It’s hard to believe this is the final post in this series! For Thing 23, I will reflect on my previous posts and what I have learned. It has been 1244 days since I started this journey–my first post went up on 20 February 2019. Favourite pArts and Surprises I most enjoyed the parts of… Read more Thing 23: Reflection
The penultimate Thing focuses on having fun in digital spaces and suggests playing around with apps like Just a Line, an app which allowed users to create and share video animations of simple drawings; Dubsmash, a lip-synching app, or Snapchat, a messaging app that focuses on sharing pictures or short videos which are promptly deleted… Read more Thing 22: Fun and Play
Gamification is a part of life and learning online. Adding elements of game-playing, such as earning rewards, competing with others, tracking progress, and exploring stories, to non-game situations, can make education more engaging and interactive. Thing 21 asks us to explore the work of online educational games, by choosing two from a list and interacting… Read more Thing 21: Online Games and Learning Tools
It can be easy to forget how new professional social networking is. Consider the students who enter university at eighteen in the autumn of 2022. They were born in the year Facebook was launched! Most young people, in other words, have never experienced a world without the social internet. Most researchers, on other hand, are… Read more Thing 20: Professional Social Networks
Citations, as I tell students in academic skills workshops, are a way to acknowledge where their information comes from. Any direct quotes; paraphrases or summaries, theories or arguments (or even viewpoints); or statistics, case studies, diagrams, etc; that they did not make themselves must be followed with a reference to the source of that work.… Read more Thing 19: Altmetrics
People who study how and why universities do what they do have been talking for awhile now about the ‘hidden curriculum‘: the etiquette, values, and expectations that underlie academic culture but which are not explicitly discussed. The hidden curriculum can create a barrier for members of the university community who are first-generation, working class, or… Read more Navigating Online Meetings With Confidence
One of my favourite things about working at a university is being able to see new ideas grow and develop. Many universities, including mine, foster this process through small grant schemes, which are designed to enable research projects to get off the ground. It was through one of these that I first heard of the… Read more Thing 18: Augmented and Virtual Reality
Earlier this week, I attended one of the Proquest Books Week online talks ‘Diversifying Reading Lists and Content Acquisition’ (the programme is available here). I hope that sharing my notes from this valuable event might be useful as my own institution and others around the world work to decolonise our campuses and libraries. The speakers… Read more Diversifying Reading Lists and Content Acquisition
Academic books are the product of considerable time, effort, and expertise and a crucial part of many scholars’ careers. There are many handbooks on how to publish and be a productive writer (some examples from our library are here, here, and here); some of these books also cover how to get academic books in front… Read more Promoting Your Book to Libraries in Four Easy Steps
Every year, the House of Commons Library holds an Open Day for library and information professionals from around the UK. It’s a chance to look behind the scenes at the library which supplies MPs with research and information they need to do their job as parliamentarians. The 2020 open day was held at the Palace… Read more Information is the Lifeblood of Parliament: Visiting the House of Commons Library