Making your own e-book from websites using Grabmybooks

October 25, 2013e-learning, LaTex, Mediawikijohn

Added: 30th October 2013: The failure of the LaTeX rendering mentioned below is because I have been using the mark-up instead of using the tags <math> Latex code </math> .

Yesterday I came across Grabmybooks, a free Firefox plugin that enables the webuser to create ebooks from webpages.

The resulting output is a .epub file which should be useable on most e-readers (This can be converted to .mobi to use on a kindle).

As an experiment I attempted to covert the statistics for humanities website into an ebook. I was very impressed with the plugins rendering of text and tables. The images have not come out that well, but its main drawback from my point of view is that is doesn’t seem to cope with the more complex math code very well, which limits its use ‘out of the box’ for my purposes. However for purely text conversion it is excellent.

It is possible to edit the hard code whilst putting the e-book together. I haven’t tried this out yet.

Conversion to text and tables works well

Varying success with images, but these have undergone numerous conversions and reformatting over the past few months.

The conversion from the LaTex plugin in Mediawiki has not worked out.

Five ways to engage the public with your PhD work

October 21, 2013PhD, research, student researchjohn

This article was one of the last things I wrote whilst at the University of Southampton. It was published in the Humanities Graduate School newsletter.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Publishing in academic journals and engaging academics can help you get an academic job, get promoted, be invited to serve on committees, and get invited to speak at academic conferences. Yet if we want to make some sort of difference in the wider world we need to engage with people outside academia.

Most of us will never have our own TV series or sell millions of books, but here are five ways we can engage the public with our research.

Start a blog: With blogger.com or wordpress.com you can get going within a few minutes. Try to write a post every week or so about something related to your thesis. The blog puts your work ‘out there’, especially if you are disciplined enough to write something on a regular basis. Your blog may be found by potential collaborators, journalists seeking an expert opinion or other people with an interest in your work.
Write for non-academic audiences: There are lots of opportunities to write in publications for school pupils, teachers, activist groups, charities, popular magazines and clubs and societies where an audience for your work may be found. These sorts of publications are not a substitute for academic books and articles, but they will probably be read by more people.
Get involved in non-academic activities: Similarly look for opportunities to give talks about your research to these groups and/or get involved in their activities. Before he became well-known for Time Team the late Mick Aston came to my school and gave my A-level history class a talk about the excavation of Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire. I have never forgotten that experience.
Don’t keep interesting things to yourself: If you find out something you think may be of wider public interest speak to supervisors, colleagues and the university press office to explore how you might communicate your work.
Get involved in the outreach activities of the faculty/ university: Public engagement is not just about your own work. The university reaches out to the public in many ways including lifelong Learning programmes, open days for prospective students, partnerships with local organisations and outreach into local schools.

Finally, two notes of caution.

Firstly, public engagement is important, but it is not a substitute for publishing in academic journals, going to academic conferences and becoming known in your academic community, especially if you desire an academic career in the future.

Secondly, make sure your public engagement is good public engagement. Despite the popular saying, there is such thing as bad publicity. Be very careful what you say and do, especially online. A negative ‘digital footprint’ is difficult to erase.

(Soft) launch of first Statistics for the Humanities website

October 15, 2013Mediawiki, statisitics, Wikijohn

I have spent the past couple of months putting the Statistics for the Humanities book into an online format. After much deliberation I have used the MediaWiki software to do this. They is still a lot of tidying up to do and its not quite finished but comments are very welcome.

It is not a collaborative wiki a là Wikipedia , but I am open to the idea of setting it up so logged in members can amend, add and improve content. At the same time I would not wish the character and level of the material to change in such a way as to do against the actual point of the website.

Please do let me know what you think about the site itself and ways in which others might contribute.

Feedback videos now available

October 3, 2013feedback, LLAS, SPEAQ, youtubejohn

Video recordings of my interviews with Simon Kemp and Bella Millet are now on youtube.

Five good things about starting a new academic job

September 19, 2013academic development, Brighton, teachingjohn

I’ve been in my new job at Brighton for nearly three weeks now. I thought I would write a few thoughts about the positives about starting a new job. It has been over ten years since I was the ‘new guy’, and so far I’m enjoying it immensely.

Five good things about starting a new job:

I’ve let go: I find it easy to start getting involved in things, but difficult to stop doing them. After ten years in the job I was the ‘go to guy’ for lots of different things. I had accumulated a lot of roles and responsibilities I did not want to give up. Some of these roles and responsibilities were probably not that important, or they are less important than they were. Someone else has to do the stuff which is really important now. The rest of it doesn’t need doing.
I’m ignorant and naïve: Usually this is a bad thing but for a newcomer it’s a (sort of) strength. If I don’t understand how something works I can ask without sounding clueless. If there is an elephant in the room I can brazenly draw attention to it (if I want to).
I can be known for something else: Past achievements can be an albatross. After a long time in a job, people can appreciate talents, skills and achievements you wish to move on from. You can become known and appreciated for the wrong reasons.
I’m meeting new people and having new experiences: I was always meeting new people in my previous job, but it has been particularly nice meeting new people in my new job. Brighton has a very different subject mix to Southampton, so I’m meeting people who teach and research different subjects like sport, hospitality, fashion design and Youthwork.
I’m really doing new things. I’m teaching on the Postgraduate Certificate course, working with students on the Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) scheme, working on Brighton’s professional recognition scheme. All this is related to my previous role, but new enough to be exciting, challenging and daunting.

Latest edition of Debut: the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies

September 9, 2013Debut, languages, LLAS, undergraduate researchjohn

Volume 4 now available

Editorial

All change at Debut by John Canning

Articles

Antigemination as thematic distinction by Gwilym Lockwood
Variation in case governance with the preposition by Katarina Martinovic

Final Début Volume under my editorship.

