Day: February 9, 2011

Tara Brabazon, writing today for the Times Higher, provides a useful analysis of the common mistakes students make when submitting assignment work and suggests ways that we in academia could improve the first year experience. Her 20-point check list of what students do wrong and how lecturers react to those errors should be published in every student handbook.

I’ve just installed the new TweetdDeck app for Google Chrome and like what I see so far. It takes the “that’s so obvious, why wasn’t it done before” idea of combining (TweetDeck calls this blending) all your feeds into three columns.

• Home: for all your identities and the people they follow across all of your social networks;
• Me: for mentions of your social identities and posts to your facebook newsfeeds; and
• Inbox: for direct messages.

Like TweetDeck the desktop app, you can add your Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz accounts and you can post to one or all of them.

I hope that the iPhone version will adopt this interface as it’s much easier to handle the blended columns than multiple columns on the small screen.

It’s only been 5 minutes, but first impressions: 5 thumbs up!