Earlier this week I visited the refurbished Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford for the first time and experienced a Shakespearean tragedy. I'm not referring to the plot of Hamlet, the best play ever written in the English language, I'm talking about this particular production, and also about the theatre itself. "I wonder what Greg Doran, the company’s new artistic director, makes of this botched shot after his own superb production a few years ago, starring David Tennant."Tennant took the role of Hamlet by the balls and walked the line between madness and sanity. Slinger doesn't know where he is going - but blame the director for that, not Slinger, who I believe is much better than the effort he is allowed to give here.
I'm still pretty happy with The Old Reader, apart from the inability to organize feeds in folders and lingering concerns about the sustainability of their business model. For that reason, I'm still looking at alternatives and I was excited by the announcement about being able to import OPMLs into WordPress.com 
via Becka Colley
I'm really a mash man - pie or not, that's my thing. So when my wife foisted crushed new potatoes on me a while ago I was sceptical. After two servings, I was hooked.
Afore the impending demise of cheatin' taxweasel Google Reader, I have moved all my RSS subscriptions to The Old Reader. And very good it is too, doing exactly what it says on the tin. The mobile version also works great, better than Reader ever did. And this simple cloud-based solution syncs to all your devices.
Wright, F., White, D., Hirst, T. & Cann, A. (2013) Visitors and Residents: mapping student attitudes to academic use of social networks. Learning, Media and Technology.
Badge, J.L., Saunders, N.F.W. & Cann, A.J. (2012) Beyond marks: new tools to visualise student engagement via social networks. Research in Learning Technology 20: 16283.
Cann, A.J. & Badge, J. (2011) Reflective Social Portfolios for Feedback and Peer Mentoring. Leicester Research Archive.
Cann, A., K. Dimitriou, and T. Hooley. (2011) Social media: A guide for researchers. Research Information Network.
Goodwin, M, Ademe, G, Pennington, M, Bartle, C and Jackson, P (2011) Engaging students, staff and employers in enhancing graduate impact: Tourism Management at the University of Gondar , Chapter 2 in Patsy Kemp and Richard Atfield (eds) Enhancing Graduate Impact in Business and Management, Hospitality, Leisure, Sport, Tourism, Newbury, Threshold Press, pp.9 20.
Goodwin, M and Lawrence, K (2011) Identifying and developing student aspirations: the role of the personal tutor , Proceedings of the Effective Learning in the Biosciences Conference: Equipping Students for the 21st Century, Leeds, UK Centre for Bioscience, p36.
"Instead of providing fertile ground for brilliant and lively conversation, discussion forums are allowed to go to seed. They become over-cultivated factory farms, in which nothing unexpected or original is permitted to flourish. Students post because they have to, not because they enjoy doing so. And teachers respond (if they respond at all) because they too have become complacent to the bizarre rules that govern the forum....
The most terrifying thing about all of this is that, more and more, learning management systems offer pre-set rubrics and auto-grading to assess these sterilized interactions. The discussion forum becomes a shackle, an assessed, graded component of a student’s performance. It defeats its own purpose."
Let's face it - we all need all the help we can get with writing. So I'm trying out Ommwriter (the free version). 
I read this after a recommendation by Martyn Poliakoff at HEASTEM13. "As more academic and academic related staff adopt the ‘individual as institution’ approach, institutions must reflect on their response. Readers familiar with Twitter may be familiar with the phrase “The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the views of my employer”. This is an often cited phrase designed as a response to risk averse “social media policies”, which have the effect of further distancing the individual and individual thought from host institutions.
Post-digital institutions may be characterised by their recognition that technology can be a vehicle to express motivation and practice. Understanding that individuals are chaotic, responding to small changes that may drive them in different directions and lead to new knowledge, learning and outcomes. Rather than setting strategic directions and objectives for technology practice (in either research or teaching) it is important to recognise that the practice is linked to behaviour, and that practices become the foci for investment of resource and energy.
Where academic practice is now played out on an increasingly digital canvas, organisations need to recognise when individuals are becoming institutions and work to support them, providing an environment that allows them to thrive. Strategic plans, objectives and directions will only succeed if they are flexible enough to accommodate the emerging technology and practices that are being exploited by these individuals."
I had a timetable malfunction at HEA STEM13 and missed Susanne's talk which I had intended to go to. Fortunately she has now published her work so everyone can see it. It's not easy to do studies of this sort and I'm very impressed by the rigour of the statistical treatment of these findings. My frustration with this sort of work is that despite continual calls for evidence-based education, when someone puts strong research such as this into the public sphere .... we still don't use it :-(The form of tutor notification that students have seen their feedback is when they telephone to thank or complain about their score.
"Digital literacy, a term coined a mere 15 years ago, continues to defy a clear definition in part due to the fast-changing social and technical reality, where the products and services most popular today may not exist a decade hence. Glister (1997) wrote about digital literacy before Google, before Facebook, before YouTube; yet, these online tools and their associated practices – online inquiry, social networking, e-learning – are integral to the way we think about living, learning and working in our digital society. The rise of ‘casual learning’ and communities of interest online showcase the rapid movement toward informal learning contexts, where individual agency, sociality and temporal fluidity change the nature of how people see themselves as knowledge builders and experts. This issue arrives at a point in our digital evolution where we are questioning many of the assumptions about how and where learning works. The barriers that constrained digital literacy, including access to technology, expertise and social support, are becoming a thing of the past, but new questions and challenges are emerging, including: how do we understand, assess and value new digital literacies?"
The Child That Books Built is a book about books. 
