The LSE Book Review

I published my first review for the LSE Review of Books last week.  The blog publishes daily (in itself an amazing task) and offers reviews from disciplines across the social sciences. Contributions are are made by writers from both within and outside of the London School of Economics (LSE).  The Review is managed out of the Public Policy Group, a section of the Department of Government.  Ultimately, the blog "seeks to encourage public engagement with and understanding of the social sciences, via involvement with their best written and most accessible products – books and ebooks".  I like being involved with such a worthy endeavour.

This work by Katarina Gray-Sharp is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The very patient Managing Editor helped me craft a balanced piece of work.  The only thing I would change is contextual to the last paragraph.  To rectify, I recommend readers visit Stephen Ramsay and his discussion on the two types of digital humanities. This thoughtful, well-constructed piece provides a more complete context to the "bitter ideological war" than anything I could write.

Although the site's licensing allows me to copy and distribute here, I always think it better to drive readers to the original site.  This benefits the publisher's hit rate, and offers the reader exposure to other aspects of the site.  If you would like to read the review, please visit http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/06/20/book-review-digital_humanities-2/.  Who knows, you might find something else there which intrigues you.

Through the Trees: Resourcing Transitions

As a teaching consultant, my lectureship is tasked with supporting staff to develop and deliver pedagogically sound papers and programmes based on contemporary principles of teaching, learning, assessment and curriculum design.  I attended an event last month for the local chapter of the Tertiary Education Union.  Interesting conversations ensued around one table, which has relevance to my work.

This work by Katarina Gray-Sharp is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

One lecturer discussed the difficulties he was having with the rapid speed of technological change.  He felt that he was expected to assimilate one new system into his teaching practice, only for it to be quickly replaced with another.  One method for responding to this difficulty is a policy that resources transitions between processes.  This means every time a new process, technology, or policy is initiated, resources which assist with the transition to the new system are automatically provided.  Such resources should include individual and unit assessments followed by training, but may extend to marking assistance or capital items depending on the assessed need.

Although transparency was identified as a general procedural issue, the quality of information was also perceived as problematic.  A trio described the onslaught of unnecessary emails from administrators across the institution.  Although not quite spam, the content was not focused on the academics' three areas of interest: teaching, research, and community service.  They, like me, look forward to a filtering device that automatically deletes emails about lost cats.

Adding Twitter Widgets To My Moodle Site

Today, I added two Twitter widgets to my Moodle site.  You could try it to.  After a little wiggle, this is what I came up with:

1. Login into your Moodle and Twitter sites.
2. In Moodle, turn editing on. In "Add a block", use the dropdown menu to choose HTML.
3. Configure (think "edit") with a title and choose HTML at the bottom of the Content box.
4. Navigate to https://twitter.com/settings/widgets. Choose "Create New". Select type (I added "User Timeline" & "Search") and "Create widget". Copy the resulting code.
5. Navigate back to your Moodle page. Paste the code into the Content box. Save and you should be go!