My muffin is not ‘awesome’!

Awesome: it’s a useful adjective, a perfect choice of word for a stunning sunrise or even for something fearful, such as the power of a nuclear bomb.

blueberry-muffin-close-upYes, that’s what we envisage when we (well, most of us anyway) use the word awesome in everyday speech. So I was mildly irritated that the hipster taking my order declared it awesome when I requested a muffin to go with my coffee. It was a nice muffin; it was not awesome.

And so it was that I cringed a little when Aris Grigoriou from Study Medicine Europe sent me ‘The Ultimate Student App Guide’.

Ultimate: there’s two meanings, the end of a process and the best imaginable, and it fits neither. The way apps are evolving its shelf life will be quite limited, and others would come up with feasible alternatives, arguably just as good.

Part of the problem is that the use of such an overblown adjective diminishes, rather than enhances, what is a well-designed and useful infographic. It immediately raises your suspicions that this is just some over-hyped sales pitch, not a serious attempt to provide a service to students. To my mind it should be kept simple, with a title such as ‘A Guide to Student Apps’. That is what it is, and it is up to others (like me?!) to judge its worth. It includes outlines of apps for organising, note-taking, file storage, citations and so on, though I note that it doesn’t have anything on plagiarism detection.

Having had my rant, here’s the helpful infographic. Do take a look at it (especially if you’re a student loking for helpful tools!), despite my misgivings over the title. It’s quite long, so I’ve made it a clickable link rather than include it in the post:

student app guide

 

 

 

 

 

While on the topic of infographics, I spied another one while on the point of deleting one of those ‘Popular in your network’ emails that clog our inboxes. This one has the simple (neutral!) title of ‘Introduction to Open Educational Resources‘ and is a nice little guide to get you started if you’re not quite sure what OER is all about.

Intro to OER

Click to access the live version

If interested, open it and try the buttons, which lead to further explanation and links to resources.

Enough for now. I need a coffee and muffin.

 

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