev, various Apache Commons libraries, Ant etc. Pity the Windows version doesn’t! Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

Upgrading Ubuntu is apparently only possible using the alternative CD or over the network. Having tried and failed to leap over 6.10 to install directly from the 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” release onto my old laptop I reinstalled 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” with a separate home partition (an implicit recommendation that doesn’t seem to be the default) with the intention of upgrading. The recommendation would appear to be to do this release by release.

Liberty Crowd Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling. Neath-Swansea Ospreys just managed to beat Leinster 19-17 in their final home game of the 2006-2007 season. Still a slim chance of winning the Magners’ League,

As an exercise in one of my level one courses I get my students to write a blog on some research topic of their choosing. I then get them to assess each others’ blog and award each other marks for content. This blog on Spam in the Internet was the winning entry this year. The others were: The history of the Internet hamad.blog Global warming Tackling Spam in the Internet

As a first part in a series of experiments on [light-weight markup languages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language) (e.g. for blogs, wilkis, presentations etc) I have installed the [PyBlosxom](http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/) blogging tool. It tool a few minutes more than the 10 minutes claimed in the [user guide](http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/1.3.1/manual/x78.html). But it’s working now. For future reference the URL (or should that be [URI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier)) is [http://tinyurl.com/2gyqvx](http://tinyurl.com/2gyqvx). An advantage of PyBlosxom (and [Perl Blosxom ](http://www.blosxom.com/) that inspired it) is that the blog entries are just text files which can be edited in any text editor and kept under version control.

In which [Dave Raggett](http://www.w3.org/people/raggett) presents the state-of-the-art in Web Forms: that is HTML Forms versus the richer XML standard XForms. Most folks these days have to resort to clever, complex, JavaScript to achieve sophisticated UI effects in the current crop of HTML standards (with all the issues around cross-browser compatibilty that that implies). Dave is proposing a *transitional approach* based on HTML plus portable JavaScript that can provide XForms-like behaviour (declarative validation, rich data types, forms logic) in the current crop of browsers.

This week I’ve been [dipping into and watching](http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2007/04/educational-videos-from-google.html) a lot of Google TechTalks with the [engEdu tag](http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=engedu) on Google video. I guess like visiting the library shelves and *browsing* (something I really ought to make time for!) as opposed to just hitting the catalogue for a specific title, this tends to throw up interesting things that you wouldn’t otherwise come across. One such was a TechTalk by [Mark Birbeck](http://internet-apps.blogspot.com) of [formsPlayer.

It’s my wife Renate’s birthday today. Happy birthday darling!

Just discovered [iStalkr.com](http://www.istalkr.com/): a *Lifecasting* site which allows you to add RSS feeds from all your stuff and creates a *time line* of your activities. I [signed up today](http://www.istalkr.com/users/cpjobling) and have added streams from my: - [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us/cpjobling) bookmarks - [twitter.com](http://twitter.com/cpjobling) twitterings - Starred [google reader items](http://http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/12981735514196780717/state/com.google/starred) - [Flickr photos](http://www.flickr.com/photos/51214457@N00/) - And this blog… So now, theoretically, I should be able to start to automatically build a complete record of my “*for public consumption*” activities just by *doing stuff*.

Here’s a [nice example](http://www.almaer.com/blog/archives/001455.html) of what can be done with Java applets! After downloading the (full!) JRuby implementation as an applet Dion shows that a little JavaScript can make it possible to execute a Ruby program in the browser. In the example, JRuby scripts are evaluated “onclick” and from a text input window. I wonder if anyone has done this with Groovy too? Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

I’ve just been watching a [video](http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6852287090518403675&q=engEDU+connexions), presented by Richard G. Baraniuk of Rice University, (part of the Google TechTalks series) on [Connexions ](http://cnx.otg) a non-profit start-up launched at Rice University in 1999 that aims to reinvent how we write, edit, publish, and use textbooks. Very inspirational and certainly worth a deeper look. Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

Google runs a regular programme of educational presentations by eminent software developers about interesting web and code development technologies, tools and techniques. The great thing is that the presentations are videoed and put on-line on Google video. It also seems to go out and about in recording events at local user groups and records those as well. I discovered this great resource a couple of days ago and have been taking advantage of the Easter break to soak some of this good stuff during the Easter break.

Just updated my template to rounders 2. Gotta keep things fresh right?

Under the heading of *it might be useful* I [signed up](http://twitter.com/cpjobling) with Twitter. There don’t seem to be any tools (extensions, google gadgets, etc) that make it easy to use from Firefox as it seems that SMS and Instant Messaging would seem to be the preferred interface. And I guess for the purpose (quick notes to say what you’re doing) that makes sense. I’ll have to install an AIM client now though!

