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CIT Management at NUS Service Class Assessment

The Centre for Instructional Technology is taking part in the NUS Service Class on-site assessment today. This is the culmination of months of work preparing the application report for this framework for service excellence.

Having been involved in this process from the start, I can see that everyone involved has learnt a lot about CIT as an organisation. At very least, it has helped us to crystallise how we do things and where we are heading as a department. The service class application process really makes you sit down and what you and your organisation are all about.

Hopefully, our effort will bear fruit - our customers will be the ones who benefit from it!

The Wayne State University Teaching and Learning blog highlights Citeline which

... is designed to display bibliographic data on timelines and as a faceted collection that can be sorted and filtered within one online view.

This tool from MIT, helps you to manage your list of published works. I haven't tried it out, but it looks very blog-like. I suspect the interface would be similar to a blog post interface, with appropriate fields for the required information - author(s), article/paper title, title of journal/publication, abstract, etc.
The biggest advantage is the dynamic display. Instead of getting a regular publication list, your publications can be viewed in different ways e.g. by type, date, publication etc.

Another tool for managing bibliographic information (and a whole lot more) is Zotero. This Firefox extension helps you to "collect, manage and cite your research sources". You can save sites, collect bibliographic information and create local copies which can be annotated and highlighted. That's just skimming the surface.

I know of someone in the Department of History who uses Zotero... perhaps I should get her to review it. 😉

And speaking of Firefox... the browser war is going to hot up as Google jumps into the fray with Google Chrome, apparently to be released tomorrow.

CDTL Brief

I was looking through CDTL Brief today and found a couple of articles which I felt should be highlighted.

Dr Stéphane Bressan, from the Department of Computer Science, shares his experience using wiki to write lecture notes independently and collaboratively in CS2102S Database Systems. He describes how he used a wiki in this particular class (useful pointers if you want to use a wiki in the classroom) as well as the difficulties and challenges he faced. It's a quick and interesting read.

In a more recent issue, Associate Professor Brian Farrell writes about how members of the Department of History use Turnitin, the plagiarism detection service which CIT provides. Dr Farrell points out that Turnitin:

  1. categorically expos(es) crude and massive plagiarism,
  2. provid(es) a graphic illustration of general student practices regarding the use of sources and the composition of research essays,
  3. provid(es) a graphic teaching aid to instruct students on the problem of cut and paste and
  4. sends [a signal] about plagiarism, academic culture and responsibilities.

Here's some infotainment for Friday. You've probably heard of the Periodic Table of Elements, of which there are numerous online resources.

Instead of a regular web-based periodic table of elements, a team of chemists at the University of Nottingham have put together a series of short videos about the elements instead. Hat tip to The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus for highlighting this.

Lead by Professor Martyn Poliakoff, who has the Einstein-like crazy professor hair, the Periodic Videos team highlights interesting properties and stories about every element in the table - from Helium to Ununoctium.

They are very watchable, and I had trouble choosing a video to highlight in this post. I chose the one above because I felt it was the most appropriate, since this is all about the Periodic Table of the Elements. (Oh, there is also an interesting connection to vodka in that video too.)

The Periodic Videos are also available on YouTube.