Author Archives: Alastair Culham

About Alastair Culham

A professional botanist and biologist with an interest in promoting biological knowledge and awareness to all.

The Digital Department (Digital literacy project at UCL)

At lunchtime today the SELC group and other interested staff met to hear a presentation on The Digital Department (Digital literacy project at UCL), a sister project to Digitally Ready.  It aims to develop the professional profile of teaching administrators.  … Continue reading

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Blogging to the world

Blogging is about communication.  Some time ago I used the Word Press Jetpack statistics to check that one of the blogs I was writing had readers (Tropical Biodiversity) but recently the Word Press stats tools for blogs have gone through … Continue reading

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Hatchpath revisited

An email this week from Hatchpath telling me that around 10% of our UG stduents had signed up for it led me to look at some of the large part 1 modules in Biological Sciences to check the usage.

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Hatchpath: University of Reading is launch site for new collaborative software

I’ve just stumbled across http://hatchpath.com, a site for student exchange of information on their modules.  It seems to have very smooth and intuitive tools for information sharing and strikes me as quite Facebook-like in its approach to making things easy. … Continue reading

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Digital deception

We all receive spam email from time to time and have probably all been asked to send our bank account details so that millions of dollars/pounds/euros can be deposited in our accounts. If you have a spam filter that gets … Continue reading

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Measures of impact – a top ten for museums

I’m sitting in a meeting room at Kew evaluating the role of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and listening to a talk on making data sticky by Rod Page.  His thesis is that data are only valuable if there are … Continue reading

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RU Digitally Ready?

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Chelsea Flower Show is Digitally Ready!

Alan Titchmarsh and Rachel De Thame may spend their time admiring the large and expensive show gardens around the grand marquee but to the digitally ready enthusiast surely the most photo worthy item in the show is the 2 metre … Continue reading

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The open access argument is hotting up further with Harvard putting its weight behind free to view publications as reported in The Guardian.  What the article doesn’t mention is that you need to be a fairly rich researcher to publish … Continue reading

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Digital dissent

I follow several electronic newsgroups to ensure I stay at the front of my research interests. The ever challenging issue of science on Wikipedia cropped up today with an unusually heated debate on the accuracy of information on a page … Continue reading

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