It’s not new, but I am providing postgraduate students who I am supervising over the Summer the option of having group supervision.

We had our first meeting today, and it did go well.  The students all know each other as they have been students together since last September.  So it was good for them to discuss ideas with each other, and from my side it was beneficial that I was able to be consistent in my discussion with them.

Of course it’s not all one sided, and I’ve asked students to email me with any specific query/issues that they have, and I’ll reply before my summer break.  But I did provide the option for the students to meet me individually, but they unanimously asked for group tutorials again.

What would I do differently?  Being better prepared would be useful - I had to do a fair bit of dashing from the small teaching room back to my office.  I’ll also make more use of whiteboards etc., to reinforce ideas, there’s only so much pen-waving possible to get meaning across.  I’ll also be clearer about what I expect students to bring, much as in a face-to-face tutorial I would expect them to bring work.

It’s the final exam board today, let’s hope it all goes smoothly.

Anyone who knows me knows that I frequently get ‘one of my heads’.  There’s no pattern to these, apart from the fact that I usually get on shortly after a stressful period.

The excellent Radio 4 programme Check Up (also known as ‘hypochondriac’s anonymous’ focuses on headaches this week.  It’s downloadable as a podcast, and I’m listening to it as I type.  I can relate to many of the symptoms which are being discussed.

There is a migraine action association, which provides some good support for migraine sufferers.  I spotted this questionnaire -

I’m one of the 7% -  When I tell people I’ve not eaten chocolate for fifteen years they don’t believe me (especially if they’ve ever met me!).

But there’s a buzz around the treatment of headaches at the moment, as shown by this BBC news article.

As for me, panadol extra, effervescent co-codamol (which I used to buy in packs of 100), an eyemask and a cool patch makes me look like the bride of Frankenstein, but does the job most of the times and I’m almost human a a few hours, or at the most a day after the first niggle behind the eyes.

But I will keep an eye open for the transcript of this ‘Check Up’ programme, and try some of the herbal remedies which were recommended early on in the programme.

Though, as can be seen from the graph below it could be something to do with the amount of time I spend in front of (all be it very ergonomically designed) computers - RescueTime provides some scary statistics!

As mentioned before, I’m changing the focus of one of the modules I teach to bring it up-to-date, replacing a somewhat obscure project management technique with scrum, a much more contemporary process.

I’ve allocated two weeks to this.  The first week inevitably has to be a ‘chalk and talk’ powerpoint-type session, though with inevitable breakouts and exercises.  This morning I’ve been mind-mapping the content of this lecture, from notes made over the last month.

I’m really finding mind42 a great online tool - and I’m now using it for all my mapping over the (generally) excellent open source solution FreeMind, simply because of the flexibility and ease of use.  It’s not too complex, and exports into a wide range of formats - see below (click to embiggen as usual)!

I should note that Tony Buzan, who coined the word mind map, would not recognize the above as a mind map.  This is a fair comment, in his excellent book ‘Use your head’ which is in my bookshelf here at home (and there are loads of copies in the university library I’m pleased to note) he states these laws.

• Start with a coloured image in the centre
• Images throughout your Mind Map
• Words should be printed
• the printed word should be on lines, and each line should be connected to other lines
• One word per line
• Use colours throughout
• The mind should be left as free as possible

From the mindmap above, I have an almost ready-made lecture structure, which maps well to PowerPoint Keynote.  Adding the graphics, and in-class activities and we’re there.

As mentioned, this is the first lecture.  The second session will be much more hands on, taking an idea from the Scrum Alliance, and running a scrum project in just 90 minutes in-class, with daily scrums held every ten minutes, and a presentation at the end.  As long as students participate, it could be very effective.

Right, enough procrastination.  It’s a lovely evening out there, but I’m in Keynote mode - let’s get prepping!

I had one of my frequent bouts of insomnia last night, so at 2am I thought I would give in and watch some BBC programmes via BBC iplayer.  I’ve recently downloaded the client to my laptop, because of various problems in the past, despite my reservations (well, rant) when I tried the client last year.

Of course, the client is Windows only, so I have to run Parallels, then iPlayer client.  This works, and it overcomes the streaming ’stutter’ which plagues my watching anything using the flash page.

