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Removing a student submission from Turnitin

jobadge — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:14:53 +0000

Leicester staff Tweet-up

jobadge — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:00:17 +0000

twitter cake from flickr

Following a hastily arranged local meet up, twitterers came for a coffee, tea and some cake at David Wilson Library Cafe, Leicester University. We marvelled at Mark’s shoes and only talked in 140 character sentences.

I went through my list of followers to find staff and postgrads from Leicester University and DeMonfort University that are tweeting and was surprised how many people there were. Andrew (@steepholm) asked for a list and I started typing and it got silly, there are LOADS of us

To save RSI, can you please add yourself to the list using this google form?

Results will be automatically added here as a list of Twitterers

We’ll organise another face to face session (with cake) again soon.

iTouch voice memos

jobadge — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:54:53 +0000

CC: flickr jschneid

I’ve just upgraded to OS 3.0 on the iTouch and tried the new voice memos app. It’s a neat and simple recorder, you can even do simple trimming of the audio files. The interface is good and sharing by email is a doddle. This means that by a simple email to posterous I can post the file online in one easy step.

Perhaps we could give student feedback this way – quick and easy to do, posterous could allow students to comment back. Not a private conversation, but maybe we can think of a way round that?

Download now or listen on posterous

Idea.m4a (462 KB)

Posted via email from jobadge’s posterous

HEA Bioscience pedR event

jobadge — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:30:12 +0000

The HEA Centre for Biosciences ran a session on pedagogic research at University of Leicester on 24 March 2009. Our twittering fraternity were out in force (@cjrw, @ajcann, @cwells1, @jon_scott) were all there and I am sure there will be other blog entries from some of them on the meeting. Unfortunately you will only get half the story here, as I had to leave just as it was getting interesting to collect the kids.

We had presentations on a wide range of topics, from the mysteries of social science research methodologies by Bonnie Green, with surely some made up terms in there (bemtology anyone?!) to case studies of practitioners looking at their own work in pedr in the biosciences. We tagged the meeting (#cfbres on delicious and twitter) and Alan invited the other participants to join our community of practice online.

As with most face to face events, the main benefit was in the networking and talking with people at the meeting. One of the feelings I was left with, was how can we harness this community of practice to greater effect? And what effect do we want to have? Is it solely to improve the teaching and learning for our students, or is part of it to improve the status of teaching and learning for ourselves?

There were two other home truths that beginning to dawn on me. Firstly, we need to stop moaning about educational research being impenetrable and just get on and get to grips with it (Paul Orsmond thought that we could do it if his second year undergraduates could!) and secondly, we need to write some grants and get in some money. Unfortunately end-of-term-itis has hit and I need to make a calendar note to come back and read this post and put these into action when vim and vigor return!

Data-intensive science

jobadge — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:26:48 +0000

A really interesting post, especially given it’s source, Prof Kell is the Chief Exec of BBSRC. I agree that data mining or processing has become something in it’s own right. Makes me think about ‘everything is miscellaneous’ and how we need to process on the out. But will scientists have the foresight to do this processing in an open and distributed online way?

The fourth paradigm of scientific knowledge generation – data-intensive science

via Professor Douglas Kell's blog by DKell on 3/17/09

We arguably recognise three main approaches to generating new knowledge: experimental and theoretical research are classically the first two, while more recently computer simulations of natural phenomena (and of engineering artefacts) have contributed a third. Now Bell, Hey and Szalay have proposed a fourth – data-intensive science.

Like any other major shift in scientific thinking – as Kuhn’s re-coined term ‘paradigm’ is intended to signify – data-intensive science both represents and is driven by a change in the scientific landscape. It is not just a re-statement of the significance of data-driven rather than hypothesis-dependent science. In this case, it is the ability of modern instrumentation to generate data at rates 100-1000-fold that of the devices they are replacing. In biology, an obvious set of examples is represented by the so-called next-generation sequencing methods for nucleic acids. Mardis and Shendure & Ji give recent reviews of these.

