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"If you're interested in education, at some point someone will have sent you a link to a video by Sir Ken Robinson, knighted for services to education in England in 2003. He has over 250,000 followers on Twitter, his videos have had over 40,000,000 views online, and his 2006 lecture is the most viewed TED talk of all time. The RSA Opening Minds curriculum his ideas are associated with is taught in over 200 schools in the UK. He clearly has some influence."

"In addition to offline access to Gmail while you're traveling or without a strong internet connection, you can now see your Google Calendar events when you're disconnected. Offline Calendar lets you view your existing schedule and events, but not edit th

This article explores excellence in web-based teaching. Drawing on the views of experts in the field and the perspective of their own years of experience, the authors compiled a list of 9 principles to provide direction in the search for online excellence

Whether or not you take a constructivist view of education, feedback on performance is inevitably seen as a crucial component of the process. However, experience shows that students (and academic staff) often struggle with feedback, which all too often fails to translate into feed-forward actions leading to educational gains. Problems get worse as student cohort sizes increase. By building on the well-established principle of separating marks from feedback and by using a social network approach to amplify peer discussion of assessed tasks, this paper describes an efficient system for interactive student feedback. Although the majority of students remain passive recipients in this system, they are still exposed to deeper reflection on assessed tasks than in traditional one-to-one feedback processes.

Thought this might be of interest to former colleagues in SALT.

"This report has been developed as part of our research project Flexible Pedagogies: preparing for the future. Technology-enhanced learning is one of five main focus strands embedded within the theme of flexible learning. It offers a summary and analysis of the current state of play, as well as recommendations for developing robust and appropriate flexible pedagogies with a view to influencing policy, future thinking and change within the rapidly-shifting landscape of learning and teaching in HE"

synchtube allows you to instantly create public and private rooms where you can watch YouTube and Vimeo music and videos synchronzied with up to 50 people. Everyone views the same video at the exact same time!

Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.

Dr Stephen Jackson, Director of Reviews at QAA, sets out his views on the importance of measuring and rewarding quality teaching and discusses how higher education institutions are managing to do this

The new version of Zoho writer is a bit like MS 2007 but is better desdigned and also allows you to switch to a 'classic' style view. More reasons to dith MS!

View virtual books using the Turning the Pages system, enjoy online exhibitions of items selected by Britsh Library experts, or take a highlights tour.

In Print or On Screen? Investigating the Reading Habits of Undergraduate Students Using Photo-Diaries and Photo-Interviews

This paper investigates the similarities and differences between two important ideas in information processing and knowledge utilisation. Those ideas are [critical thinking] and [information literacy]. The two phrases are shown in brackets to indicate that the two words involved in each idea are not arbitrarily combined but have been coupled by authors to represent a single entity or a focus for development of concepts describing the characteristics involved. By exploring terms related to this couplet from the same sentence, the meaning of each of the central ideas can be expanded. The education, library science, and health science literature were used in this study, which analysed 8745 articles dealing with [critical thinking] and 8201 reports dealing with [information literacy] included in either ERIC or PubMed from 2000-2009.

Free Online webinar on Open Educational Resources

Demonstrations and best practice guides for the new quiz engine in Moodle 2.1 which was developed at the Open University (OU).

Very useful page! See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdpFrwPGCmc.

"Objective - To describe the development and implementation of two courses designed to help university students avoid plagiarism. Design - Quantitative and qualitative analysis. Setting - A university in the United Kingdom. Subjects - An unknown number of university students who took a Plagiarism Awareness Program (PAP) course between 2008 and 2011, and approximately 3,000 university students enrolled in a Plagiarism Avoidance for New Students (PANS) course delivered via a virtual learning environment (VLE) between October and December 2012. The authors attempted to collect rates of continued plagiarism among students who had taken plagiarism education courses. The authors also surveyed 702 university students about plagiarism in 2011. Methods - Data collected from PAP participants informed revision of the authors' approach to plagiarism education and led to development of the second course, PANS. At the end of the course, students completed a test of their knowledge about plagiarism. Authors compared scores from students who took a course supervised by a librarian to the scores from students who took the course independently. Main Results - Students reported that many aspects of citation and attribution are challenging (p. 149). The authors discovered that 93% of students who completed the PANS course facilitated by a librarian in-person passed the final exam with a grade of 70% or higher, while 85% of students who took the same course independently, without a librarian instructor, in an online VLE scored 70% or higher (p. 155). The authors report that referrals of students who plagiarized declined significantly (p-value < 0.001) since the implementation of a plagiarism avoidance curriculum. Conclusion - As reported by the authors, first-year university students require more extensive education about plagiarism avoidance. A university plagiarism avoidance program instructed by librarians reduces the total number of students caught plagiarizing an