After a recommendation in this week’s Technology Guardian I discovered [LibraryThing](http://www.librarything.com) another beta/web2.0/link/social/tagging web site. This time for books. I’ve started putting [my book collection](http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=cpjobling) into it. Apart from the benefits of having a complete library catalogue on-line, the social networking aspects could be interesting. It can also be used in marking books for a class reading list. See [EG-146 Reading List](http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=eg-146) as an example. powered by [performancing firefox](http://performancing.com/firefox)

It’s the end of another term. Four weeks without students but lots of boring admin to do. powered by [performancing firefox](http://performancing.com/firefox)

I’ve just returned to my office after attending a Lunch and Learn session on Blogging and the uses of Blogging in education. Nichola van den Berg from LIS was the presenter and she gave a very nice introduction to blogging to an audience of academics who were new to the subject. A couple of things that I took away from the session were (1) I could do more to get my students blogging and (2) I could do more with this blog.

I have just registered for the domain cpjobling.org via the free version of Google Apps. I’ve got a new web site up and running but it’s a bit sparse. However at only $10 for nominet site registration and free web, application, email and collaboration hosting (within limits) it’s a snip!

Three items of note from Charles Nutter’s ‘blog: 1. [JRuby 0.9.8](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/behind-scenes-jruby-098-released.html) has been released with 98% support for Ruby on Rails. The road to a 1.0 release seems well signposted. 3. Netbeans support for Ruby and JRuby is “[even better than expected](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/netbeans-6-ruby-support-even-better.html)” (see the [demos](http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/two_demos_jruby_on_rails) on Roman Strobl’s blog) 5. [Ruby on Grails](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/ruby-on-grails-why-hell-not.html) – Charles has analyzed the contents of the grails project and concludes that it could easily be fronted by JRuby rather than Groovy.

Glen Smith has launched a new blog aggregation site called GroovyBlogs.org. Created in just 20 hours in Grails, the site attempts to gather all the news that’s hot in the Groovy world and present it in one place. The source code is also available.

The [learning lab](http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk) at my University launched its first podcast today. I feel obliged to blog about it as Chris Hall interviewed me about the *Blackboard Quest* that I developed as a Blackboard training exercise for first year engineers. The podcast is [here](http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk/podcasts.html). The interview itself is quite quiet compared to the rest of the podcast, but then people have always said that I mumble! powered by [performancing firefox](http://performancing.com/firefox)

I have published another literate program on literateprograms.org. This one shows how the Rot13 encoding system can be implemented in Java. However, that is trivial! The real point is to document the basic use of JUnit testing and Apache Ant which are standard tools in the professional Java developer’s toolbox (in fact they make Java just about usable Within 24 hours of the first mention of my program, another literate programmer had documented the altogether more elegant implementation as a sed script.

I am grateful to [Dion Almaer](http://www.almaer.com/blog/archives/001379.html) for pointing me to a new add on for Windows called Enso Launcher which allows you to launch applications right from the keyboard. For example you just hold the Caps Lock key and type Op[tab]Ex release caps lock to open explorer. Not quite as quick as [windows]+E but not far off!. It also does stuff like spell checking any text anywhere. It also has the function I use a lot: changing upper case text to lower case text in any program or text field in programs other than Word!

I have installed an instance of [DokuWiki](http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki) which I am intending to use as a home page. Its current location is [eehope.swan.ac.uk/~eechris/dokuwiki/index.php](http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/%7Eeechris/dokuwiki/index.php) but eventually I hope to move it to [eehope.swan.ac.uk/~eechris](http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/%7Eeechris). powered by [performancing firefox](http://performancing.com/firefox)

I’m in the process of moving my Bloglines aggregation settings to Google Reader. The features that I like abou Google Reader that prompted this move are: I can add multiple tags to RSS feeds Reader shows you what’s new (and also what’s old) in all feeds or across tagged items: no more navigating complex folder structures the list display is easier to scan when you’re busy it’s easy to share feeds or individual articles

Mentioned in episode 100 of the Java Posse was a new (to me) open source language for the JVM called Fortress. Using a notation that looks literally more like mathematics than either Mathematica or Matlab, and claiming a place in the application domains that have been Fortran’s province since year dot, this looks like a language and a project that deserves further study.

I’ve been teaching Groovy as part of one of my final year bachelor modules for about two years now. My module EG-358: Software Applications gives a sort of overview of how software engineering is applied across the range of platforms from desktop through to embedded (I cover the Enterprise in a Masters level module) and it takes in such esoteric issues as design patterns, collaborative development, agile development, IDEs, real-time, concurrency, etc.

This Python recipe “ASPN : Python Cookbook : Replace occurrence of string in files under directory tree” has a comment that reminded me of the power of Perl. I am updating my slides for a lecture course that uses rst2s5 (a utility that uses Docutils/reStructuredText to generate S5 slides). When I wrote the original slides for last year’s course, rst2s5 was still in the Docutils Sandbox. It has now been promoted into the official Docutils distribution but some changes have been made.

Talk about information overload! I currently have 1675 unread items on my main blog roll in [Bloglines](http://www.bloglines.com). I just exported the OPML file of my subscriptions and imported it into [Flock’s](http://www.flock.com) RSS aggregator but as I’m sure that this only shows a few days worth, I’ll feel guilty forever unless I go through the list on Bloglines. I have to say Flock’s RSS reader is lovely to look at and very slick.

