Earlier this afternoon I caught wind from Dean Groom that I have been nominated for an Edublog Award for Best Educational Tech Support Blog and wanted to extend my humble appreciation to everyone who nominated me.
The award itself would be nice, to be sure, but more than anything else it is the acknowledgment of my peers – and the people I sincerely respect – that means the most to me about this.
To be identified as contributing something of value to the edublogging community – and perhaps the field of …

One of the WordPress plugins I’ve always been on the lookout for, but so far haven’t found, is one that will enable me to post to this blog via email. As I’ve said before, I spend an enormous amount of time on the train during the week; time that could be spent productively and yet all too frequently isn’t due to lack of wireless broadband on my laptop.
I do, however, have a mobile with internet access and have begun to use it extensively. However there is only so much you …

Sometimes I wonder whether all the attention and energy I put into fighting the status quo in the education system, and the never-ending quest to affect change is making me antagonistic and cynical, even resentful and bitter.
When I first started blogging several years ago I was a very political, very liberal blogger. It was the era of the Bush Administration in the US and the Howard Government in Australia and there was a lot not to like about the state of affairs at the time. United States Foreign …

This week I attended a two-day workshop put on by members of the Library staff that discussed the nature of research publications, the implications for which journals you publish in and how you recognise the differences in quality, and above all the whole notion of maximising your research impact.
None of these are factors I’ve ever thought about; none of them are things I’ve ever had to think about.  As a non-academic, I have no mandate to publish, no quota of annual publications to meet, and therefore not the slightest clue …

An article by this week’s New York Times (“Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest “) offers some very interesting statistics on what would appear to be a crash in blog usage, indicating:
“According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream …