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 …
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).
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …