Centre for Open Learning UCT

Scientific American has been bringing science to people for over 160 years. Now the magazine is bringing people to science through a new online listing of citizen science opportunities. Early this month, Scientific American Online launched a Citizen Science section of the web site. This is part of a larger Education effort, which includes a number of science activities called Bring Science Home.

Nice penguin article May 2012, mentions Richard Sherley

I like several things: the dynamic moving changing nature of the site - both with the pictures and text I like the way they have used their students' voices - definitely something we should do I like the levels of detail you can get - summary, more detail on the course, more detail on the lecturers

Following on from the lists of academic tweeters published earlier this month, we have put together a short guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities, available to download as a PDF. How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters? We have put together a short guide answering these questions, showing new users how to get started on Twitter and hone their tweeting style, as well as offering advice to more experienced users on how to use Twitter for research projects, alongside blogging, and for use in teaching.

Great guide, Nicola, thanks for sharing that.

by Jonathan Jansen

useful ideas some of which we already have tried

The Virtual Museum (VM) provides the platform for citizen scientists to contribute to biodiversity projects.  This innovative concept was developed by the Animal Demography Unit. For many people, a "museum" is a place to see stuffed animals on display. But the ADU's Virtual Museum is not like this. The scientific part of a museum contains collections of specimens, frequently large numbers of specimens of the same species from different parts of the range, all carefully preserved and labelled with the date and place where they were collected. The ADU's Virtual Museum is like this, except that instead of specimens in draws or bottles, we have digital photographs arranged in a database.

nice approach to podcasting

This is an example of where the UCT CMS system has been used in a much more dynamic way. The colours are a bit dull (but probably fitting for Criminology) but we can make it more exciting. Look at the section under highlights - the Summer School blog and other external sites can go there. We can also investigate using 'follow us on Twitter' or having a live COL Twitter feed, with daily updates, depending on the projects that are running at a particular time e.g. Summer School in Jan, Pace in Fed, Third term around the time of winter and summer school, etc. More importantly, PACE, Summer School, etc can have their own navigation bar (where you see 'MERL', 'Physical Security' and so forth on this site) with more info about them than the current overview from Continuing Ed provides and we can also link to this extended info from there.

not bad but I still find it rather dull, I am afraid. Also I don't think I can live the CHED salmon pink colour coding... Someone told me that UCT ICTS is going over to wordpress???????? but Jenny never mentioned anything?

Getting started... @JJJ John James Jacoby says codex.buddypress.org is the best place to start. Best advice is to use BuddyPress to compliment an existing site/audience. I'm going to try this out with my social media students - going to use BuddyPress as a pilot for GC 

Thought you may find this interesting:)

here is a list of the most populat CT newspapers - consider for Summer School publicity meeting Thurs morning

Have emailed for a quote - very good prices - R 150 a week, around R 2 800 to buy (among the cheapest I've seen, but still expensive), but will forward you guys the quote once I get it.

As promised - here's episode 1 of 4, interesting comments on video "please bbc, don't call us arabs"

Academic tweet difficulties - funny

lots of online free photography classes among other things

Example of clicktivism Original email: A recent surge in poaching is threatening to send African rhino populations back to dangerously low numbers. One rhino is killed every 19 hours despite laws that prohibit poaching and sales of rhino horns. Demand for rhino horns is particularly high in Vietnam and China where the powder is thought to cure cancer and other health ailments, though it has no health benefits whatsoever. Sir Richard Branson is calling for immediate action by CITES, a consortium of 175 countries charged with stopping the rhino horn trade. Join him by signing the petition to demand that CITES put pressure on Vietnam and China to ensure that severe punishments for traffickers and sellers are enforced.

If we want to change www.ems.uct.ac.za to www.summerschool.uct.ac.za we need to do this, if we just change the blog address it says site no longer exists & cannot be found - not what we want at this stage...

Plan to bring this one to life instead of starting a new one:)