I see the BBC have a report on what Oaklands College are doing with eMentors.
A college is harnessing the power of students’ technical knowledge to teach their lecturers a thing or two about information technology. The college has appointed 35 “eMentors” to help staff with everything from laptops to interactive whiteboards. The scheme works on the premise that students are more technically adept.
Quite an interesting and innovative approach to getting staff to get familiar with the technology.
The BBC are reporting that students are using content “lifted” from the web for their online UCAS forms.
Sixth form students are being warned not to cheat on their university application forms by copying material from the internet.
The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service has written to every UK school saying doing so could affect students’ chances of winning a place.
Ucas is to use plagiarism detection technology to scrutinise the half a million forms seeking entry in 2008.
Maybe it’s time to move away from a written statement on a form for applications.
The web may have made it easier, but when I filled in an UCAS form (some time ago now) I know people who were given extra guidance and help filling it in over and beyond what you would expect and that was never considered “cheating”.
Copying and pasting is cheating, there is no doubt, using the web to help fill in the form is fine, but who tells the sixth former filling in the form what is okay and what isn’t?
You’ve heard of Second Life (which I don’t get) now there is MetaPlace!
The BBC is reporting on this new development in virtual worlds (which isn’t quite ready yet).
A free tool that allows anyone to create a virtual world has been launched. Users of Metaplace, as it is known, can build 3D online worlds for PCs or even a mobile phone without any knowledge of complex computer languages.
Read rest of article on BBC News.
Apple have announced that they are launching the iPhone in the UK. It will go on sale on November 9th on the O2 network.
“We picked the best one, the most popular carrier, it’s O2. We’ve since lowered the price of the US phone of the 8GB phone, in the UK the price of the iPhone is £269 including VAT.”
That’s a lot of money for a phone, be interesting to see what the data costs will be?
As I write it’s about five minutes before the Apple event at the Apple Store in London gets underway.
Generally it is accepted that this will be the launch of the iPhone in Europe.
It will be interesting to see if it is a 3G version or whether the fact that O2 have been upgrading their network to EDGE will mean that the UK iPhone will still be EDGE only.
Not long to wait now…
According to a report by Sheffield University the UK exported £28bn worth of learning in 2003-04.
That’s a lot of learning…
Plasq have launched their third beta of Comic Life for Windows.
Here is Comic Life Windows beta 3! Please UNINSTALL your old version of Comic Life BEFORE INSTALLING the b3 version. Remember it is still a beta. So remember anything can still go wrong! We do try our best to make it as reliable as possible – but as it is a beta, we do ask that you are cautious and don’t recommend using it for time-critical work in case anything goes awry.
You can find the download, new beta serial number and release notes in this forum post here.
I do like Comic Life on my Mac and I am pleased to see a version for Windows.
When I was told I had to teach statistics to a group Advanced GNVQ Business students many years ago I did wonder how I would approach it.
In the end I went with themed series of bitesize lessons.
Each lesson had a theme, some of these included:
Time Series – Toy Story, to infinity and beyond, could now use Doctor Who
Correlation – Indiana Jones
Regression – Star Trek
Dispersion and Range – Blackadder goes Forth
Normal Distribution – X-Files
Each lesson was self-contained and included theory and different kinds of assessment.
It seemed to work well, with students who years later still remembered many of the lessons.
As for copyright, well I was a different person then…
Mashable is reporting that Wikipedia has reached two million articles.
Wikipedia has hit a record 2 million articles for its user-regulated online encyclopedia. On Monday, the English Wikipedia’s two millionth article was “El Hormiguero,” detailing the Spanish TV show of the same name. After its launch six years ago, I think we can all attest to the establishment of Wikipedia, its example of effective crowd wisdom, and its lasting power as a long tail entity.
There are concerns in the academic community over relying on articles from Wikipedia, and therefore any lecturer or learner using such sources is advised to also consult and confirm sources, say using an online published reference in addition such as Britannica Online. Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) has also recommended this approach (in a podcast interview).
Just a follow up to my previous post.
As you can see from the following photograph that it doesn’t take much, seems like they used a screwdriver to get in!
Still lots of hassle dealing with insurance companies. More annoyance more than anything else. I was lucky that I didn’t lose any data (all backed up).
Another annoyance has been changing passwords. Though I am sure that the thieves are not really that interested in my Flickr photographs and my Facebook profile, I’d rather be safe than sorry. I didn’t use the laptop for personal financial stuff so there is virtually no risk there.
Following the comments on the previous post on having a whip-round, which really touched me, I have setup Paypal to allow this to happen. Thanks in advance, much appreciated.