Chemical Reaction

Fire! Reflections on a major incident In the evening of Friday September 12 I received a call from our Deputy Head of Security to alert me to a major fire at the University's Jubilee Campus. The building ablaze was the unfinished GlaxoSmithKline Carbon Neutral Laboratory for Sustainable Chemistry and, during the hours that followed, it …

Another university league table variation

A league table of universties' social media 'visibility' Econsultancy have published a league table of Russell Group universities' social media profiles or their 'visibility': The visibility score we use here is based on the total number of links a web domain has scored on the six social sites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Delicious and StumbleUpon, …

Finding the good stuff

Social media can be overwhelming... And this can make finding the really good stuff really rather difficult. The Schumpeter column in The Economist has an interesting take on this. Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention …

Lawrence on University College Nottingham

A controversial piece from D H Lawrence More of Lawrence on Nottingham is available here but this entertaining piece is a highlight. Not exactly what you'd want to use in promotional material though. 'Nottingham's New University' in Pansies (1929) In Nottingham, that dismal town where I went to school and college, they've built a new …

Fun ways to tackle plagiarism

Tackling Plagiarism A really entertaining approach to this challenging issue from the University of Bergen

Unofficial university promos

Contrasting unofficial university promo videos Certainly at least one of these is not endorsed by its University... Must admit I found it difficult to get past about 4 minutes on this one: No such trouble with this much more entertaining effort (not entirely suitable for younger viewers in parts).

Ways universities share information using social media

Universities using social media A very interesting set of examples this: 10 Ways Universities Share Information Using Social Media What this really highlights is how many more opportunities there are better to exploit social media for all sorts of useful information-sharing purposes. At Nottingham we use just a few of these methods consistently and therefore …

Guardian Education Notebook: Thanks for that

The Grauniad, in December, ran this lovely Notebook item in which I was honoured to have my name misspelled: We know universities are cash-strapped, but isn't it going too far to suggest they generate money by building alumni cemeteries, golf courses and breweries? Dr Paul Geatrix, Nottingham University's registrar, claims he was "joking" when he …

New additions to iTunes U

As reported by the BBC, UCL, the OU and Trinity have joined the iTunes U stable along with a group of other non-US universities. It remains to be seen whether they will reach the top 10 with any of their offerings but one of the UCL presentations is a bit different: the University's annual report …