Course result torment

Don't you just hate this bit of the whole studying process? The night before the night before your result comes out. Might it come out a day early? Can you talk your brain out of thinking that you've failed, scraped a pass, done okay, done better than okay? How come before you realise it's imminent you can happily forget it - but the closer the date comes, the longer the time seems to drag. Exams may be nature's laxative... but results time sure does get your stomach flipping too!

Okay. I will stop thinking about it... and go back to marking. Why oh why is it that my job won't allow me to forget the axe that's hanging over my student-y head?! Torture!

Humble pie...

Tum te tum. Just realised what I did with my mysteriously vanished blog entry. I pressed 'cancel' instead of publish.

Do be dooo... shuffles off looking at feet and ignoring the burning red heat coming from her embarrassed face...

Blog rage!

I just typed a whole entry... and because I'm trying out Flock as a web 2.0 sorta browser, I thought I'd use that... and... it ate it. Give it me back you rat-infested browser!! It was my blog entry and I want it back! Okay, I can't be bothered to retype. The gist is... media - stop reporting twaddle about Facebook. So people waste time online using it? Well, they'd probably just be texting their mates anyway. Either accept it's here and people are in the middle of 'oooooh, new toy!' novelty factor or bash out the same old rubbish and never learn anything about how these technologies are / can be used. I don't get why people get so riled about this sort of thing. Why not attempt to harness the enthusiasm people have for mobiles, e-mail, the web, social networking, blogging - whatever the latest 'thing' to do is - and find out how to turn it into something productive? The same goes for education. These tools seem to get people excited, so why not try to use them appropriately?

Well, there were other bits and links to the BBC and The Guardian's sites where they've currently got 'Facebook is wasting employer's money' and 'you can't make more friends using Facebook-type sites' scaremongering going on. But, I've given up the will to blog and may (note the irony!) get back to doing some real work. Wasting time blogging about people wasting time online instead of working, while I should be marking. Let's just say this was a moment of reflection which will build my professional approach to education in the long run. Or something along those lines...

The clue's in the name...

Seen in the BBC's News Magazine...

"QUOTE OF THE DAY"

I know it's not nice to laugh... but...

Seconds out for second chance degrees

Students face higher fees to study for second degree | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk: "Students wishing to study for a second undergraduate degree could face higher course fees, following funding cuts announced by the government today. From next year, government grants given to universities to fund students studying for a second degree or lower qualifications will be reduced by around £100m a year."

One of those moments where you were glad you finished your second undergraduate degree the year before the cuts hit?

Seriously, a sad day for any graduate who finds that the degree they did when barely an adult and hardly able to know what they wanted to do, doesn't cut the mustard and a decade or so later they need to retrain. Make a mistake first time out... and that's you done. Maybe the idea that a degree isn't a specific training qualification and should equip for you the skills of learning which will fit you for anything... but my experience says that's not always the case. I just wasn't up to making the most of higher education the first time out. Second time around it opened doors I never even knew existed. Will those opportunities now disappear?

10 Future Web Trends

I just love articles like from Read/Write Web this for the 'look back and laugh' or 'oooooh they were right' value!

10 Future Web Trends: "10 Future Web Trends"

Let's give it a year... and see... right or wrong, it's interesting food for thought (and they even managed to write a whole article with only one mention of 'Web 3.0' - hooray for looking beyond the utterly obvious!)

Facing a lack of online privacy...

Facebook changes raise privacy concerns | | Guardian Unlimited Business: "Facebook is opening up its website so that member profiles can be discovered through online search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, as the social networking site looks to boost user numbers. But the move will spark further concerns about privacy as users have to opt out of the service, rather than opt in, meaning that all 39 million profiles could be viewable when the service goes live."

Mildly scary news in The Guardian about Facebook which risks trampling on people's privacy. Just as it snuggles into the online lives of millions of users, it takes that information and throws it out into the wilds. I wonder how many people have been savvy enough to restrict access to their profile already? I'm guessing it's fairly minimal and that this may mean a field day for those who are into identity theft...

10 bits of Firefox goodness

Having just set up my new laptop (finally - why does it always take me so long?!), I thought I'd make a note of all my favourite Firefox add-ons.  I always try to do a cull and review of everything I've got set up whenever I change computer and although I invariably end up with lots of twaddle installed, these are my top 10 add-ons which always make it through the cut...