As the need for cost-effective computation on non-specialist hardware developed, Beowulf clusters of commodity PCs became a de facto standard in University laboratories and elsewhere. However, these were designed more for parallel computation than for accessing and analysing huge datasets, and rarely included database software. As data volumes grow to petabytes and beyond, it becomes infeasible (for reasons of bandwidth) to transport such large amounts of data frequently over a Grid or the interweb (or even the Cloud), and localised processing is to be preferred. A team of collaborators including Szalay have consequently realised a computer architecture, the Graywulf (named after Jim Gray), suitable for data-intensive science. It won the award for best storage solution at Supercomputing08. Bell and colleagues gives an example using a Graywulf of the execution of a query over a large astronomical database, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, that took 12 minutes (compared with 13 days on a non-parallel database). We have exploited other parallel architectures such as the Condor pool, but as with the Beowulf they are unsuitable for very large datasets.

As mentioned in my first blog, Sydney Brenner has remarked (Nature, June 5, 1980) that “Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries, and new ideas, probably in that order.” Bell and colleagues conclude in a similar vein: “In the future, the rapidity with which any given discipline advances is likely to depend on how well the community acquires the necessary expertise in database, workflow management, visualization and cloud computing technologies.” Workflows (e.g. using Taverna) for data integration have proved useful for many purposes, including for systems biology and for bio-statistical analyses of microarray data. Big databases with fast access and information visualisation look like being the next important areas for biology.

Bell, G., Hey, T. & Szalay, A. (2009). Beyond the data deluge. Science 323, 1297-8
Kell, D. B. & Oliver, S. G. (2004). Here is the evidence, now what is the hypothesis? The complementary roles of inductive and hypothesis-driven science in the post-genomic era. Bioessays 26, 99-105
Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago University Press, Chicago
Li, P., Oinn, T., Soiland, S. & Kell, D. B. (2008). Automated manipulation of systems biology models using libSBML within Taverna workflows. Bioinformatics 24, 287-289. Full text
Li, P., Castrillo, J. I., Velarde, G., Wassink, I., Soiland-Reyes, S., Owen, S., Withers, D., Oinn, T., Pocock, M. R., Goble, C. A., Oliver, S. G. & Kell, D. B. (2008). Performing statistical analyses on quantitative data in Taverna workflows: an example using R and maxdBrowse to identify differentially expressed genes from microarray data. BMC Bioinformatics 9, 334. Full text
Mardis, E. R. (2008). Next-generation DNA sequencing methods. Annu Rev Genomics Hum Genet 9, 387-402
Shendure, J. & Ji, H. (2008). Next-generation DNA sequencing. Nat Biotechnol 26, 1135-45
Simmhan, Y., Barga, R., Ingen, C. v., Nieto-Santisteban, M., Dobos, L., Li, N., Shipway, M., Szalay, A. S., Werner, S. & Heasley, J. (2009). GrayWulf: scalable software architecture for data intensive computing. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1-10
Sterling, T. L., Salmon, J., Becker, D. J. & Savarese, D. F. (1999). How to Build a Beowulf: A Guide to Implementation and Application of PC Clusters. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Ware, C. (2000). Information visualization. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco
Wedge, D. & Kell, D. B. (2008). Rapid prediction of optimum population size in genetic programming using a novel genotype – fitness correlation. GECCO 2008 (M. Keizer et al., eds), 1315-1322

Livescribe: a new way to take notes?

jobadge — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:30:33 +0000

credit: Amit Gupta (flickr)

This is one of those bits of kit I’ve seen around in a few places recently, MacWorld 09 awards, I saw that Howard Rheingold bookmarked it on delicious, but it wasn’t until I saw Michael Wesch tweet about his use of it that the penny dropped.

Livescribe Smartpen is a pen that you can use to take notes which also records what you are listening to. It has a camera under the nib and is triggered to record by using special note paper (you can print your own for free or buy the expensive notebooks from livescribe!). The cool part comes when you connect the pen to a computer and upload the recoding. It produces a flash movie of your handwritten scribble which is clickable. Click on a section of the notes and you get to listen to the part of the recording you made whilst you were taking those notes. What’s more you can share these notes online (as Micheal Wesch did), in a livescribe community, or presumably anywhere you can embed flash movies.

