Web round-up

Here’s a smattering of interesting and useful items I found on blogs this morning:

1.  Finding Google Images with the appropriate use licenses, so that you can use them in your course without any copyright complications. (I actually know one professor who will only use pictures he has personally taken. On that note, I’m almost ready to teach that course on the Great Barrier Reef, I just need some funding to go get my images!)

2. Taking remote desktop access to the next level: easily control a computer from not just another computer, but also a mobile phone or tablet. The University of Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center discusses easy-to-use apps from Splashtop. Note that not all of the apps are Windows-accessible, but some are.

3.  Time Magazine is starting a new column on “the latest research and the most penetrating insights into how learning works”. We’ll have to wait and see if what they have to say is broadly applicable to higher education. But, just for starters, here’s a pithy insight from the introductory column:
How we learn shapes what we know and what we can do. Our knowledge and our abilities are largely determined not by our IQ or some other fixed measure of intelligence, but by the effectiveness of our learning process ….

4.  The Teaching Professor Blog reflects on the advantages and disadvantages of the points system (versus letter grades and percentages). The blog post is a review of work by Augsburg College Professor of Sociology Diane Pike. Her presidential address on this topic to the Midwest Sociological Society was subsequently published in Sociology Quarterly.