Students who are aware that their work will be checked by plagiarism-detection software are just as likely to cheat as those who are not, a study suggests.

Last Friday David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) presented some of the findings from their JISC-funded work on Digital Visitors and Residents. Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session can be found below:

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

This site contains guidance material aimed primarily at students, teachers or doctors who wish to use a patient recording or patient data for learning and teaching. It will also be of interest and use to other clinical and healthcare workers as well as to university staff where patient recordings are made available for learning and teaching. Learn about the ethical principles that underpin the guidelines.

As part of our greening scientific computing and videoconferencing projects, we are producing short (2pp) case studies on best practice in universities, colleges and research organisations (see below for list, and page bottom for downloads). The 2008-09 SusteIT project also produced over 20 case studies of greenIT in universities and colleges - see below for a master list and click here for actual cases.

Training (and that includes e-learning) is a costly and inefficient way for knowledge workers to acquire knowledge and skills in today's workplace; in fact the real learning takes place continuously as people do their jobs. Now reports show that individuals and teams are increasingly using their social media tools and devices to by-pass L&D to solve their own learning and performance problems themselves.

Students, educators and others interested in finding the best published content, events and experts for learning new things will be heartened to learn that a new metadata markup standard is in the works to make discovery of learning materials easier than ever. Perhaps more importantly, it will make those materials easier for machines to find. Once finding the right content is a solved problem, many new things could become possible

iSocrates is an educational software program that allows instructors to quickly and easily create digital evaluation rubrics for virtually any assignment.iSocrates allows instructors to generate criteria pull-down menus featuring their most commonly used feedback comments, and to evaluate student performance from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective. iSocrates can also compute a performance score based on instructor-assigned weights and evaluations, and generate printouts of the filled out rubrics to hand back to students.

Clayton R Wright has produced the latest version of his well-known and well-regarded conference list.

"Sixty-two percent of teens set their profiles to private (friends only) on social media sites, according to results from a recent study by Pew Internet entitled "Teens, kindness and cruelty on social networking sites." Nineteen percent set their profiles to partially private, and 17% leave their profiles completely public"

"What is a Virtual Experiment? A Virtual Experiment or VE is a highly interactive web application. Unlike a simulation a VE does not usually model any part of the experiment; but is an interface to a set of pre-recorded experimental states derived from the original experiment. The users are given the tools to access the apparatus via the screen (mouse, pad or touch screen) and record the results themselves"

A Survey of Undergraduate Technology Use and Attitudes. Funded by Evaluation of Learners' Experiences of e‐learning Special Interest Group (ELESIG ) Small Grant

This bulletin is designed to keep all our colleagues and contacts up to date on our latest news, events, resources and funding opportunities.

"ALT comment on the Higher Education Funding Council for England's Strategy Statement "Opportunity, choice and excellence in higher education" Schmoller, Seb and Slater, John (2011) ALT comment on the Higher Education Funding Council for England's Strategy Statement "Opportunity, choice and excellence in higher education". ALT. (Unpublished)"