Impressions Scholarcast

Giving all students in your class 100% without looking at their answers certainly reduces marking load. How do you achieve this nirvana? Simple, use clickers in class exams. This excellent solution comes to us via a Wired Campus blog post from Josh Fischman reporting the outcome of a biology exam for 900 students at the University of Kansas. Now where do I order clickers?

According to a post from Fred Wilson a journablogger ‘has his or her own blog or works in a blog network like paid content, techcrunch, gigaom, alley insider, read write web, mashable, venturebeat, etc, etc’.

I like the word but it is difficult to pronounce. For the record I don’t yet aspire to be a journablogger, but, hey, academic publishing might eventually go this way. Trained academic publishers should already have most of the ethics and skills of journalists, with the exception of brevity, perhaps!  Blogging skills are straightforward to acquire.

Tips on how to get things done and save time at work are thick on the ground. A seemingly anonymous Lifehacker blog post caught my imagination for once since I could actually see myself implementing most of the 10 tips. My summary is:

1. In extremis do a brain dump; leave your workstation and with pen/paper or lightweight device mind map problems, rants and ideas
2. Set a timer, ignore distractions and stick at the current task alone until the bell
3. Always give a qualified yes; say yes with one or more conditions, even if trivial
4. Book a meeting with yourself; go away from your desk and in GTD parlance do a weekly review
5. Get a meeting back on track; politely say “Let’s get back to the agenda”
6. Limit every email to a maximum of 5 sentences; help yourself and your recipients
7. Each week cross off one item from your to-do list; it is probably obsolete in any case
8. Check email only after one hour at work
9. At day end leave first doable task for next day on your keyboard (hence tip
10. Make deadlines; book lunch, dinner, sports, drink date

Now here goes.

In our Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development and hence the School of IT we have a MSDN Academic Alliance licence. This gives the Faculty’s students and staff free copies of Microsoft developer tools, operating systems and servers, amongst other software.

However, Bill Gates has just announced DreamSpark which is the free availability of Microsoft developer and designer tools to ALL students. Great news, but sadly Australia is not on the initial list of countries. We are promised this for later in the year.

Thanks for the heads-up to Karo for the blog post.

In our Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development and hence the School of IT we have a MSDN Academic Alliance licence. This gives the Faculty’s students and staff free copies of Microsoft developer tools, operating systems and servers, amongst other software.

However, Bill Gates has just announced the free availability of Microsoft developer and designer tools to ALL students. Great news, but sadly Australia is not on the initial list of countries. We are promised this for later in the year.

Thanks for the heads-up to Karo for the blog post.

When an application or web site prompts you for a login the accepted standard has become:

1. The cursor should be blinking in the login name field
2. Type your login name
3. Press tab to move to the password field
4. Type your password
5. Press tab to move the Remember Me field as a checkbox
6. Tap the space bar to toggle the checkbox, if needed
7. Press tab to move to Login button (optional)
8. Press Enter

Judge your Web 2.0 site by its conformance to this standard.

Write off Facebook for a start!