Academic promotion: through teaching or research? … plus Wikipedia misinformation!

First, apologies for the long title for this post – it didn’t start out that way, but as I was writing I came across a serious error in Wikipedia, a timely reminder to treat it with caution. And given my recent penchant for talking up matters wiki-related, I thought I’d better temper my enthusiasm and report my finding. Continue reading

WikiWhat?

Since my last post on contributing to Wikipedia (and I worry that no-one has yet had a go at fixing ‘Open Learning‘), matters Wiki have again crossed my path. In fact it’s hard to ignore the Wiki explosion, with Wikiquote (Who wrote “The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them.”?), Wikispecies (Did you know you are a heterotroph?), Wikinews (yes, it’s been proved that there are six degrees of separation), Wikibooks (contributors are known as Wikibookians), Continue reading

Stigmergy

I seem to have been hit with a plethora of new words lately. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), I met at least three new words when proof reading the index for an upcoming book. I won’t say what they are, because you probably know them already and then I’d be embarrassed.

But I’ll take a chance that not everyone knows stigmergy. Have you heard of it? Before I tell you what it means, Continue reading