As reported today on TechCrunch Serbian developer Ilija Studen has released a free clone of the popular project management service Basecamp. Studen’s product is called ActiveCollab. It differs from Basecamp (a hosted web application for which, if you have more than one project or a team larger than 2, you pay a monthly subscription to use) in that the product is free and open source. It is also a PHP5/MySQL application that indiduals, small companies, and even, presumably, Universities can download and install on their own web server.

> In any programming language, a program to print “hello world” is a classic opener. It is also a useful indication of the complexity of the language, particularly from the point of view of the teacher and the learner. [Hello World (Java) – LiteratePrograms](http://en.literateprograms.org/Hello_World_(Java)) technorati tags:[blogging](http://technorati.com/tag/blogging), [flock](http://technorati.com/tag/flock), [literate.programming](http://technorati.com/tag/literate.programming), [blog](http://technorati.com/tag/blog), [cpj](http://technorati.com/tag/cpj) Blogged with [Flock](http://www.flock.com “Flock”)

I needed to typeset two small figures side-by side in a document today. Tried minipages and twocolumns but to no avail. Then I found this little tip: Just put the figures into cells of a table! Simple, elegant and quite probably obvious. Thanks to Matt Guthaus for this one!

 Spent a nice weekend in Hedon with with my mom Sheila and her partner Terry (Pictured). This entry is really an excuse to use Picassa which I’ve just installed along with the Google Desktop Package. Picassa has the best UI for photo album work that I’ve seen and it also produces great CDs for exchange with friends. An it’s free! 

Blogger has just launched a new plug-in for Word that allows you to write your Blog articles in Word and upload it. _All *the *_usual **stuff that you’d expect. Tables and images are not supported. You’ll find the download page at http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html.

I have quietly admired Kathy Sierra’s approach to teaching for some time now and own all the Head First books (including the 2nd Edition of Head First Java). Kathy and her colleagues launched a Web Log Creating Passionate Users in December of last year. Today’s article Ten Tips for New Trainers/Teachers might be a good lauch point for me to learn about and apply some of these ideas in my own teaching.

I have played with Maven on and off for a while but as documentation is a bit patchy, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the “Maven Book” by Vincent Massol and Tim O’Brien’s (Maven: A Developer’s Notebook, O’Reilly, 2005) since it was announced some time ago. It’s been on pre-order at Amazon.co.uk for months but it finally arrived yesterday. I worked through chapter 1 in about two hours. Chapter 3 looks particularly interesting.

The incredible testimony to the US Senate by George Galloway. Needs to be recorded here for posterity.

I’ve just completed a couple of lab report marking sessions and saw the usual mistakes being made. By the usual process of serendipity I noted Writing Between the Lines from Andy Hunt (pragmatic programmer) which is well worth directing my students to. Here’s a nice pithy quote that I could see myself adding to the red-ink comments that I typically add to a returned report: Remember that writing is a conversation.

Note to self, latest version of Knoppix is 3.8.1. If I have time, project this (long) weekend, is to install Knoppix on our old home PC. I have the version that comes with Knoppix Hacks but might want to upgrade.

My blog template seems to have gottem messed up. I’ve had to save my sidebar settings to start a new look. I was getting bored anyway!

There’s some weird and wonderful stuff out there. Here was map I created at http://www.world66.com/myworld66 of the places I’ve visited in the world so far (site and image both gone from the internet!) It was a little misleading because I’ve only been to Georgia, Florida, Arizona and California in the States and New South Wales (well actually only Sydney) in Australia. Still, it’s a bit of a giggle.

I got my hands dirty trying to fix a bug in Megg last week. My main motivation, for what turned out to be a long weekend’s work, was a desire to use Mike Clark’s pragmatic automation template announced back in July last year. It wouldn’t load from the URL. It wouldn’t load when I downloaded the zip file and copied it into ./templates/pragouto-template. It wouldn’t load from ./pragauto-template. In fact, it would only work when I added it to the templates collection in the project directory and added it to megg.

Just watched this Screencast from Jon Udell on the power of client-side scripting and web services. It it Jon demonstrates a little bookmarklet that takes an ISBN from a page (demo works with Amazon) and looks the book up in a library. Jon’s blog has a page where you can create your own bookmarklet for various library catalogue systems so I created one for Swansea University. Here’s it is: javascript:var%20re=/([/-]|is[bs]n=)(d{7,9}[dX])/i;if(re.test(location.href)==true){var%20isbn=RegExp.$2;

Been watching presentations and demonstrations of Rails and Trails. Bookmarks online http://del.icio.us/cpjobling. Rails is a rapid web application development framework that makes developing CRUD interfaces a snap. It is based on the Active Record pattern, is written in Ruby and has a set of smart classes that automates initial view generation and the controller. By default, the model is essentially an active record. Trails is a Java framework inspired by Rails that leverages Hibernate, Tapestry and Spring to provide similar functionality.

