Moodle has been claimed to be based be a Social Constructivist pedagogy. It aint. Niall Sclater summed it up, when talking about the OU’s adoption of the eLearning platform, by pointing out that “It can also be argued that LMSs are relatively pedagogy-neutral and and are merely shells in which to place content and activities”. [...]
Update: I put the wrong link in earlier to the GM script, oops!
Putting a large cohort of students into specific Moodle groups can be tedious and error-prone (if you need specific students in specific groups).
I’ve written a Greasemonkey script to help assign specific people to groups in Moodle. It simply hides people already assigned to [...]
Using SMS for education generally costs money. Even if you use free software you will generally end up paying someone for each text you send. However there are free tools out there that incorporate free SMS functionality. Twitter and Jaiku are two simple ones. With these tools you type short messages and they are published [...]
Image via Wikipedia
I’ve been hearing about educational institutions strategically “building a presence in Second Life”. They are sceptical about SL but worried about being left behind if it takes off. There are big technical barriers to SL uptake: fast machines needed, fast broadband needed, the need for a client plugin, proxy server access issues etc. [...]
Via iAlja on twitter I heard about the TED talk on crows by Joshua Klein. I am fascinated by crow intelligence and I found this talk incredible.
It shows a very cool video of a Caledonia crow fashioning a wire hook to use as a tool. It talks about crows who follow Swedish fishermen to steal [...]
Photo owned by kevindooley (cc)
There are not two sides to every story. Sometimes there is only one:
Smoking is bad for you
Climate change is happening, caused by human activity
Both these one-sided stories started out with two sides.
On the other hand some stories do have two sides but you only hear one. Probably because the [...]
The economist this week reports a study which found that the black rat actually comprises several distinct species. Apparently this will be useful for devising better rat eradication strategies.
It is the brown rat that is used by scientists. Mice are used in genetic research but rats are often used in experiments into things like learning. [...]
