Doing a double act again, I presented our thoughts on how we have progressively used web 2 at Leicester during the HEA Centre for Bioscience event. For me, this was a whiz through how my PLE had changed over the last (almost) 2 years (from Jan 08 to today).

Alan made a wordle to represent his PLE and would probably have talked about communication and filtering if he had been there to say something.

Stuart Johnson asked me a really good question about whether my complicated diagrams of all the tools I use would put some people off from ever starting the move into web 2. I think that it probably would have put me off at first, but I hoped that people could recognise some tools they are perhaps already using and that they probably use them in a more connected way than they think.

Oops, edited after the fact as I forgot I scheduled this post and intended to add content to it at some point. With the excitement of pretending to be Alan Cann all day, I forgot!

I briefly demonstrated our e-learning at Leicester group on citeulike and Alan was going to talk about how we are going to use citeulike for online journal clubs next semester with our second year students on a research skills course.

The slides are on google docs and embedded here from slideshare.

We are hosting a HEA Centre for Biosicence event at Leicester in December.

Enhancing learning through Web2.0

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Medical Sciences Building, University of Leicester

Web2.0 technologies continue to grow, both in diversity and usage and have the potential to impact all areas of learning. How can a bioscientist navigate the technologies of Web2.0 and why should you bother? The Centre for Bioscience would like to bring together examples of Web 2.0 which enhance student learning or academic scholarship. The day will advocate useful approaches rather than advocating particular programmes and be aimed at the novice to moderate user of Web2.0 tools.

Follow this event on Twitter at #CfBweb2 to follow Centre tweets on Twitter or consider joining Twitter.

The Centre hosts a social network site, UK Centre for Bioscience Pilot Social network, to explore the potential of using Web 2.0 with academics in bioscience education in UK HE. Give it a go!

Full programme and registration

When setting up our smallworlds project and the course content for key skills undergraduate course, we struggled to find good sources of customisable RSS searches in peer reviewed journals. In the course of searching for something else, I stumbled across a solution today, the JISC project ticTOC.

ticTOC

ticTOC allows you to search for journals by journal name or publisher, then add them to a list ‘myTOC’.

The table of contents for these journals can then be exported as a OPML file for an RSS reader. Very simple and easy to do.

TOCs RSS in Google Reader

I would like to be able to take this one stage further and add search terms but, it is a step in the right direction.

Of course, I put it on twitter and then got another suggestion for something similar (thanks twitterverse!), myjournals. Tools like these are the workhorses that we need to encourage more scientists into the web2.0 world. Current awareness is the bread and butter of science, if we can make it obvious that RSS can turn your bread and butter into a cheese toasty we are laughing!

update: general Search added December 2008.