The JISC are running a blog competition  linked to their conference, they wanted to know how important technology is in our work in education and research, they suggested we consider:

Imagine a day without access to your mobile phone, iPod, laptop, or the internet. How would you do your teaching, learning and research?

So here is what I imagined:

It is Tuesday evening: the mobile phone, iPod, laptop and all other internet connected devices are banished to a box in the kitchen or sporting a "DO NOT USE" post-it

It is Wednesday morning: I wake to the ringing of the alarm clock, the multitude of other devices with alarms are muffled in their box. I am unable to catch up with what has happened with my contacts around the world while I slept, nor am I able to tweet my morning thoughts. Fortunately last night I had taken a paper copy of my diary, so at least I know what I am doing today.
I walk into the university talking to myself, I would normally listen to a podcast but the iPod is in the box in the kitchen.
The lecture is a real challenge, the topic is Programming and I normally run my presentation and programs across the internet, I resort to talking and writing snippets on the whiteboard. There is a lot of grumbling from the students: "she will be expecting us to use punched cards next".
Back in my office I am supposed to have a catch up meeting with some colleagues from a European project, we would normally use an online collaborative environment, but given the internet ban I consider making a phone call, but I discover that my desk phone is locked and I can't make international calls, so instead I write a note to the partners and then walk over to the post room to find out the procedure for sending mail overseas, apparently I could find the details online, but I can't go online.
Returning from the post room I discover a pile of crumbs in the kitchen, I had missed the email saying that there was a cake to celebrate a colleague getting a paper accepted in a prestigious journal. Its nearing lunch time and I remember I need to pay a bill, so I walk down to bank, queue for 20 minutes to speak with a cashier so I can make the payment.
Wednesday afternoon is normally an informal Second Life meet-up for my Italian class but today I can't participate, so I study one of the recommended text book instead, which is really quite dry.
Home in the evening I would normally catch up with email, reading bogs and maybe writing my own, but the internet ban stops all that, so instead I sit down and read my copy of "Digital Habitats".

It is Thursday morning: the box in the kitchen is unpacked and I tweet:
"I'm back online, I missed you all, did you miss me?"

These three books were all recomended to me, quite different style but all made good reads.

Colette's "Gigi and The Cat" was a Christmas present. These two short stories were originally written in French during the 1930/40s. The stories are different Gigi growing up to be a courtesan, The Cat more important to her owner than his new wife. Both stories are full of flowing descriptions.

Dave Boling's "Guernica" has the strap line; "An epic story of love, family and war". The book tells a multi-layered story of 3 brothers from the village of Guernica, and links to Picasso's painting of the atrocities visited on the village. A few of the links are tenuous, but a good story.

Amazon recommended Rose Tremain's "The Road Home" and certainly was right it was a book I would enjoy. The story follows Lev from Eastern Europe to London and back again. Well written and a good joined together plot with realistic characters.

Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life". This book from the 1950's investigates the structures of social encounters in terms of performance, like the theatre, with props, other actors and an audience.

Goffman had studied many groups and comes up with many examples, the book is obviously dated and the references to women are, perhaps, typical of the age.

The work needs to be linked to the modern world, but it is still very relevant.

The JSC funded Linksphere project has 2 strands:

1. Producing a unified system for accessing the university's repositories;

2. Developing a social network for researchers.

The social network is now available to researchers from the University of Reading, if you want to give it a try you can access it from http://www.reading.ac.uk/linksphere/

 

I have read a lot of good books this year, I have benefited from recommendations from friends, colleagues and occasionally strangers. It is amazing if I am on public transport how often someone is engrossed in a book, sometimes there will be opportunity to engage them in conversation and discover if their book will be to my taste, and then of cause there is Twitter which is a good place to find recommendations.

Work related: Davey Winder's "Being Virtual" This book is on Digital Identity, written from an unusual personal perspective. It isn't written in the usual dry academic style and so must easier to digest than a number of work related books which I have notsucceeded in reading more than a sub-set of.

Non-fiction: Simon Winchester's "The Surgeon of Crowthorne"  I hadn't ever imagined I would read a book about a dictionary, but this book brings together a number of characters who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Fiction: I have read a lot of great fiction,  and there are many books vieing for this award. But I think Stegg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is the book that I found most riveting .

Most read author: Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. I have more than one book my several authors but at 3 books Harrod-Eagles   get this title. She is a historical author, charting a family from the 1400s over some 20 books, I understand she is still writing. Thee books give an interesting view of politics (especially from a Yorkshire perspective) and everyday life. I will try to read more of these books but I don't think I would want to read more than a few in a year, I need modern stuff as well.

I've just discovered an article in an IEEE Proceddings which includes a study of RedGloo, if you are a member of the Uni of Reading and on campus - you can read the full text. Otherwise below is the citation and abstract:

Testing the strength of weak ties theory in small educational social networking websites Memic, H.   Sch. of Inf. Technol., Dzemal Bijedic Univ., Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina; This paper appears in: Information Technology Interfaces, 2009. ITI '09. Proceedings of the ITI 2009 31st International Conference on Publication Date: 22-25 June 2009 On page(s): 273-278 Location: Dubrovnik, ISSN: 1330-1012 ISBN: 978-953-7138-15-8 INSPEC Accession Number: 10813841 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/ITI.2009.5196093 Current Version Published: 2009-08-07

Abstract Most face-to-face interaction networks are structured as predicted by Granovetter's dasiastrength of weak tiespsila theory. This paper seeks to verify whether friendship relation in social networking websites is structured similarly as in face-to-face social networks. This is accomplished by examining the most important consequences of the theory in four smaller educational online social networks. It was found that all of the four networks from three different social networking websites are in complete synchrony with the theory.

From a snowy Reading:

 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

I had a strange email last night with the subject line saying "ONLINE CRB & IDENTITY CHECKS" followed by an email address for someone at agustawestland.com. The "to field was for someone called Joanne at another genuine organisation, and I must have had a mention in the blind copy. The mail contained twoattachments and no text.
I decided this was some elaborate scam and alerted our IT services. After some investigation they determined if wasn't scam, although the mail probably should be classified as SPAM.
Among other things the company are offering to do is they offer checks on the identity of your customers.
Given the way they managed to compromise the identity of Joanne (her full name and email are on my copy) and the person at agustawestland.com (and again her full name is given) I wouldn't trust them with any data.

Bernard Schlink's "The Reader" is a very moving book, originally written in German, and more recently made into a film (which I haven't seen).
The story is in 3 parts all presented by the author in the first person. The first part introduces the author as a teenage boy recovering from illness, and deals with his meting with Hanna and their subsequent relationship (this must be in the 1960s). The second part deals with the trial of Hanna for war crimes, and the final the subsequent correspondence between the author and Hanna.
Much of the plot hinges on Hanna's "deeper secret", the nature of which isn't apparent until half way through Part 2.
A very good book definitely worth reading.