I saw an article on this “coomunity bookmarking” site some time ago (in Thursday Guardian OnLine supplement I think) and signed up. Didn’t quite get it at the time, but today I read another Guardian OnLine article and I saw Jon Udell’s screencast. Now I think I start to understand. It’s a better way to do the kind of “link blogging” that I want to do when I haven’t got the time to write a more detailed entry.

< p>Other JavaPolis presentations that I need to check out are: J2ME Realtime Java AOP/AspectJ EJB 3.0 Hibernate JDO JavaServerFaces Spring Eclipse Struts Tapestry, and TestNG

Just watched Tim Boudreau’s JavaPolis presentation/demo of Netbeans 4.0. Looks good and worth a look over the weekend. I’m keen to try out the much discussed Eclipse project import feature and the mobile application developer tools which, if they work, will give me something more concrete to put into my final Software Applications lectures on “Embedded Systems”. < p>The last time I used Netbeans, I was put off by the fact that it came with it’s own copy of the JDK (which I already had) so it was a bit of a disk hog for no good reason; Mounting a CVS repository only worked if you had a CVS client installed and Ant was not as well integrated.

There’s a complaint in Britain that if you are waiting for a bus, you’ll be waiting for a long time, then two will come along at once! On Wednesday this week, I was burning the midnight oil trying to beg, borrow and steal some examples of realistic Groovlets (servlets in Grrovy) for my final lecture on Scripting Languages in which I wanted to cover web applications. Not one example in all the articles I read on the groovy home site could tell me how to actually get the parameters of a HTTP request as a map (I found out from the javax.

Another great presentation from last year’s JavaPolis, Tim Bray, inventor of XML, discusses dynamic languages and their relationship to Java. One of the earliest discussions on the topic of scripting languages and their potential to make a revolutionary impact on software development was, I believe, first mooted by Johm Oosterhout, the inventor of TCL, in IEEE Computer Magazine back in 1998 [1]. Tim Bray makes an updated case for using scripting (or dynamic) languages on the Java platform for many of the same reasons originally cited by Oosterhout.

Here in the UK, Universities typically send students off on holiday for the four weeks around the period in March-April when Easter falls. At the University of Wales Swansea (or Swansea University as it prefers to call itself [for marketing purposes)]) our Easter break is right in the middle of the teaching period. There are still three weeks of lecturing to go after Easter, and quite a lot of course preparation, marking, exam setting, course reviews and other admin stuff, but nonetheless it’s still a period for taking a breather, catching up on interesting stuff and adding stuff to this Blog.

Level 1 ICCT will be doing the first Ethereal lab to come out of my student Richard Owen’s final year project. Richard has created a wikipage on the ICCT wiki. Richard is looking for comments so hopefully the students will have some.

While reading Robert C. (Uncle Bob) Martin’s “UML for Java Programmers” [Prentice Hall, 2003] I came accross a reference to “Fitnesse” a wiki-based acceptance testing system. Looks very interesting and well worth a deeper look. I added Uncle Bob’s blog feed to Blogger.com (see my Blogroll) to track other interesting bits and bobs (pun unintended).

These are the articles I read while doing today’s Bloglines trawl that I thought worthy of note. Test driven development in Python by Jason Diamond in OnLamp.com Python Devcenter. Three-tier development with PHP5 by Luis Yordano Cruz in OnLamp.com PHP Devecenter

A long held artical of faith in the Java world is that Java is a Single Language solution. It’s the biggest differentiator between .NET and Java, for example. A summit was held at Sun HQ (reported by Tim Bray) [thanks to dion on TECH for the link] in which it is clear that Sun is interested in other languages that could run on the JVM. The obvious ones are Jython and Groovy, but present was Larry Wall (of Perl fame) and Guido van Rossum (of Python).

Jon Udell has just published an inspirational column in his “Prime Time Hypermedia” series on O’Relly.net. Called Software Movies, Jon shows how you can make much more immediate, high-impact, demos using video capture than is possible with text and images. He demonstrates this with a great example of how he used Windows Media Encoder (WME … a free download from MicroSoft) to capture a video demo of using xpath to make queries on his blog.

This is something that I always forget how to do. Here is the recipe adapted from Linux Server Hacks. < ol> First generate your key $ ssh-keygen -t rsa This created two files, ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. 5. Then copy the key pair to the host you want to login to $ ssh -l userserver “mkdir .ssh; chmod 0700 .ssh”* $ scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub *user@server:.ssh/authorized_keys2 6. Now you can login using $ ssh -l eechrisserver**

Chapter 2 of Jennifer Versperman’s Essential CVS (O’Reilly): CVS Quickstart Guide is online. I used it for quickly setting up my CVS repository on eehope.swan.ac.uk. The best tutorial introduction to CVS is the in Pragmatic Version Control (thoroughly recommend).

I am grateful to Adrian Colyer who has just annnounced the imminent arrival of some flash demos of AspectJ in aAction and also the online availability of presentations (and interviews) made by himself and Rod Johnson at a recent meeting (AOP2004) of the BeJUG (Belgian Java User Group).

