Google Maps
The satellite view for OL1 1BB (UCO) must be over a year old, as it doesn’t show University Studios!
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&tab=wl
To get from Huddersfield to Madrid by car would apparently take 20 and a half hours, while walking (part of the way on water, according to the map) would take 7 days and 14 hours.
I’ve just had a look at the Place de l’Odeon in Paris and it’s almost as good as being able to stroll down the streets myself. My favourite French Revolutionary, Camille Desmoulins, lived there and I could get a lot closer to the windows of his second floor apartment than I could in person. But I couldn’t see in, and this and the blurred faces of passers by is quite reassuring about the privacy aspect. If you were a Chinese human rights activist, you could Google map a tour of human rights violation hotspots. Shame the government have banned it.
Wikipedia
While my random article search didn’t turn up anything that interests me enough to blog about (science and geography articles seem to vastly outnumber historical, literary or artistic ones) , it did give a glimpse of the huge amount of information available on Wikipedia. I have a confession. I like Wikipedia. It provides a starting point for finding out about unfamiliar subjects. The possible unreliability of its content makes me exercise my evaluative skills (i.e. take everything with a pinch of salt), which is no bad thing. It’s a good place to go for useful links to other websites. And it’s not entirely lacking in editorial control (the absence of which is a downside of the net’s democratisation of knowledge). But I would like to know more about who’s in charge and what their values are. I’m an information literacy professional. We’re nosy about stuff like that. I plan to set up a wiki for my colleagues like the one for library procedure at Huddersfield – a handy way of sharing information and making sure everyone knows what’s what.
Technorati
Various searches for Huddersfield seemed to turn up pretty much the same stuff. Yes, I can see the value of this as a marketing tool but I just can’t get enthusiastic about it.
Del.icio.us
Same favourites on all computers? Very convenient, but could be embarrassing at work if your favourites include the best nude mudwrestling or Morris dancing sites (apologies to any mudwrestlers and Morris dancers out there). An excellent example of how the web is democratising knowledge, and a very useful resource for learners and teachers.
RSS
I haven’t had time to answer all the questions I’m supposed to in this blog entry, but I’ve learned enough to be enthusiastically adovcating the use of RSS feeds to my academic colleagues. The other day I tried to get one of them to set one up from the Bolton Wanderers website, only to find that it doesn’t have a feed. Manchester United’s website has one, but my suggestion that he support them instead didn’t go down too well. I also found out that if your computer has Internet Explorer 7 on it, you can save RSS feeds to it via the toolbar, without using Bloglines.
St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry
Before it was bombed in World War II (as a reprisal for the British bombing of Dresden), Coventry was a walled city of red sandstone buildings like this one.
Flickr’s great – easy to use, and it p****s all over Google Image Search (am I allowed to say that?)
145/366 – Lauragais
Originally uploaded by Lily 0_0
- The Lauragais is my favourite part of rural France. With its gently rolling countryside, it reminds me very much of my native Warwickshire. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lines “Such little hills the sky/Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb” could easily apply to both. In medieval times, the Lauragais was so prosperous it was nicknamed the “Pays Cocaigne” (as in “land of plenty”, not “class A drugs heaven”). The medieval heresy of Catharism took root here before spreading to the areas now known to tourists as the “Pays Cathares”, but the Lauragais has been slow to market itself as the Cradle of Catharism. Ten years ago it didn’t get many visitors, and the farmers who passed my car as I sat in deserted country lanes looking at the scenery clearly thought I was odd!
Hello!
Hello everyone,
Hope you are all well. Sarah Munks help me set this blog up last year, so all I had to do was fail to remember my password, get a new one and change the theme.
I think if I was new to computers, I’d be put off by the way it isn’t always obvious on a website how to get to things. This is something students struggle with on Blackboard – you have to rummage about to find what you’re looking for – and something to be borne in mind when helping people with little or no IT experience. I don’t know how people crack those computer games where you have to make a fiendishly clever guess at what to do to make it to the next level. It must be like trying to find stuff on LexisNexis.
Thank you whoever came up with the 25 things course. It’d have been impossible for me to attend if it hadn’t been online, and I’d have missed out on the chance to update my skills.
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