Month: March 2007

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My Library Thing

After a recommendation in this week’s Technology Guardian I discovered [LibraryThing](http://www.librarything.com) another beta/web2.0/link/social/tagging web site. This time for books. I’ve started putting [my book collection](http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=cpjobling) into it. Apart from the benefits of having a complete library catalogue on-line, the social networking aspects could be interesting. It can also be used in marking books for a class reading list. See [EG-146 Reading List](http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=eg-146) as an example.

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End of term

It’s the end of another term. Four weeks without students but lots of boring admin to do.

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Lunch and Learn: Enters the Blogsphere

I’ve just returned to my office after attending a Lunch and Learn session on Blogging and the uses of Blogging in education. Nichola van den Berg from LIS was the presenter and she gave a very nice introduction to blogging to an audience of academics who were new to the subject. A couple of things that I took away from the session were (1) I could do more to get my students blogging and (2) I could do more with this blog.

  1. The idea of my EG-153 blogging exercise is to get students to recognise the benefits of blogging as a research tool. It sort of works, but I don’t think they become bloggers as a result. It occurs to me that blogging would also be a great way opf supporting their LEAP activities. Another couple of ideas that come immediately to mind are Blogs would make a reasonable alternative to log books; group blogs would be useful for GDEs; and research blogs would help in planning and gatherinhg materials for the dissertation project.

  2. It could also be versy useful for reflectingon my own teaching and professional development, which is why I need to use it more. Question is do I reflect here or in a separate blog?

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p>Some of these were illustrated in Nichola’s talk so I know that they work elsewhere. Expect more on this topic!

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New Domain

I have just registered for the domain cpjobling.org via the free version of Google Apps. I’ve got a new web site up and running but it’s a bit sparse. However at only $10 for nominet site registration and free web, application, email and collaboration hosting (within limits) it’s a snip!

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JRuby nearing 1.0

Three items of note from Charles Nutter’s ‘blog:
1. [JRuby 0.9.8](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/behind-scenes-jruby-098-released.html) has been released with 98% support for Ruby on Rails. The road to a 1.0 release seems well signposted.

3. Netbeans support for Ruby and JRuby is “[even better than expected](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/netbeans-6-ruby-support-even-better.html)” (see the [demos](http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/two_demos_jruby_on_rails) on Roman Strobl’s blog)

5. [Ruby on Grails](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/ruby-on-grails-why-hell-not.html) – Charles has analyzed the contents of the grails project and concludes that it could easily be fronted by JRuby rather than Groovy. Grails developer Graeme Rocher [agrees](http://graemerocher.blogspot.com/2007/03/charles-nutter-ruby-on-grails-story.html). I would comment that that’s the beauty of dynamic languages: it leverages your investment in libraries and APIs!

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