Monthly Archives: December 2009

Alt-MBA

The Alt-MBA is: The Alt-MBA pro­gram is a group of motiv­ated and con­nec­ted learners, leap­ers and agents of change who want to build bet­ter brains with other like­minded people from around the world. The group was ori­gin­ally inspired by the Altern­at­ive MBA pro­gram cre­ated by Seth Godin in Decem­ber 2008. A hand­ful of applic­ants that were

Tips for Zotero

Since mov­ing to Zotero, I’ve found my ‘work flow’ to be much smoother. These few tips have made things even easier. I par­tic­u­larly find it use­ful when I’ve found a link to the full-text of an art­icle, just to drag the link to the item in Zotero (and have Zotero auto-magically down­load into my library).

Referring to Referencite

In writ­ing my piece on ref­er­en­cing, I just Googled ‘apa ref­er­en­cing’ and here are the first page of search res­ults. I was sur­prised by the res­ults. First, I used Google​.co​.nz instead of Google​.com (I nor­mally use the later), and secondly the Uni­ver­sity of Auckland’s ref­er­en­cing resource Referen©ite didn’t fea­ture at all on the first page. I

Referencing here and now

As I look back at my last entry it occurs to me that I use two dis­tinct approaches to cit­ing and ref­er­en­cing ideas, works, etc. Spe­cific­ally, I use a mix­ture of hyper­links and APA ref­er­en­cing. My habit seems to be that for non-academic works, I tend to use hyper­links that go to appro­pri­ate sources. This

Whither learning styles?

The Chron­icle of Higher Edu­ca­tion led me to an inter­est­ing art­icle on learn­ing styles by Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2009). The sum­mary of the art­icle out­lines the idea of learn­ing styles: The term ”learn­ing styles” refers to the concept that indi­vidu­als dif­fer in regard to what mode of instruc­tion or study is most effect­ive for

Group projects

For sometime—in fact for many years—the Instruc­tions to exam­iners and assessors has said the fol­low­ing about group pro­jects: 2 Group Pro­jects a The inclu­sion of any group pro­ject as part of the con­tri­bu­tion to the final course­work per­cent­age in a course should be restric­ted to rel­ev­ant fields at higher levels. b Assess­ment should be on

Using PDF files in nVivo 8

Here we tend to use nVivo for qual­it­at­ive research/analysis. It’s pretty robust, but the hand­ling of PDF files leaves a lot to be desired. What nVivo seems to do is to con­vert the PDF into some sort of RTF-like format. Unfor­tu­nately the fidel­ity of the con­ver­ted file isn’t that good. In fact, it can be

MathTran

Some­times, it is really neces­sary to dis­play a com­plex for­mula; such as this: I use Math­Tran to achieve this, rather than doing a com­plex server-side install of Latex. Then I can use a URL like the one below to dynam­ic­ally dis­play the equa­tion above: http://www.mathtran.org/cgi-bin/mathtran?D=1;tex=\textstyle \Delta x \%2C\Delta p_x \ge \hbar/2 That reminds me, there is a

My personal learning environment

Jo Badge talks a bit about her per­sonal learn­ing envir­on­ment, and so I thought I’d draft out mine. I’m really web-centric and spend most of time ‘in’ Fire­fox (I some­times think about switch­ing to Chrome, but I’m hooked on Zotero). I found it inter­est­ing to con­sider what is miss­ing here … there is no Power­Point.

Dealing with plagiarism in the digital age

Jo Badge and Jon Scott have pro­duced a very inter­est­ing paper entitled Deal­ing with pla­gi­ar­ism in the digital age. In their con­clud­ing remarks, they argue that there is “little solid empir­ical evid­ence to show the effect­ive­ness of these [pla­gi­ar­ism detec­tion] tools in improv­ing stu­dent prac­tices”. How­ever, exper­i­ence here is that the use of Turn It

Research as a second language

One blog I always find myself going back to is by Thomas Bas­bøll, who is the Res­id­ent Writ­ing Con­sult­ant at Copen­ha­gen Busi­ness School. He calls his blog Research as a second lan­guage. I was promp­ted to men­tion it now as I was read­ing his art­icle Free Time, Blank Pages, and other Cata­strophes. As I hurtle/stumble

Templates and styles

It seems that I don’t really under­stand the way that Mov­able Type handles styles and tem­plates. I’ve (yet again) made a total mess of this site in the pro­cess of set­ting up my aca­demic journ­alling. No doubt this will take me some­time (over the week­end) to sort out … but I might wait until after