Blogs
Here you'll find a selection of our newest blogs, to read the full article
click on the link marked Entry or to go to that sector's blog, click on the
heading.
- Why iPad? - I am lucky enough to have had an iPad (a personal one, not a work one) from the beginning and have been using it at home (instead of my home laptop and often instead of my phone), very occasionally for work (I would use it more because of the mobile nature of my [...] Entry - Comments
- Technology-Enhanced Learning and CPD - The issue of continuous professional development (CPD) in relation to Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) has recently been raised by Graham Attwell in his Pontydysgu blog. Graham aims to write a literature review around the subject, and is keen to get input from a wide audience. His blog highlights the importance of the role of TEL in [...] Entry - Comments
- What is the future of technology in education? - I was asked to write a guest blog post for ULCCs ‘Future of Technology in Education’ 2010 event last week. As I said in the blog post , FOTE09 was one of the best events I attended last year … there was a wide range of speakers and the ideas they put forward were challenging [...] Entry - Comments
- SAN and Virtualisation on a budget of zero? - For quite a while now we’ve been using VMware Virtual Infrastructure with the bells and whistles of Vmotion and HA on a Fibre Channel SAN. In my eyes it’s all been very good in that it gives us a resilient cluster to run our VM’s and therefore services on. Unfortunately, it’s not necessarily cheap, not [...] Entry - Comments
- RSC Wales External Penetration Testing Service - RSC Wales are now able to offer scheduled external penetration testing service to our supported learning providers.
The external penetration testing service can be used to provide a detailed report of your Internet facing systems and services. This report is generated by scanning the external IP addresses and hostnames used by the organistation, the scans are [...] Entry - Comments
- Cacti Realtime Plugin - I’m a big fan of the Cacti – the monitoring tool, although I’ve a small number of the plants too! One of it’s limitations, is that it works on a 1 or 5 minute poller interval, so you get very rounded figures and no sign of the short bursts of traffic, CPU or anything else [...] Entry - Comments
- Online Leadership and Management Toolkit - Just a brief post to let you know that your RSC Wales WBL team will be demonstrating the new online Leadership and Management toolkit at NTfW Regional meetings during December and early in the New Year.
The Toolkit was developed by the Learning and Skills Improvement Service in conjunction with the Welsh Assembly Government and the support [...] Entry - Comments
- Next Generation Learning Awards 2010: Technology Excellence in FE & Skills - Can Welsh WBL Providers feature as prominently as last year?
Becta has launched the exciting Next Generation Learning Awards: Technology Excellence in FE & Skills. Now in their second year, they will look to reward all types of learning provider in the FE and Skills sector and seek to identify those across the whole system who [...] Entry - Comments
- Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiment. - Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest.
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an [...] Entry - Comments
- Spot On! - A few months ago, on the BBC’s Springwatch programme, I watched an interview with a scientist. This was not a professional scientist, but an amateur with acute powers of observation who had acted on her instinct over several decades. This person has been recording the precise date of the annual spring bud-burst on one individual [...] Entry - Comments
- Delivering Digital Inclusion: A Strategic Framework and Consultation for Wales - I wrote earlier this week about the RaceOnline Manifesto for a Networked Nation , and at the end of that posting I mentioned the consultation on Digital Inclusion which was recently launched by the Welsh Assembly Government. These documents have different purposes and tenors, but they address the same theme.
As the title indicates, the consultation document [...] Entry - Comments
- Manifesto for a Networked Nation - The RaceOnline 2012 Manifesto for a Networked Nation was launched yesterday. “This manifesto is a rallying cry for us all to create a truly networked nation” declares the document at the outset. It aims at a very wide target audience, and as a result, blends an outline of the evidence for investing in this area, [...] Entry - Comments
- Open Source Library Management Systems: Is the wave breaking yet? - Way back in April 2009 we had a somewhat ground-breaking event here in Swansea Uni on Open Source library systems. A year is a long time in technology and I was keen to catch up with developments in open source since returning from my maternity leave. What better way than to have a chat with [...] Entry - Comments
- In the #Swamp at Llandrindod Wells: library advocacy & web 2.0 - I was lucky enough to attend yesterday’s South and Mid Wales Partnership Staff Conference 2010 (Twitter hashtag #swamp) which brought together all varieties of librarians from the region to the distinctly swampy-green Hotel Metropole in Llandrindod Wells. Days out like this are great for networking and staff development but the real value is the ideas [...] Entry - Comments
- Pimp my OPAC -
Some modern library management systems come with enrichment services that provide useful extra features for the catalogue/OPAC – book cover images, tables of contents, links to reviews etc. They can be also be part of a whole revamp with a new resource discovery front-end such as Aquabrowser or Vufind, or they could be part of [...] Entry - Comments
- Focus on Foundation Degrees - Foundation degrees are becoming highly significant post-18 qualifications in Wales. In a recent written statement Leighton Andrews, Minster for Children, Education and Lifelong Learning in the Welsh Assembly Government, identified Foundation degrees (Fds) as an important outcome of ‘For our Future’, and a way of providing HE that is ‘inclusive, accessible and responsive to the [...] Entry - Comments
- A month (or two) in the life of… - As we make the transition between the old academic session and the new, I thought it would be a good moment to reflect on some of the things I’ve been doing in the past month or two. I hope, like earlier Month in a life posts by Karl and Helen, it’ll give you an idea of what we do, and also highlight some of the developments in [...] Entry - Comments
- Welsh college project to help develop community content - When I reported last month on the JISC conference I was feeling very excited about the possibilities for crowdsourcing and the way technology could be used to open up the world of research to the community. So it was good to hear the news that Coleg Harlech is among the successful bidders to a recent JISC call [...] Entry - Comments
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