Network nightmare

This is the tale of dealing with the frustration of an intermittent WiFi connectivity issue and finding a solution. It’s almost 5 years since we moved into our present house. Because I had been experimenting with WiFi Internet sharing using my iMac as a base station in our previous house I was confident we would manage networking without cables in...

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Digital Literacy

At the 29 July meeting of Academic Board there was discussion of a proposal to change the document describing qualities of a USQ graduate to include mention of digital literacy. I remember the discussion clearly because there was a proposal that digital literacy be replaced by technological literacy, against which I spoke on the basis of technological literacy having a...

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Els Porxos

I arrived back at the hotel from the conference shortly before 7:00 pm. After Majella and Sam had described their adventures for the day we set out for Sagrada Familia which they had seen already and recommended as one sight I should see. We rode one Metro line to the next station from Placa Catalunya, changed line and rode the...

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Els Quatre Gats

Majella came to Barcelona prepared with a recommendation from Des Coates for a restaurant, Els Quatre Gats, that had been frequented by various celebrities, including Picasso. I had searched for it using Google on our first night in town and found it on the map but Majella had missed it when she tried to get there on her first day out...

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Ignorance – curse or blessing for teachers?

A couple of weeks ago, not long after the release of the Queensland Education Performance Review, I was engaged in conversation with some colleagues about the recommendations in the report. As teacher educators we shared concerns about the capabilities of some graduates and, while we recognise the problems inherent in graduating teachers with deficiencies in literacy, numeracy and science, we...

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Take a tablet for a headache?

Late last Friday afternoon I received an offer that I found difficult to refuse. One of our Faculty members had been participating in a trial of tablet computers, primarily for marking electronic assessment submissions, but was struggling to find the time to fully participate in the trial and decided to opt out. Suddenly the Faculty had a ‘spare’ tablet computer...

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A little flakiness in KeyNote ’09?

I’ve owned the past few versions of KeyNote (since it was first bundled in iWork) but I really have not used it seriously in that time. I had played with it occasionally but, mostly because our campus is resolutely Windows fixated and everybody expects to be able to view PowerPoint presentation files but cannot view KeyNote files, I had not...

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Of authorship and ownership

I’ve written on this topic previously (Chance encounters, May 2005) but I’ve been building up to another shot for some time and events today finally brought me to tipping point. This morning one of the members of our University committee that deals with our LMS passed on a copy of an EDUCAUSE report (Diaz, 2009). The committee chair later circulated...

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