Category: English & ICT

Is Wikipedia wicked? To Google or not to Google?

Prescribed reading lists or more information literacy?

After the magnificently named Tara Brabazon’s article on Bowling Google a googly in the Guardian on 22 January, there’s a more measured response to the problems of plagiarism (deliberate or otherwise) from Dr Stephen Thornton of Cardiff University. In this week’s paper he makes a plea for ‘more information literacy’ and a less ‘Stalinist’ approach than Professor Tara’s refusal to mark anything that comes from material she hasn’t prescribed for her first year students.

Look new, feeling blue?

Visitors to the new pages on the First World War, on finding out about names on war memorials and on Remembrance Day texts, will have noticed a new, blue look. The look has also been applied to a few other pages as they’ve needed updating, though I’ve not dared yet to take the home page.

What do you reckon, folks? The new style, like the old one, is borrowed from another site – this time from someone offering design ideas, so I don’t feel bad. The Actis style I ripped off for the previous look was not only old-fashioned (even Actis had abandoned it), the company doesn’t even exist…. I spent a while (too long) experimenting with colours – are these cool or drab? The use of a style sheet (impressed?) should make it easy to change colours, though I’d need to spend a while finding a range of tones to keep a similar range of (subtle?) contrasts.