In my dual role as ICT Coordinator and Teacher of ICT, I receive a lot of emails from students, invariably asking for help with some aspect of their computing environment. Whilst the majority of these responses are polite and well written, a there are those …
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Tag: email
Canned Response: Impolite Student
Communication Comparison
As ICT and media tools have become more and more integrated into our lives, certain limitations have become extremely apparent. This is especially true in terms of the ability of ICT tools to facilitate communication between individuals and groups. To give but one example, consider …
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Your Work: Dead or Alive?
The following tweet landed on my feed this morning, and it really got me thinking. I so often try to tackle printing as an environmental issue, that I forget the fact that it is, in many ways, simply an inferior way to work.
Don't tell me a policy is a "living document" that is being constantly reviewed if you then go and print it on paper. Sigh. — Chris Betcher (@betchaboy) January 28, 2013This led me to compose the following email to my colleagues, as an opening salvo in a new offensive against the poor practice of printing:
Colleagues, you all know that I am opposed to printing. But there is more to it than just environmentalism.
If you want to think of your work as "living" (eg actively used, collaborative, flexible, responsive, meaningful) then why consign it to static paper? Why not share your work online, build an audience and set your work free. Put it in a blog, or an online document, invite commentary, make everyone an owner.
This is the future of knowledge for our students. Lead by example. Paper is a dead end. Isn't it time to upgrade?
Fortunately Chris Betcher put his thoughts down in a shared, digital environment, and so we are all able to make use of them. Imagine if he just printing them out, and filed them away.
Snopes: Urban Legends Reference
Snopes is a fantastic website that has gathered together a massive number of urban legends, hoaxes and scams and provides information on their validity and origins. Think of it as Mythbusters for the web.
Whenever a concerned acquaintance forwards me an email telling me …
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Hivelogic – The Enkoder
http://hivelogic.com/enkoder
Spam bots crawl the web looking for email addresses which they can harvest for their evil overlords. This means that posting your email address online can lead directly to an increase in the amount of spam you receive. The Enkoder helps protect email address …
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Thunderbird
http://mozilla.com/thunderbird/
Thunderbird is an email client available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Built by Mozilla, it provides a clean, easy-to-use system for managing email on the desktop. With advanced spam filtering and search, as well as the ability to add in calendering (which can be …
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