I am grateful to the author of the “You are number 6″ blog for pointing out two great sources of information on All Things Java Related. In future I’ll be asking Fred and Eric about a lot of things! Definately a couple of links for my course pages.

Found a couple of useful sites which I’ll use to get LaTeX working with XEmacs. Using XEmacs to edit LaTeX files and Sridhar Lavu – LaTeX on Windows.

Came across this survey of Screen Presentation Tools by Michael Wiedmann whilest looking for ways to do lecture slides/notes in LaTeX. I was directed to that page by blog entry LaTeX beamer on the but she’s a girl… blog by way of a Google Search for LaTeX beamer. This was after finding a reference to the LaTeX beamer package (a similar package to Prosper) in New Beamer from Kai von Fietel’s Geek Notes2.

I liked Together for Java. Before it was bought by Borland, Together was available to academic institutions for free. I used it in my teaching. It had some of the best looking diagrams, could round-trip Java code, and auto-create sequence diagrams. All great stuff when you’re in the business of teaching Modeling and Java to beginning programmers. When Borland bought Together, the free academic licensing deals dissappeared also. Last year I had to rewrite my UML tutorials for Rational Rose (available for free for academic use from IBM) which is far less friendly.

Second article in new IBM developerWorks series alt.lang.jre is an introduction to the Groovy language by Andrew Glover entitled Feeling Groovy. The first article in the series is Get to Know Jython by Barry A. Feigenbaum and is also worth a read. Groovy has a possible advantage over Jython in that it has become the subject of a Java Community Process (JCP) project (JSR 241) and so may become a “standard” for scripting Java objects.

Thanks to dIon Gillard for this link. Having nothing much better to do today I watched J2EE Best Practices using a Real-Life Example a webinar by Carol McDonald. A good seminar showing how to use the Core J2EE Patterns to best affect. Comments on layering, the presentation, business and persistence layers all very good. But like Rod Johnson and Bruce Tate are telling us, a lot of these patterns are actually anti patterns whose purpose is to overcome architectural deficiencies in the J2EE architecture rather than best practice.

I have installed a SnipSnap Weblog/Wiki at eehope.swan.ac.uk:8668/space/start. Not sure how to make it start as a service because it launches an instance of a Jetty web server which is a Java Daemon process that can’t be killed by killing the shell script that started it. Thus you can start the server using an init script, but killing the server is not so simple!

Catch up with email (allow an hour). Play with OpenCMS for a while: Install documentation modules if necessary. Create a new engineering web site. Report any problems. Install SnipSnap: Create a blog. Play with the Wiki. Report any problems. Interview a student re his GDE Catch up with Blogines.

I’ve just spent the whole day trying to install OpenCMS on my SuSE 9.1 box. I got stuck trying to get access to MySQL. In the end I had to delete MySQL and delete the old databases. When I reinstalled I noticed that it advised my to mysqladmin -u root password ‘password’ mysqladmin -u root -h hostname passwd ‘password’ I didn’t do the latter first time around! When I fixed the error and changed the DB url to jdbc:mysql:<em>hostname</em>:3306/ it finally all worked.

I just did a google search for “collaborative programming” + wikki on google and came up with (the only match!) Pair Programming: More Learning and Less Anxiety in a First Programming Course. Not exactly what I expected to find, but very relevant nonetheless. Perhaps even better, the paper is hosted at The GE Master Teachers for Freshman Engineering at Northeastern University which seems to be a clearing house for best practice.

I just noticed that Blogger has updated its blog posting system. Along with the standard HTML composition window, Blogger now has a Compose window that gives a WYSYWIG view. It includes picture upload, numbered and unumbered lists, text coloring, fonts layout and keyboard shortcuts. Great stuff!

After an interest piquing article in yesterday’s Guardian Online All Eyes on Blinkx, I downloaded a beta copy of the Blinkx client. It’s currently 67% through indexing My Documents at the moment. Key features: It uses AI techniques to index the content of document rather than Google’s page ranking algorithm. It indexes documents and email inboxes on your own computer. It has smart searches It can produce a sort of concept map of the results of your search.

A really small HTTP server.

Over the next day or so I plan to work my way though Thomas Risberg’s tutorial Developing a Spring Framework MVC Application Step-by-Step. Read in conjunction with Rod Johnson’s new book, which I skimmed this morning, I should be up to speed with Spring in time to decide if it will work with my module EG-M42: Client-Server Programming with Java. If all goes well, I plan to have a look at Spring IDE for Eclipse and Spring Live before starting my own case-study project which will either be a reimplementation of the* World of Zuul* from Objects First with Java or George Reese’s bank account example from Database Programming with JDBC and Java.

At at meeting of the web strategy group various options of CMS were discussed. University is pursuing a tender from each of the following: RedDot Percussion TerminalFour Also mentioned wais an open source alternative OpenCMS which runs in a Tomcat+MySQL context. We hope to have a demo of the OpenCMS system in LIS later this week. In related news I installed Tomcat on eehope (my new SuSE 9.1 Server). Installation was via YaST and very smooth.