September 6, 2013Debut, feedback, HEA, LLAS, research, student researchjohn

The last volume of Début: the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies I will edit is going online in the next week or so. I thought I'd share a bit of my editorial.

Editorial: All change at Début

John Canning

Final-year projects and dissertations (FYPD) undertaken by students at the end of their Bachelor degree courses are a topic of current interest in many countries. It is timely to reassert the importance of FYPD and to rethink their role in the curriculum as the context of higher education changes. (Healy et al 2013).

Every year thousands of undergraduates undertake a final year project, an independent study or some other form of original research. Most of this research is never seen by anyone outside the student's own department. I don't know if a copy of my own undergraduate dissertation still exists somewhere in depths of Aberystwyth University. I think I had my own copy, if it survives it is probably in my parents' attic. As far as I know it was not read by anyone other than those who marked it. I can't recall receiving any feedback on it, except the mark which was printed alongside the results of my other modules.

I don't regard the non-publication of my own undergraduate work as a great loss to the world. In contrast I regard setting up Début : the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies which enables others to publish their undergraduate work as one of my major achievements. Undergraduate (and recently graduated) authors have received feedback on their work from academics outside their own institutions. They have revised their work and made great work even better.

This is my final edition as Debut Editor. I would like to thank all the authors, reviewers, colleagues at LLAS in Southampton, and colleagues all over the world who have urged their students to submit their work to Début : the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies 4 (2013)

Without all these people Début would not be possible.

From September 2013 Billy Clark, Senior Lecturer in English Language at Middlesex University will be taking over as editor.

I look forward to seeing Début prosper under Billy's leadership and wish him all the best.

Reference

Healey M., L.Lannin, A, Stibbe and J. Derounian (2013) Developing and enhancing undergraduate final year projects and dissertations. York: Higher Education Academy. Available from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/detail/ntfs/ntfsproject_Gloucestershire10

Down Memory Lane: Learning and Teaching initiatives/ projects/ schemes no longer with us.

August 15, 2013subject centresjohn

Clearing out the office after ten years in the job has brought back lots of memories. In sorting through my stuff I have unearthed materials and publications from many organisations and projects which no longer exist, their functions having been absorbed by other organisations, or in some cases eliminated altogether.

Subject centres

Having worked at the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, I am unlikely to be dispassionate about the subject centre network. Publications such our Liaison magazine and the English subject centre’s Wordplay are among accidental archive. Some of the subject centres published academic journals which have been taken over by the Higher Education Academy or commercial publishers.

The Learning and Teaching Support Network.

Before the Higher Education Academy there was the Learning Teaching Support Network (LTSN) which consisted of the 24 subject centres based in UK universities and a Generic Centre based in York. The LTSN Generic Centre published a number of useful guides on topics such as employability and assessment. These were rebranded and republished when the HEA was formed.

Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL)

FDTL consisted of five phases, each open to different subjects. Universities were able to bid for subject specific teaching development projects. If I remember rightly phases 1, 2 and 3 predated the formation of the subject centres. A number of languages projects were funded in phase 4, notably in the area of residence abroad.

National Disability Team

I have one of their mouse mats on my desk right now. Produced lots of good resources for helping university teaching staff address the practical and legal aspects of supporting disabled students. I seem to remember that the Special Education Needs and Disability Act (2001) was a key focus for some of this work.

Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs).

CETLs received a total of £315m to enhance learning and teaching across the sector. The legacy was mixed, as outlined in the HEFCE evaluation:

The report concludes that the legacy of the programme rests largely in individual staff and in those institutions which have embedded CETL developments, rather than in a general enhancement of teaching and learning across the entire higher education sector.

The funding sounds substantial (and indeed it was) but a lot of the funding went into infrastructure, notably new or extensively refurbished buildings.

14-19 Diplomas

Mainly paper work here. The languages and humanities diplomas occupied a lot of our subject centre time in the last year or two of the previous government. The languages, humanities and science diplomas were to be the last to be introduced. The policy was abandoned when the present Coalition Government took power. Although extensive consultations took place and drafts of the curriculum were written, these diplomas never implemented. Possibly a missed opportunity to break the tyranny of A-levels.

Good feedback: joining up the circles

August 8, 2013feedback, LLAS, SPEAQjohn

The website for our Getting More Out of Feedback is coming along nicely. As part of the Sharing Practice in Assurance and Enhancing Quality (SPEAQ) project, this GMOOF project aims to join up the quality circles of the student, the teacher, and the quality manager. Rather than having separate websites for students, teachers and quality managers on giving and receiving feedback, we recognise that good feedback from teacher to students, students to teachers, teachers to teachers, students to students, teacher to professional body etc. etc. has the same characteristics.

Phil Race characterises good feedback as:

Relevant
Timely
Meaningful
Suggestions for improvement

Good feedback has these characteristics, irrespective of who is the provider of feedback and who is the recipient.

The website also contains a brief review of the literature on feedback in higher education.

As well as the xtranormal videos I mentioned in a previous post we have interviews with various members of staff, in preparation. My interview with my LLAS colleague Laurence Georgin is available on youtube and through the site.

Feedback: What's it all about?

August 6, 2013feedback, SPEAQjohn

Team effort on this one. We made the video for our Getting More out of Feedback Project. The script was adapted from my literature review by Laurence Georgin and Fiona Harvey. Fiona Harvey who works at the Centre for Innovation and Technologies, University of Southampton, produced the drawings. One of our University Digital champions edited the video and did the commentary.