1.   Scrapbook - absolutely love it!  If you want to take an entire offline copy of a website, then this is the add-on you need.  So many educational websites expire after you've completed the course and leave you with happy memories but nothing which is the equivalent of the course texts you might get in traditional environments - this way, you get to take your books home!  Definitely recommended and the search facility is brilliant too.

2.   Web Developer - if you do any kind of web development at all, then this is a really handy one to have.  You can check for broken links, page dimensions, mess about with the CSS... cookies... lots of HTML goodness!

3.   IE Tab - some websites don't like Firefox - shame on them!  Well, if you want to get round that while still using your favourite web browser, then the IE Tab add-on lets you do just that while convincing the site you're looking at that it's snuggled up in Internet Explorer and everything's dandy.

4.    Foxmarks Bookmark synchronizer - use more than one computer regularly... and you enter 'where are my bookmarks' hell.  Foxmarks does an excellent job of synchronizing your bookmarks so that you barely even notice you've changed PC.

5.    Adblock Plus - bye bye to annoying adverts which blink and distract when you're trying to read the content of a page!  Sorry about the whole lost revenues thing... but I really don't care that much...

6.   404: File is not found? - this one is great if you're doing some research and the link you've got is out of date or duff or has been moved or... well... it's just gone awol.  If the Internet Archive managed to get a copy of it before that happened, then this little Add-on takes you straight to its previous location with no faffing.

7.    Download Statusbar - if there's one thing that niggles me in Firefox, it's the annoying window that pops up by default when you're downloading something.  The Download Statusbar gets rid of that and tidies everything up for you.

8.    Google Notebook - it's my favourite way of taking notes when I'm working online... and this add-on integrates the whole thing neatly into Firefox so taking notes on any page is only ever a right click away.

9.   Del.icio.us bookmarks - I do like a good bit of Del.icio.us-ing, and having a nice little button to press whenever something catches my eye and I want to plonk it into Del.icio.us appeals to my lazy side.

10.   Google Reader Watcher - I admit it... I am a bit of a Google-a-phile... and I do like a good RSS feed served up by good ol' Google Reader.  However, I am also extraordinarily lazy and having even to traipse off to check for new stuff doesn't appeal... so this little widget checking in the background is right up my street!

Oh, and the ones which didn't make the cut this time around?  Clipmarks - too messy and complicated for a simple note-taking tool)... Google Browser Sync - clunky and urgh... BlogRovr - never understood it... ScribeFire - should've made blogging nice an' easy, but it had some quirks when using it with Blogger which drove me potty.

I do also use the Google Firefox toolbar and the Facebook one... but browser life would still tick along happily even if I didn't have 'em... so they're not quite top ten material.

Socialistics - the nuts and bolts of your friendships?

Socialistics Helps You Understand Your Social Network: "Socialistics Ever wanted to have an in-depth analysis of the people in your Facebook network? Now you can. A Facebook app called Socialistics gives you more data about your online friends than you can shake a stick at: clouds, statistics, graphs - it’s all there. And it’s not just the basics: Socialistics scratches quite deep beneath the surface. You can, for example, see the political views or religious beliefs of the people in your network; you can get stats for friends of your friends (extended network); or you can see all of your friends’ images in a big picture wall. There’s also a couple of upcoming features, like something called Socialysis, that aren’t yet ready for the public."

Have to say that this sort of tool is probably more toy than tool at the moment... but it's one of those Facebook apps that might actually be pretty useful in terms of using social networks such as this in education. It gives you an insight into your own connections with other people and looking at my own set of stats it's fascinating, confirming and interesting all in one.

I know the novelty will wear off, but I'm sure there's a 'real' use in there somewhere...

Who's the digital native now?

Poetry, politics and old people's homes: the likes and dislikes of a 95-year-old blogger | Technology | The Guardian: "She is billed as the world's oldest blogger. At 95 years old and with a worldwide following that has seen more than 340,000 hits on her blog, Spaniard María Amelia López has achieved the kind of status that millions of younger internet chroniclers can only dream of."

Digital divide... what digital divide? Love it!