Ruby (on wheels)

Finally got to the Edinburgh Coffee Morning. I always pick up some interesting tips, and it’s great to find out what people are doing and looking into with software and widgets.

Should I volunteer? For some time I’ve been receiving news and reading the “Seeing Hands” blog. It’s an inspirational look at helping blind people in Nepal to gain education and a paying job - not easy in a country that assumes blind people cannot contribute to society. I’ve been wondering about volunteering to go - it would be a worthwhile use of my massage training and it would give me a chance to see Nepal, a country I’ve always wanted to visit.

Should I?

I was recently pointed to some software that is now in beta - called Mendeley - which gives you a way to store research citations and then access it from any computer. I’m still working on seeing the ways it could help with research, but so far it looks really promising!

What I like about it:

• I can upload/store a pdf file and it will automatically extract the relevant citation information (journal name, date etc)
• it will also extract the references in the article and store them
• I can use the online version as a back-up
• it is possible to create folders for references that are related
• there is a plug-in for Word which means I can add the citation as I am working on a document, and it will then create a bibliography (as does Endnote, but this is free)
• I can create a shared group so that with colleagues we can share references about a topic
• it is possible to publish my own work

I can work online or offline, and then synchronise my references with the online version; then I can go to my office computer andsynchronise also, which means I don’t have to keep sending myself emails to rememebr to update!

A link to podcasts created by Steven Fry - sent to me by a former student who somehow survived the course!

Fry introduces “langue and parole” with examples, gives a whirlwind tour of the history of English, moves to a critique of Barthes, and revels in the “pleasure of language”. It’s quite a heady mixture!

After reading a post by David on using twitter polls, I decided to try it out and create my own:

There are various applications being developed by twtapps,

and here’s David’s orignal poll - you can vote on this too:

The twitter poll website is easy to use (if you have a twitter account already set up you just add your twitter name). The code is produced for the poll, which you can copy and paste into a blog post. It was easy to add this to my edublogs blog - I’ve also got several Wordpress blogs but despite trying all sorts of ways to embed the code, I simply can’t get it to work! Any suggestions welcome …