Stephen Powell, thoughts mostly about learning

Reading the website about this new BBC project I couldn’t help but think back to the Ultralab project ‘Every Object Tells a Story‘ with the Victoria and Albert Museum back in 2004. Not a project I worked on myself, but the parallels with the BBC are obvious, particularly the ability to ‘add an object’ [...]

Great as BBC iPlayer is, I like many mac users had struggled when using Firefox to download programmes. For some reason, after each download I was prompted to install the iPlayer desktop application again, but in doing so was still only able to download a single programme before being stick in the loop again.
The [...]

Hours wasted compiling this spreadsheet and associated Google Gadget, Motion Chart. The data still needs refining and but for many values it works well giving the user the opportunity to view three different parameters (axis of a graph and relative size of the plot) for related items. In my case, measures of different [...]

As a part of my work on the Coeducate project I recently attended a project day with representatives from 11 other UK HE institutions.
As us often the cases at such events the most value to be gained is from the surrounding off topic discussions and in one such conversation with someone from Cambridge University [...]

Work requirements mean that I can no longer resist using Microsoft Office (my convenience not a University of Bolton dictate) and the first step of migration was the relatively simple export and import of contacts. 30 minutes of fiddling with export and import options and the only answer I could find was:
1. export vCard [...]

A requirement of the Coeducate Jisc funded project is that we have a project Blog. The easiest choice and the one I took was to use wordpress.com with the addition of a sub-domain re-direct (Wordpress charge $10 to allow this) so that we can use the URL http://coeducate.bolton.ac.uk thereby assuring a little bit of [...]

Most adults feel exams failed to gauge real ability:77 per cent of adults believe that exam results should not be used to judge their suitability for jobs

(Via Education Guardian).
The overwhelming majority of adults believe school exams do not reflect their true abilities or predict their future success, according to a new report published today. As [...]

Some good suggestions in this report by Paul Ramsden, the chief executive of the Higher Education Academy:
Universities should offer ‘pick and mix’ degrees, says report:

- build up qualifications from modules taken at different times in several universities
- make it easier to switch between full-time and part-time study, possibly by making students pay for each module [...]

UK universities should take online lead:

“UK universities should push to become world leaders in online higher education, ministers will say tomorrow, despite the failure of the UK e-University four years ago.
The universities secretary, John Denham, is likely to call not for a revival of the UKeU, which collapsed in 2004, but to develop a “global [...]

Rather than fund a whole army of ‘Plagiarism Consultants’ and associated conferences why not re-engineer towards authentic forms of assessment - deal with the root of the problem rather than tinker with the flawed approach of the essay!
“
Universities review plagiarism policies to catch Facebook cheats:

Universities are reviewing their plagiarism policies to clamp down on students [...]