Author Archives: Alastair Culham

About Alastair Culham

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

Wikipedian Andy Mabbett is collecting the voices of scientists as Wikipedia sound files.  Read more.    

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Digitally Ready, a retrospective

In October 2011 I drafted a brief description of my digital education interests for this blog (when it was just starting) but didn’t get to the point where I wanted to publish it.  Looking back over the two years of … Continue reading

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Sharing Good Practice – A journey to using Facebook as an educational tool

I’ve been at Reading University for quite a long time now.  Arriving at Reading fresh from my PhD, during which I managed my research data and wrote my thesis using a Sinclair QL (with optional disk drive), I told my … Continue reading

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Are we ‘Digitally Ready’ yet?

At 10am on Monday the JISC funded Digitally Ready project group, which broadcasts its progress via a blog and Twitter, met for an evaluation of project progress. A new emphasis for future JISC funding is likely to be student engagement … Continue reading

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Blogging assignments – comments and experiences part 2: BSc Honors Projects

One of the challenges with undergraduate projects is to give the student experience of publishing their work.  Sometimes a project fits part of a larger research area and the student gets co authorship of a paper.  Three years ago one … Continue reading

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Blogging assignments – comments and experiences part 1: MSc formative and summative assignments

Blogging has become one of the major means of communicating just about anything.  It allows more development of thought than a tweet or Facebook post and is a logical development of the traditional form of published essays.  I’ve been experimenting … Continue reading

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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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