Study Day Evaluation 3 March 2012

Evaluations 030312

It appears that a number of questionnaires may have been mislaid, so this summary is based on only 53 returns, (about 20-25%) and can't really be relied upon. If you happen to have the missing sheets, please let us have them back and their results can be incorporated.

There was only one suggestion for another e-learning resource: Maths for Life, by Malcolm Swan. He has written quite a lot but I couldn't find any distinctively e-learning material from him--perhaps the person who suggested this could provide further details. Thanks.

Interest Group Results from 3 March

Interest group posters_030312

More arising from the tech. session on Saturday

Jim Crawley's Delicious feed (it used to be delicio.us) points towards these resources which may be of interest.

Year 2 final study day, 3 March: from the technology session.

Many thanks to David Andrews and Carol Thompson for this session. They have posted their links and materials on BREO--just a reminder of how to find them:

• Log on to BREO
• Go to the Post-Compulsory Education site.
• Choose Study Days from the list on the left of the screen
• Then Year 2 Study Day--Saturday 3 March.
• Open the 'E' and technology enhanced learning folder.

Other recommendations from within the group were for:

• SMART Exchange; resources to use with a Smart board
• Dipity: create interactive timelines with linked and embedded resources for everything from an historical story to a project plan
• On a larger scale; BookType is the way to create your own text-books, for print or e-book platforms
• Wolfram Alpha; you'll never know what it can do until you try it, and even then you won't...

Do add more in the comments! And see previous material in the same vein here and here (from the corresponding session last year).

BREO update

From Peter W:

 

I have received the email below regarding the problems that BREO has been experiencing (and hence Turnitin). As you can see it is still not fixed and the University is waiting for someone in Amsterdam to sort out the problem.

 

Hopefully it will be sorted before the deadline but if there is a problem please stress to students that they should hand in the hard copies of their work on Friday as normal and that if they are experiencing problems with Turnitin/BREO and can't put it through this week then they will not be penalised.

 

From BREO Support:

 

Yesterday Subject Communities in Blackboard unexpectedly disappeared from your Communities box. Immediately we noticed this problem we contacted our technical support team in Amsterdam and asked them to urgently resolve the problem. We can see that the Communities have not been deleted, rather have become unavailable. Their availability is controlled by a data process and it is a fault with that process that needs to be resolved. We will continue to press the Amsterdam support team (our system is hosted there) for an urgent resolution today and will update you as soon as we have more definitive information.

For immediate information, follow BREO at University of Bedfordshire on Facebook

BREO problem

In case you have come here because you can't access BREO, here's a note from Peter Wolstencroft:

Hello Everyone

 

Some students today have been struggling to access the PCE BREO site. I have chased this problem and received the response below. Please advise students to submit through Turnitin tomorrow if they experience a problem today.

 

If the worst comes to the worst and this is not resolved before the deadline then please accept the hard copy in the first instance.

 

[...]

 

Hello Peter

It seems this was caused by recent changes in the way BREO handles enrolment data, it looks like student enrolment was coming from a data file which is no longer used, so they have been blocked from accessing the site. Now that we've identified the issue we've asked Blackboard to fix it as soon as possible.

Hopefully their access to PCE will be restored by the end of the day.

 

Regards

Guide to referencing

I've just written this up for the blog for the Polhill cohort, and thought it might be of more general interest. It's all been posted before, but I imagine most of you have better things to do than trawl through the blog archives.

Here is the presentation I used yesterday evening, with accompanying podcast: Basic Author Date (Harvard) Referencing

As well as the guidance from the university library incorporated in the Handbook, you might also find the following links useful:

• http://citeitright.com/
• http://www.easybib.com/ and
• http://learnhigher.ac.uk/Staff/ Referencing.html

Here are the pages on problems from the American Psychological Association style website:

• http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/how-do-i-cite-a-kindle.html
• http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/06/how-do-you-cite-an-e-book.html

However, I also noted that I do have some reservations about the obsession with referencing (not to the extent, however, of letting you get away with it!) I've written about it here, here, here, and here.