Author Archives: Shirley Williams

About Shirley Williams

Shirley Williams is a National Teaching Fellow and Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of Reading. She is involved in a number of research projects related to learning technologies, communities, social networks, Digital identity and knowledge transfer. She also enjoys reading and cooking.

OPEN Project at Aberdeen

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Shirley Williams

There is a very interesting project starting up at Aberdeen, below is a bit from their introduction: ‘Online Presence, Employability, Network (OPEN) is a novel project supported by the Higher Education Academy (HEA), and being developed the University of Aberdeen’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Employability, Staff-student partnerships, Work/Academic placements | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Fellowship for people who use software

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Shirley Williams

The announcement below just popped in to my inbox and I thought it might be of interest to Digitally Ready folks: The Software Sustainability Institute (www.software.ac.uk) has launched a Fellowship programme that recognises outstanding UK-based researchers who use software. The Fellowships come … Continue reading →

Posted in Meetings & Events | Leave a comment

Digital Assets

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Shirley Williams

We all have lots of digital stuff, be it photos, music, books or software. The University is good at backing up and generally looking after such stuff on centrally owned machines, but what do we do about the electronic stuff … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital community | Leave a comment

Tracking Downloads with Centaur

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Shirley Williams

In an earlier post I asked: Is it worth tweeting about academic papers? and I apologized for the quality of the graphs saying “Centaur does not allow users to extract data over a specified period”. Well it is possible to … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Endnote and Google Scholar

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Shirley Williams

In an earlier post we looked at Google Scholar. Last week I saw this link to a screencast about using Endnote and Google Scholar, it shows how to set up Google Scholar to link to institutional libraries and to export … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Is it worth tweeting about academic papers?

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Shirley Williams

Last month Melissa Terras, from the Department of Information Studies at University College London, published a blog post “Is blogging and tweeting about research papers worth it? The Verdict”.  In this post she explained an experiment she conducted by which she … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

Google Refine

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Shirley Williams

Google Refine is a powerful tool for dealing with messy data. It seems to have more power than a spreadsheet and lots of potential. Have a look at the videos on the Google Refine site to get a feel. Unlike … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Google Scholar for searching

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Shirley Williams

There are many databases available for academic searching, and there is a list of those available to University of Reading users. Google Scholar is a good overarching tool for searching through a number of these, via the preferences you can … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Online professionalism and Facebook – Falling through the generation gap

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Shirley Williams

Via a tweet I found this recently published article: Osman, A., Wardle, A. & Caesar, R. (2012) Online professionalism and Facebook – Falling through the generation gap. Medical teacher. Available online at: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/full/10.3109/0142159X.2012.668624 Although the survey reported is about medical professionals … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Behaving Online

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Shirley Williams

There is lots of advice available on how to behave online, some of it very sensible and some of it belonging to the 19th century. The University has produced two guides on Being Online one for students and one for … Continue reading →

Posted in Social media | 3 Comments