Stephanie on November 28th, 2008

One of the things that I like about a lot of blogs is that they put their personality out there… and I realise that to date I’ve been too “PC”. So here it goes as a warning to anyone who reads this - this is about to undergo a massive personality change.

In line with this, I’m gonna share a few things from classes, a few funny tales and horror stories from the board side of the classroom, where me, the performing monkey, stands and takes the crap that students who see education as a commodity dole out.

Like today, when some bright spark comes up to me after class and says “what should I do if I don’t understand something?”

*stunned silence with crickets chirping*

My response - “Raise your hand in class and ask.”

She looked at me as if I’d just sworn at her. Sheesh.

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Stephanie on November 26th, 2008

So you’ve been asked to do a project for an assignment and part of that is a Gantt chart.

Stop whining about the price of Microsoft Project and install something that is just as good and will get the job done for you… free.

More information about the product can be found on the the Open Workbench website and Wikipedia. It has enough features to get your project underway, and there are a number of downloads of project templates also available.

Download Open Workbench from their website (registration required)

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Stephanie on August 16th, 2008

One of the biggest gripes that I hear from students is that there is no information on the internet or in research databases about a subject. Inevitably they end up turning to non-reliable sources, and not getting marks as they have not done adequate research. Note to students: I want to give you marks! Please give me a reason to give you those extra points!

I plan to tackle this in a four part series:

  1. Refining your search terms,
  2. How to use Google to search, and
  3. How to use online databases to search
  4. Quality of sources

Hopefully using the information in these posts you will be able to find more information relevant to your assignment,

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Stephanie on August 12th, 2008

EBSO is a good database but sometimes searching can produce undesirable results. Check the video for a demonstration on how to get good results from your searches.

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Stephanie on August 7th, 2008

Well this is half humourous - students really do need to pay attention to this, as I see it all the time!!!!

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PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a FREE replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions.

PSPP can perform descriptive statistics, T-tests, linear regression and non-parametric tests. Its backend is designed to perform its analyses as fast as possible, regardless of the size of the input data. You can use PSPP with its graphical interface or the more traditional syntax commands.

It runs on a variety of platforms and is useful for quantitative data analysis.

Get PSPP

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Stephanie on August 2nd, 2008

Bibme.org was a massive find for me and my teaching staff. It does exactly what it claims to - create correctly formatted bibliographies for use in academic work.

The biggest boon of this site is that it takes a web reference, or a book ISBN, and if it has been used by someone else on the site, it will fill in all the information for you - authors, publisher, year of publication, etc. If it is a web site it will scrape information from the site. If information is missing - just fill in the fields provided and it will then save it all into a perfect citation format!

Register as a user and it will save the citations for future use!

Other Uses

Researchers and students are finding this a useful tool not only for putting together a bibliography for assessments, but as a way of compiling lists of material they have used - you can save multiple lists and download them for future use or even sharing.

IMPORTANT: Don’t forget that Bibliographies are only part of the referencing process - citations must be included in assignments, and there is a citation guide also available on the site.

http://www.bibme.org

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I love gadgets and technology as they are great ways to assist with research. Google Books and other online book offerings are a boon to researchers who are good at search as they can quickly get to the topics they need with good search terms.

I have just read via TechCrunch that Amazon is going to tackle the textbook market via their Kindle product - this has great potential in terms of lugging around textbooks, but hopefully also in terms of finding relevant information in the texts as well.

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