Life, The Universe and Everything: Reflections and Rants

if you love your students, you’ll kill those course reading lists – they do no good and can do great harm. The full course reading list is a crutch for mediocrity which I no longer provide.

Over four days in April, we hosted almost 200 Transition Year students for four days of workshops in Digital Humanities at UCC.  Each day we introduced a fresh batch of young learners to aspects of our DH practice here in UCC in a brisk run through digital learning, text markup and making with Arduinos

I don’t think think is fair or useful to satirise someone who has been dead for 1400 years. Free speech, which is the cornerstone of freedom and dignity, allows people the right to do that, and I agree with that right, but I also gives me the freedom to assert that cartoonists who satirise dead…

Portfolio based assessments are a staple in my classes: I design courses so that students build material over the whole course for collection and submission at the end.  I should probably use a ePortfolio tool to support that, but not even Mahara, easily the best of them, is good enough. Why?  it lacks three key…

Digitally archiving most of your learning activity is now possible, which means you can share it later, out of context. As an example of how this might be problematic, suppose you present in an interview a short video clip of a classroom discussion on a controversial topic in which you demonstrate excellence and I appear…

The enormous financial repercussions of the leaking of a recording of  Donald Sterling, made by mutual agreement by his archivist, Vanessa Stiviano brings the issue of archiving and privacy to the headlines again.  The idea that someone might have a personal archivist might seem odd to most of us, but Sterling would not be the…

Burning plagiarising students at the stake seems to be a major focus of the academic world these days, and I written about that elsewhere previously on this blog. In passing, I said I would discuss how I create assessments which are mostly proof against plagiarism. Creating assessments based on learning outcomes is a mugs game…

Identity is a major research issue in the humanities – one might say that the nature of who we are, what it means to be human, is a fundamental question for the humanities. Increasing, social media has come to play an important part how we shape our identity and how we interact with other people’s…

Academic Plagiarism, and specifically the success of Turnitin, is once more in the news – and ‘Frankly, my dear, I couldn’t give a damn.’  I don’t care much about plagiarism, most of my assessments are designed in a way that makes them very difficult to plagiarise, and I mainly use Turnitin to manage digital submissions…

Moving to working on mobile devices, and for serious work this means a full sized tablet, is not something you can do overnight, and if you try you will be disappointed. Since I got an iPad, I considered and resisted the idea of buying a Bluetooth keyboard. I convinced myself that the logic of the…