Research Essentials

Nice little app, if rather expensive for an iTunes app at £5.99. First pages is a little disclaimer screen – be advised that Geocaching can be dangerous. Shame that this is displayed each time you start the app. I think it’s there whilst the device searches for the satellites, but can’t be sure. Personally I [...]

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Last Wednesday I went to the Cellar Bar. This is a lovely old bar in, you guessed it, the cellars below the oldest part of the Open University campus. Quite small but very friendly and cosy. A few others were already there, and Tony Hirst joined us. He remembered my research interest in Geocaching and [...]

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  I’ve just set up the OpenLearn travel bug. A bit of a long shot but might prove interesting. I’ve got an OpenLearn USB pen and have registered it as a travel bug. Patrick has laminated the goals card that will travel with the pen. I’m aiming for something tiny that will be easy to [...]

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This took place over a lunchtime in the Old Lecture Theatre. There were stands covering the most popular “Learn about” papers available on the Knowledge Network. Popular means most downloaded. There was Geocaching, Ambient Technologies, Second Life, Blogging and Wikis to mention only a few. The stands took up about a quarter of the hall, [...]

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Geocaching: What is it? Geocaching is a leisure activity in which participants use a global positioning system (GPS) mobile device to locate a hidden ‘cache’. The cache is usually a physical container concealed somewhere in the landscape. Participants are given a starting location (a car park or other easily identifiable spot) and then use the [...]

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9am was the start of my session. I’d worked hard to cut it down to 15 minutes – shedding all the literature and theory in favour of just covering the practical aspects of what I had done, my findings and the implcations for my main PhD study. The first presentation was very interesting – all [...]

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Unfortunately the Law and Social Sciences building won’t allow me on to its wireless network. This means live blogging has to be produced in a file and pasted into the blog later. So it’s a delayed live blog. As I know Gill’s talk very well (after all, I was one of her participants), this gives [...]

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Rebecca and I were so very tired after today. We returned to the comfortable halls after our presentation and had an enjoyable and nice meal. But we couldn’t face dancing so instead we decided to go hunt for a geocache just off campus. What a daft idea! We ended up walking about 2 miles – [...]

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