But, at 2am I thought traffic would be light, both on TalkTalk and from the BBC, so settled down with a cup of hot milk to watch Top Gear.

Big mistake.

The stream still stuttered around once a minute, and even my usual trick of pausing playback for around five minutes, then playing the stream didn’t work.  I know my broadband connection is a soggy piece of string, but it’s stable in all other applications (even YouTube!), here’s a cut/paste from my router’s page as I type.

Data Rate Down/Up491Kb/446Kb

But to confuse the issue, as I type this on Big Mac, I’m watching the live flash video stream of the Any Murray v Richard Gasquet on MacBook.  It’s been streaming for about fifteen minutes, at 6:30pm which must be peak ‘Internet time’ both for TalkTalk and the BBC.

And the only stutter has been when I fired up a very media intense web page!

So I’m now confused.  Why can I stream a live video in high enough quality that I can spot a green ball on a green lawn, which is being watched concurrently by tens of thousands of people, when I cannot watch a pre-recorded programme using BBC iPlayer (I tried the original player, and the new beta service just in case).

I can’t wait for the mac client to arrive, which should by then provide additional functionality such as ’series link’, and maybe, just maybe an extension to the restrictive 7 day watching period once download starts.

Not that Big Brother - I’m too emotionally traumatised after watching Doctor Who to consider watching fifteen idiots willing to let them be watched 24 hours a day.

But, I was prompted by the (as usual) excellent Web Worker Daily to consider looking at RescueTime.  It’s an application which you install onto all your machines (Windows, Mac and Linux), and it monitors both web sites and other software, and creates reports.

You can also create a web-widget so that others can see what you’re doing - but that’s a little too much exposure for all of the time which I’m in front of a computer.  Here’s a snapshot as of today, as of 9pm.

Maybe I am a news addict after all!

I’ve installed it on all my home machines, and will do the same on my work one if it can cope (I’ve managed to get the 40 minutes from power-on to being able to send emails down to less than 10 - but I don’t really want to add another application to start-up, though it appears to be very efficient.

Meanwhile, I’m getting ready for a tough weekend of OU marking ahead - lots of assignments to mark before my holidays.  It’ll get done as always.

I’m definitely back in the swing of things at work now.  It’s been a busy day with my final routeway board as ITMB course director today.  All went well, thanks to some good administration and management support.

The rest of the day has been spent moderating MSc work, and preparing emails to students in anticipation of the results being released.

One thing that I am significantly behind with at the moment is preparation for next year’s teaching.  It seems a long way off (94 days according to a quick calculation), but take out weekends (26 days) and holidays (15 days), clearing and Open Days (say 5 days), and we’re down to 48 days.. I’m going to stop now otherwise I’m going to start panicking again.

I’m just trying a collaborative mind-map, to see if this is a way that I can work with colleagues when shaping the new module.  It may work, it may not, but it’s worth a try, and if it is successful, is something that can be shared with other colleagues.  I’m using the online package mind42 for this, which I’ve used on my own in the past, but this is the first time that I’ve tried using it in a collaborative way.

Meanwhile, I’m still working on the Scrum lectures for the advanced project management module, trying to find case studies which are (relatively) short, but don’t appear to be a sales pitch for Scrum itself.  It’s hard work, and I may end up adapting one of the ‘classic’ case studies which we use.  This is a shame, as I was also keen to bring elements of International Business into the module, but writing good case studies is notoriously difficult, even with a creative writing course under my belt!  There are resources which can easily be found through Google, and I’ve spent some time working though these, but many of these are written for business to business, or to subtly sell consultancy.  Still, the evaluation will continue.

I do try and use the skills picked up many years ago from the SAFARI online learning course developed by the Open University (and now available to all for free I’m pleased to note) to evaluate online resources, but having spent so much time online I guess that I’ve developed an ‘instinct’ rather than following through a specific criteria for a website.  If I finally do bite the bullet and commit to  a Higher Degree, this is no doubt something I will need to revisit.

Still, the weekend beckons, and less than a fortnight before I’m on my holidays!

