A key category. My views on the latest technology and its use in research and teaching. I love apps and they make the life of an academic much easier. This includes online and offline technology.
It’s been at least six months since my last blog post, while it might seem like a long time, it’s always amazing to look back and reflect on what I have accomplished during this time. I don’t really want this blog post to sound like my end of year “speech”, however this past year has been amazing, action packed, fun-filled and downright breath-taking. As the curtain call on the year I wanted to take some time to pen my thoughts and reflect on my achievements over the past year. I don’t really want to dump everything in to this one post, so the plan is to undertake a series of blog posts. In the first instance I want to talk about a subject very close to my heart, “analytics”. The biggest achievement this year was the successful validation of the first BSc Business Data Analytics course at Huddersfield Business School. It was a rigorous process but the course was passed with zero conditions and five commendations!
Quick Blog post today about technology in the classroom. Technology when scaffolded into a classroom environment can provide an immense amount of value in helping students to learn but to also engage. Over my 15 years in higher education I have seen many technologies which have bought an innovative slant to the teaching and learning process. One of the best ones I have used is a little known tool called Socrative.
Using SEO principles to increase research citations
As academics we spend countless hours, days and weeks developing papers which we hope will one day make a difference in the world. One metric that is often used to measure this difference is article citations. The more citations a paper can gather the higher the impact this can have on the career of an academic. However for many academics once they submit their paper and it has been has accepted for publishing they sit on their laurels and expect citations to come rolling in.
In the brave new world of the internet this is no longer the case. With so much data and information out there, getting your paper seen is becoming increasingly difficult. Academics need to understand that they are competing for citations in a global marketplace, the competition is fierce. Hence this blog post looks at the process of Academic SEO, which is the application of marketing principles to rank your research higher in the popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), and hence increasing the chances of your research being found and cited.
As discussed in one of my previous blog posts, Nvivo is a very powerful Data Management tool which is ideal for managing large data sets. However for the Novice the power of Nvivo can be overwhelming and confusing and for the early career researcher it can be off putting and intimidating. Hence in order to demystify Nvivo, my aim is for the next few blog posts to create a series of Vlog’s (Video Blog).
Hence my first Vlog is about Nvivo and Classifications. Click on read more to view my youtube video on Nvivo Classifications and a short summary of what Nvivo Classifications are, how they work and why they are important.
This blog post displays some of the results from a SMS Pilot study on the use of text messaging as a means of communicating with students to aid retention. This study was run in 2011 and was primarily carried out to scope views and perceptions of mobile devices within the University of Huddersfield under the project lead of Abdul Jabbar. The detailed final report can be found by clicking here.
It’s been a few weeks since my last blog post, the advent of the summer holidays and the completion and submission of my PhD has been the immediate priority. More to come on my relief that my PhD is now done and dusted, just awaiting the viva date!
However today I wanted to write about something a little different. In this blog post I want to talk about my own anecdotal experiences on the key advantages and disadvantages of buying everyone in an organisation iPads.
Some of you may have already heard of a new web-based service called Kudos. The main USP of the software is to help academics develop awareness and greater impact of their research through the main academic (Academia.edu, researchgate.net) and public social media engines (Twitter, Facebook). It is aimed at researchers, publishers and institutions and is free to register.
So what are the facts behind the marketing buzz. Here are my views on the advantage and disadvantages of this unique software and how useful I really think it is in helping to develop awareness of your work.
Previously I wrote a blog post about iPad apps for research in higher education, it was a two part blog post, you can find part 1 here and part 2 here. I want to carry on with this series of blog posts but today I want to really focus on using iPad apps for increasing productivity.
Twitter as a tool has become somewhat of a cultural icon. Over the years since its inception it has morphed into a powerful tool that has caused enormous change from the Arab spring to viral pictures of cats. It has shown itself to be a useful tool across various different industries and disciplines and has caused a huge amount of disruption in areas such as print media. The same industries such as print media now also use twitter to keep it touch with members of the public for up to date information, pictures and videos and news that are occurring in real time.
In my view there is also great scope to use twitter for research, however one of the biggest issues many researchers and academics have about this medium is how can you possibly say anything of relevance within a 140 Characters. This is quite a challenge for many academics!!
This is the second part of a two part post which talks about essential iPad apps for Researchers and Academics. You can access the apps 1-5 outlined in the first part of the post by clicking here. This blog post covers apps 6-10.
Data Analytics and Visualisation
This blog post displays some of the results from a SMS Pilot study on the use of text messaging as a means of communicating with students to aid retention. This study was run in 2011 and was primarily carried out to scope views and perceptions of mobile devices within the 
The Academic Triangle 