Category: Random
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Needs to do better
Enda Kenny’s pledge to abolish the Seanad, reported in yesterdays Irish Times, is a cheap shot at populist politics which shows why he is no better than the current crowd. There are things which can be done to reform the Seanad, and some are very easy.
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Blogging as a Personal Learning Environment
I’m making my Digital History students (Hi6018) create and use a blog as the anchor for their assessment portfolio in the the course, and I was hunting around for other courses using blogs, but cannot find as many as I used to be able to see. Bill Turkel’s class at UWO are doing it, and…
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There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch…
John A Murphy often advocated nationalising the land but somehow I don’t think he had in mind nationalising the speculative overbuilding of the property bubble. However, barring major accidents, all of us who pay tax in Ireland are about to become part of the biggest landowning cartel in our history since Cromwell took it all…
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NASA – Need Another Space Agency?
NASA’s underfunding seems to be the only thing, apart from shuttle launches, that gets space in the news these days. People need a frontier to challenge them, which is why watching Discovery blast off into the night on Sky News while sipping a pint of the black stuff in the pub makes most blokes feel…
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Boyne Walk in the Wet
The Battle of the Boyne was the largest single battle fought in Ireland, and I recently had the opportunity to walk the site with the Military History Society of Ireland on a typically wet Irish summer day. The walk was led by Dr Harman Murtagh, the society President, who played a key role in the…
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Games in Three Parts
Good computer games should come in three parts. I don’t mean in terms of gameplay, I mean in terms of architecture. Well designed business client-server applications have three main parts, database, business rules and front end client, but many games are driven mainly by the graphical front end, and munge up the other two parts…
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Networks and “National” universities
Some people still cling to the idea that an academic department is a tight box on an organisation chart, but those days are fast dying, and now a department is more like a clump on a network diagram with an increasingly diverse range of connections to other disciplines and institutions. It is true that for…
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Teaching Continuity Plan
How do we maintain teaching continuity through the coming winter of swine flu? We’re assured that our university has a plan for the pandemic but we have not been told anything about it, which is unusual – our current President is very good about keeping everyone informed. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at my own teaching,…
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Augmented Reality at home
It really takes a writer to show a vision of how new technologies can change our daily lives, and in Halting State, Charles Stross has done that for me with his version of augmented reality. Standing in my barn this morning, I realised I need CopSpace here, at home.