The changeover from Amazon DVD rental to LoveFilm has now been completed.  The new interface is slick, and whilst I have yet to receive a DVD rental from Lovefilm, I have no doubt that the service will be good - they have a near-monopoly now on the service in the UK - even the Tesco DVD rental which I briefly flirted with last year was clearly a LoveFilm rebrand (and not a very good rebrand at that!).

I still have my ‘mean’ £3.99 a month for two DVD rentals.  This does me fine, at the moment it’s a struggle to get the time to watch those, although ‘Black Sheep’ was very, very funny last weekend.  This offer is not available to new subscribers now.

But one thing I am disappointed about is the loss of the 10% discount on DVD purchases - it’s now only 5%.  I’ve written to Amazon about this, and got the following response..

I can understand your concern and apologise sincerely for any inconvenience or misunderstanding caused.

We regret to inform you that we have revised our DVD Rental discount to 5% for our subscribers as a result of the DVD Rental transfer and we are unable to retrieve the 10% discount that you have received earlier.

However, you will continue to receive this 5% DVD retail purchase discount. We offer DVD Rental by Post members an extra 5% discount off the Amazon.co.uk price (current price at time of purchase) on all DVDs purchased from Amazon.co.uk.

Please note that this offer does not include DVDs purchased from Marketplace and zShops.

You don’t need to do anything special to take advantage of these savings. As long as you remain a member of DVD Rental by Post (including remaining a member of the LOVEFiLM DVD Rentals service after the transfer is complete), the discount will be applied to all your DVD purchases from Amazon.co.uk.

Still, 5% is better than nothing.  It will be interesting to see if the 10% is still applied to pre-ordered DVD’s, I have a Torchwood box set on order since March, will I get my full discount?

Back to work tomorrow.  I’m not 100%, I would reckon 85%, rising to about 90% in the morning but falling off to 75% come the evening.

It appears that I’ve been lucky, bronchtitis can take much longer to clear up.

There’s not much else to report - I’ll drip out a few techie postings over the next few days for various tweaks and gadgets which I have been playing with over the last week.

It’s amazing how difficult it is to get back into the blogging habit, after a week away.

I’ve been signed off work by the doctor for a week, with bronchitis.  And I thought it was only the old or smokers who got it - and I’m neither… yet.

I’ve been advised to rest… whilst it didn’t explicitly state this included no blogging, I think it was implied.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

I feel a little better today, and whilst occasionally having a coughing fit, and worried about a headache which is niggling me behind the eyes, I’ve been able to return to ‘light duties’.

One of these duties has been to get used to the iWork applications, and particularly Keynote, which was one of the the main reasons which I purchased the package.

It’s good.

Loading almost instantly, so quickly that a few times I wasn’t sure that it had loaded.  This pattern is the same throughout all of the iWork apps (Pages and Numbers), and really is a time saver.  I guess if Apple can’t produce applications which load quickly on their own hardware, then no-one can.

Keynote appears to cope with all of my PowerPoints from the 2003 version of the software.  I had a scare when it appeared not to be able to read files off my pen drive, but this was tracked to corrupt files on the drive - this has happened a few times now and I guess you get what you pay for when you pay less than £10 for an 8 gig pen drive from eBay - lesson learned.

The software is clear and intuitive, even the ‘Inspector’ window which I’ve seen in some other Apple apps makes sense once you consider it as an ‘intelligent properties’ window.  I’ve worked on three PowerPoints today, adopting a standard Keynote template to each one, and they do look good (even better with animation!).

Exporting the Keynote file formal (.key) into PowerPoint (.ppt), then opening it in NeoOffice works - the only thing which is lost is some of the more impressive transition effects.  The plan, certainly for the modules which I’m teaching on my own anyhow, is to use the dual-screen mode with the MacBook directly connected to the PC projector.  There’s no reason why this shouldn’t work.

As an added bonus, my Apple Remote can act as a ‘clicker’ - meaning I can be more flexible with my delivery, and be a little more ‘animated’.

I have taken it steady though, and did get a little distracted by trying to work out how to embed the following YouTube video into a slide (rather than just a hyperlink).

The final ‘very nice’ is that it’s a doddle to export the presentation as a ShockWave file, making for the ultimate in portability, and great for e-learning environments such as moodle, but not, alas into WordPress as .swf’s are ‘banned’.

And I haven’t even managed to start looking at Pages and Numbers yet!