I today installed the latest beta of the new “Java 2 Version 5″ SDK on my laptop. I also received my copy of Java 1.5 Tiger A Developer’s Notebook by Brett McLaughlin and David Flangan, just released by O’Reilly. So I’m all set for some serious playtime.

Rod Johnson talks about lightweight containers, IoC (dependency injection), Spring, AOP, EJB and Java 1.5. The interview was recorded at this year’s TSS symposium. I’ve just gotten Rod’s new book (see also the review blogged yesterday) and this interview has gotten me all excited to dive in.

Mentioned by Bruce Eckel in his recent Talk blogged earlier, D is another programming language in the C/C++/C#/Java stable. This Language Comparison Table is a good place to start as is this Paper and Presentation. Another Blogger (Kurt Zhou) also also picked up on this.

First review of Rod Johnson’s new book J2EE Development without EJB by Dion Almaer on the ServerSide. As I’ve just had email from Amazon.co.uk that my copy was dispatched last week, I’ll reserve judgment for now. However, I’m hoping for some useful insights that will help in the redevelopment of my “Client Server Programming in Java” course. Pity it arrives too late to go into the booklist!

Bruce gave a talk at UC Berkley and 9 July 2004. This is his blog entry 7-9-04 Java Issues & Directions which popped under my radar cover via the Dion on Tech who blogged a ServerSide new forum announcement (which has comments). The blog links to a 2 hour 16 minute streamed video. “Be warned, those of you who feel Java is the best language, forever and without bounds, and that it has no limitations: herein I critize Java, but in the spirit of understanding the limitations of the language.

I have today announced the availability of a revised RST plugin that does most of the proposed functionality discussed here and announced in this Blog last Thursday. This is my first chance to give something nack to the open source community! It’s purely selfish of course! I need this functionality and I’ve just scratched my own itch!

Posted today to the Leo Developer’s forum. Context I have used the RST2 plugin for a couple of days translating a lab sheet for a programming exercise and think I have gotten a feel for how it works, and perhaps how it should work. Tracking back through the forums it seems clear that the original rst plugin (developed by Josef Dalcolmo) was intended only to produce reST documents. All the nodes of an @rst tree would become an reST document with the headlines becoming different levels of heading.

Warp is a new literate programming tool created by Harold Thimbleby of UCL to help accurately write about programs. The approach is described more fully in Explaining code for publication. The idea, in a nutshell, is to mark-up source code with commented XML tags so that code can then be extracted by the warp tool into a file that can be included in a word document or LaTeX file or even (using JavaScript) an HTML file.

Quickstart to installing and using Docutils.

Online, and seemingly publicly accessible, course on Java (for people with prior programming experience) with some very rich multimedia resources including streaming videos of lectures.

Today was an open day at UWS. Every department and school was expected to lay something on for potential students. Every admissions tutor (who usually gets lumbered with this sort of thing) is expected to take time off to be pleasant and show the little kiddies around. Except that all the labs that I would have shown were locked because no one had told the technicians that they should be opened!

I am following Ron Smith’s 15 June 2004 article Python development with Eclipse and Ant from IBM developerWorks. The first step is to install the PyDev plugin which is available at Eclipse update site http://pydef.sf.net/updates/. First problem is that when I try to call the python interpreter to run the test I get a launch error. Don’t know if this is an Eclipse, PyDev or Python problem. Launch configuration seems ok!

I have just downloaded and installed Eclipse 3.0. For safety’s sake I backed up my old workspace and deleted the .metadata folder. I also unzipped Eclipse into a clean directory. On startup, Eclipse now asks for a default workspace. This feature should make installation much easier on the School network, cause we can leave it to the students.

This interactive diagram to the Java universe is a flash application that links to the documentation. I thank Malcolm Davies on Java.Net for drawing our attention to this excellent resource. In a nutshell: “Developers learn and use Java _*to create and run *_Programs _*that make *_Devices _*and the *_Internet _*useful for *_People.”

This was posted today on techno.blog(“Dion”): techno.blog(“Dion”): The Brits like to kick a man when he is down… and very funny it is too! Not sure of the source of the images but it is so typical of the British approach to [lack of] success.

Lots of the great and the good around campus today, including AMs and MPs. This is why! Digital Technium which was Officially Opened Today Apparently some of our communication’s group PhD students had to look busy at their workstations inside although it was definitely a day to be outdoors!

Martin Fowler mentioned UMLet in his recent article on UmlSketchingTools which I blogged about earlier this week. A paper in which the authors (Auer et al, 2003) describe the ideas behind UMLet is very insightful and pretty much echoes my own experiences of over-blown UML tools in the teaching domain (and I’ve tried ArgoUML, Poseidon CE, Together and Rational Rose with variable — but mostly limited — success over the last three or four years).

Excellent article by Ron Smith on IBM developerWorks on how to set up and use Python with Eclipse and Ant. Will definately be using this to set up Eclipse 3.0 with Python support when the final version is released.