One of the main problems of recording lectures has been that an hour’s worth of talking is a lot to wade through if you can’t understand what you wrote on page 3 of your notes. This provides a quick way to skip to the exact part of the recording you need, listen again and make some sense of what you heard. The notes are searchable too. For non-native english speakers, or dyslexics, this could also help them to understand their own notes after the lecture.

Sharing your notes online is a really interesting area, and I wonder how many of the students who have already shared their work have thought about whether they have or need their lecturer’s permission to publish their lectures online?

I think using one of these pens would make me think more carefully about how I took notes, perhaps drawing more diagrams and making short bullet points and notes to myself to listen again. I like the idea that you get double benefit from taking notes this – first, the act of writing notes helps me to remember and listen actively to what is being said, and second, I get an electronic copy of my notes as back-up that I can move around digitally without having to type them up later.

I wonder how many students or teaching staff will weigh up the cost of a netbook (£200) against the cost of a livescribe pen (£129)? Carrying a 37 g pen is going to be easy on the pocket in other ways too.

QR Codes Ideas Factory: Leicester

jobadge — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:54:46 +0000

Andy Ramsden’s write up of the workshop he ran about QR codes with us today.

QR Codes Ideas Factory: Leicester

via QR codes at Bath by Andy Ramsden on 1/26/09

I ran the QR Codes Ideas Factory at UEA on the 26th January . The attendance was really good from across the institution. Thanks to Jo Badge for organising it. There were QR codes all over the building. The one on the meeting room enabled a link to the supporting documentation on a Blog. I quite liked this idea. It meant as I entered the room I could scan the link, get a handle of the workshop aims, leave comments etc., (link to image).

The outcomes of the session are available in two mind maps;

How might you use QR Codes? (png file)
What are the barriers to the use of QR Codes? (png file)

A couple of things struck me from the session. I was particularly interested the underlying theme … “using QR codes to enable people to access the required information as efficiently and effectively as possible. However, this quickly becomes a pointless activity because on many occasions we might direct them to resources and activities that are not appropriate for small screen devices. Such as web sites that do not render, or documents / pdfs which can not be read. Therefore, if the implementation of QR Codes is to be effective then we need to ensure that our material is accessible and usable on small screen devices”.

There was some discussion about student generation of QR codes and sharing these with each other. An interesting thing to observe was the sharing of QR codes in the session. Quite a few people had iPhones, and one individual captured as a photo a QR code included in my presentation. The person they where sitting next to then read the QR code from the iPhone and not my slide. This made me re-visit the scenario of collecting and managing QR codes from presentations. If I can’t scan the image (for what ever reason) then perhaps I should photo the slide (this is something that I regularly undertake during presentations) then upload them to Flickr, and later read them on my computer screen.

In terms of improving the support material, there were a number of questions raised. Firstly, the issue of size and the need to accommodate error handling, and secondly, the use of different colour QR codes.

Howard Rheingold’s attention 101 #uoltan

jobadge — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:47:14 +0000

This is a reminder that I need to pay attention and watch this video later when I’m not doing OU marking!
I am hoping that this will give me some answers to some of the points raised in our tan session today #uoltan

Fancy a twitter with Britney?

jobadge — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:04:44 +0000

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/article2116931.ece
Fancy a twitter with Britney? New network craze sweeping globe | The Sun |Features

So Twitter in the super soar away Sun. Definitely mainstream now.

Jing flash videos via posterous

jobadge — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:46:12 +0000

(download)

Click here to download:

posteroustest.swf (2935 KB)

Testing whether I can post Jing videos to posterous and then have them autoposted to wordpress. Doubt it but worth a try. It’s a 2.9MB swf file!

note edited on wordpress: almost – clicking on th e download link does play the jing video full screen. I suppose I just need to add a screenshot over the link. However posting Jing direct to posterous using email puts it into a whole new league for me. I am always put off using jing by the faff of making a screen shot, hosting the swf file file somewhere else, writing bits of code to make it work. One email and you’re done – that’s my kind of posting Fab.