O’Reilly Network interviews the Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in OnLamp. Many nuggets including this one: **ORN**: Ward Cunningham once told me “With better IDEs, static languages such as Java are almost as easy to program in as dynamic languages.” You’re both fans of the Ruby language, especially when compared to more static languages. Do you think that the potential shift to writing business applications in slightly more dynamic languages such as Java and C# […] is good for programmer productivity and ease, or do those languages not go far enough?

Well what a match! I blame Motson … he couldn’t resist telling us how England had been in this or that situation before and lost! But I’m not gutted because we played well and went down fighting. Roll on the world cup! [image (c) BBC]

In about 45 minutes time (19.00 BST) I will be teaching some Engineering Summer School students how to register for, set up and use a Blogger.com group blog. Should be fun. The title link is to the support site. The only fly in the ointment is that England’s Euro2004 Quarter Final against host nation Portugal kicks off at 19.45! Still, nanny has given us all permission to leave early, so hopefully we won’t miss much!

A new tutorial article by Stefan Bodewig on the OracleTM Technology Network has been brought to my attention by a news article on TSS (thanks Sudhakar Ramakrishan). Describes the new , and tasks that should make ant even better! Will print and read the detail later, but I can’t wait to try some of these out on the EG-140 build (which needs all kinds of scripting tricks to work).

Another approach to UML diagramming. This time publicised in Martin Fowler’s Blicki: MF Bliki: UmlSketchingTools. UMLGraph uses a mixure of javadoc tags and pic macros to do the hard work. Dr Spinelis argues for his declaritive approch in “On the Declarative Specification of Models, IEEE Software, 20(2):94-96, March/April 2003 which is on-line in PDF format at http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/jrnl/2003-IEEESW-umlgraph/html/article.html. Worth a look I think — as is the author’s (Domidis Spinellis) book Code Reading.

Jeremy Rayner’s June 15 blog entry directed me to another free drawing tool for UML diagrams. Thanks for the link! < p>I mentioned violet a couple of days ago. It is really simple, unfortunately it doesn’t have the ability to move classes around once positioned. This makes it a a bit hard to use. It is open source so that could be fixed of course! < p>Visual Thought is a drawing tool so it has the same advantages as Visio in that it’s not designed for MDA or for code generation, so you can happily use it for agile modelling.

BBC Match Reports on South Africa 31-17 Ireland Argentina 50-44 Wales Australia 35-15 Scotland. All the home sides lost the first tests, but there’s potential there!

BBC Match Report quote: New Zealand gave coach Graham Henry the perfect start to his reign as England suffered at Dunedin’s “House of Pain.” I’m gutted that the match kicked off 8.00 am UK time and I forgot to set the Sky+ box! Still Ireland versus South Africa this afternoon and Wales versus Argentina this evening. And the European Cup too! Super Saturday!

Not quite on topic, but well worth considering: “If I were sitting down to design a course today, I’d put at the top of my paper: What can I do to make them curious and interested? What can I do to get them to where they can be creative? And finally, What can I do to help them feel like THEY kick ass, as opposed to thinking that I kick ass?

Found this simple UML tool Violet on Cay Horstmann’s web site. Thanks to Frank Carver for starting a thread on tools for Java teaching on JavaRanch and Marlene Miller for suggesting Voilet.

I have a plan to refactor the lab exercises for EG-140 in readiness for automated submission and marking. The first step was to put the BlueJ projects that students upload into a new repository. However I wanted the repository to be such that all the projects would be within the eg-140-laboratory project but different subsets could be delivered to various audiences. For example, students starting a week’s work should be able to get hold of just a single project as in

I’m currently reading the free beta chapter of Version Control with Subversion from the forthcoming O’Reilly open book. Given that subversion can apparently use simple web technology, it may have more potential for use in a teaching situation than CVS — provided that the plugins for ant and eclipse are as good as the CVS ones! Watch this log for experiences on CVS versus Subversion.

Added g2swaroop.net – A Byte of Python – Free Python Book / Free Python Tutorial to my to read list. Thanks to Daniel Ayers for the heads up!

Refcards.com is a site where you can get handy reference cards for numerous open source tools and technologies. They can be printed double sided onto card (or paper) and fold into a three-column, easy-to-carry quick reference. Brilliant! The site had apparently disappeared for a while but is now back. Its author Andrew Ford has produced a new refcard for Template Toolkit. He has included some cards on Web technologies (very useful as handouts for my students!

Added this tech talk to my to watch list. Tech Talk: Scott Ambler on Agile Modeling and Development It’ll be interesting to hear the man!

New addition to my to read list ONJava.com: Template-Based Code Generation with Apache Velocity, Part 2 [Jun. 02, 2004] published yesterday. Here is Part 1.

Version 1.0.0 jMock – A Lightweight Mock Object Library for Java has been released. jMock is a framework that uses refelection (I assume) to programmatically define mock objects for unit testing. Tutorials and source code ready for downloading.

Adrian Colyer has tried to describe AOP without using the buzzwords. An attempt to answer a challenge thrown down at the last TSS symposium in The Aspects Blog. It boils down to DRY (don’t repeat yourself). So what we’ve really got in any non-trivial software application is not the ideal 1-to-1 mapping between concept and implementation, but an n:m mapping. No wonder software gets so hard to maintain, and so hard to understand, and so complex.

Daily trawl through the java.blogs feeds picked up a reference to ONJava.com: SSS (Small, Simple, Safe) [May. 26, 2004]. SSS is apparently a simple tool that allows you to instantiate and play with Java objects. It is apparently used and useful in teaching. I simply had to make a comment to the effect that BlueJ has had this feature for ever! Here’s my reponse in full: BlueJ is a simple Java IDE (avalable from www.

Lot of traffic on the blogosphere about the new Milestone 9 release of Eclipse. Here’s a memo to self to check this out later.

Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas The Pragmatic Programmers have published a brilliant article with the above title in Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, “OO in one sentence: Keep it DRY, Shy and Tell the Other guy”, IEEE Software, Vol.21 No. 3, pp 101–103, May/June 2004. In outline their main points are: DRY (don’t repeat yourself) states:> Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, and authoritative representation representation within a system.

My colleague Tim Davies and I assessed the web sites that form a key part of the UWS Micromouse project that is part of EG-252 Group Design Project. Some really good sites but my favourites were Group B which scored highest for style and Group E which scored highest for content and UML designs. Some bad apples too: Group D doesn’t have a site and Group F doesn’t have much content!

Committed myself to contributing to Headstart and EESW (two summer schools that we run in the School of Engineering) … again! Subject of my bit this year will be Blogging (or more formally Using the Internet as a Research and Collaboration Tool. The idea is that I’ll give the students a potted introduction to the Internet, www, semantic web, rss, blogging etc and then get them to create group blogs focussed on high-performance ballooning (our Summer School topic).

John Udell points to two great little nuggets from an Channel9 interview of Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wikki. Ward talks about the difficulties of programming in the modern context and how the Wikki came to be. Nice to see what Ward looks like too.

Something to look into: “JAM leverages the new import and target override features of Ant 1.6 to create a reusable, consistent Java build framework. JAM modules support JBoss, XDoclet, JUnit, Cactus, Struts, Castor, Resin and MDA/UML code generation. Maven’s POM and repository features are supported via a Maven-to-Ant bridge.” < p>Thanks to New Build Tool: J2EE + Ant = JAM on theServerSide.

Nice blog article about Java’s pass-by-reference semantics. I still think Kathy Sierra’s Campfire Story Pass-by-Value Please is a good an explanation of this difficult concept as you’ll find. And it’s nice and memorable. Kathy and Bert Bates make good use of the analogy in Head First Java too. < p>Thanks to Val’s Blog.

I need to develop a web application to allow student upload of Java programs for testing. A Jython servlet with some form of template engine for presentation may be part of the solution (full framework J2EE application seems overkill!). I came across several interesting articles after a simple Google search for Velocity and Jython. This one is definitely worth another look later: Pythlet.

So you can blog by email … does it work? Yes it does! —————————————– Emailed in…

This must be at least the third incarnation of the Fresh and Crispy blog. Maybe this’ll last longer than the others. Comments: My Open Story for #101openstories – Fresh and Crispy - Apr 2, 2017 […] a practitioner, I suppose my Open Educational Practice began when I launched this Blog back in 2004. Fresh and Crispy (the name is a pun on my initials) was originally hosted on Blogspot. It has […]

I am humbled at being made the 5th recipient of the prestigious #LTHEChat Golden Tweeter Award for [my] continuous commitment, valuable contributions and creative energy to the weekly LTHEchat as both a member of the community and as a volunteer member in two organising teams, from January to June 2016. My thanks to the LTHEChat community for this recognition! Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 2 #LTHEChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 1, 2017

On Friday I stumbled across #GuildChat which was discussing the Learning Management System (LMS) or what we in the UK call the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As a long-time participant in Wednesday’s #LTHEchat (@LTHEchat) I expected the chat to be “storified”, but as it wasn’t, I’ve taken the liberty of making my own record. Here it is. View the story “#GuildChat Readdress the LMS” on Storify About #GuildChat and #LTHEchat #GuildChat is a weekly Tweet Chat hosted by the eLearning Guild (@eLearningGuild)– a US membership organization that seems similar to the UK’s Association for Learning Technology (@A_L_T).

On Friday I stumbled across #GuildChat which was discussing the Learning Management System (LMS) or what we in the UK call the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As a long-time participant in Wednesday’s #LTHEchat (@LTHEchat) I expected the chat to be “storified”, but as it wasn’t, I’ve taken the liberty of making my own record. Here it is. View the story “#GuildChat Readdress the LMS” on Storify About #GuildChat and #LTHEchat #GuildChat is a weekly Tweet Chat hosted by the eLearning Guild (@eLearningGuild)– a US membership organization that seems similar to the UK’s Association for Learning Technology (@A_L_T).

View the story “#HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016” on Storify Comments: My CPD in 2016: Part 1 #HEAChat – Fresh and Crispy - Jun 4, 2017 […] It looks like I made a story for this one: See Unofficial Storify of #HEAchat/#LTHEchat February 2016. […]