Mic-UK has an excellent reference for microscopic life. It’s where I learned about Gastrotrichs.
Pond Microbe Identification
Tag: references
Bibme: A Nice Tool for Composing Bibliography References
While we were talking about what I expect from lab reports, one of my students pointed out the Bibme website. It helps put together bibliography references in a variety of styles: MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian.
Test HTML5 Canvas
[inline]
[script type=”text/javascript”]
document.write(“hello world!”);
var c2=document.getElementById(“myCanvas2”);
var ctx2=c2.getContext(“2d”);
ctx2.moveTo(10,10);
ctx2.lineTo(150,50);
ctx2.lineTo(10,50);
ctx2.stroke();
[/script]
[/inline]
So I’m experimenting with creating drawings using HTML5. And it works (mostly)!! I have to hardwire in paragraph breaks, but otherwise it works so far.
The key references:
- w3schools.com: HTML5 Canvas: for the code for the drawing above.
- Volcano’s Inline Javascript plugin for WordPress to make it work on this blog.
- The page for Opera developers is also a great HTML5 drawing reference.
- Dive into HTML5 is another excellent resource.
- Bill Mill’s canvas tutorial.
National Academy’s Books are Now Free
The National Academy Press has just made all of its publications free for downloading (as pdf’s). Of particular interest is the Education section which includes titles such as:
- How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (Donovan et al., 2000): This is an excellent resource for pedagogy.
- Surrounded by Science: Learning Science in Informal Environments
- Learning Science Through Computer Games and Simulations
There are 20 books in the Education section, and while many of the books in the other sections are quite technical, there are some gems among the 4,000 available titles.
Citing websites
My students are very good at putting the list references on their presentations, however, websites usually turn up as simply a link to the site. I’m now working on rectifying this. Because there are a lot of different types of online resources Yale Library has a few different ways to cite them. What I like the most, however, is that they give very clear examples of how to use them in the MLA, APA and Chicago styles. My preference is for the APA but to make sure and include the URL (like the citation at the bottom of this post).
Citing a blog
Because my students use a lot of online sources I always emphasize the importance of watching out for copyright infringement and making sure they cite their references. This is easy enough to say but for a lot of internet content there is a lot of conflicting information about how to write citations.
Blogs in particular are difficult to cite, so I thought it would be useful to add the citation to the bottom of each of my blog posts as an example (it also allowed me to figure out how to write a WordPress Plugin). After looking at a number of referencing styles I finally settled on the Yale University Writing Center’s APA format.
You should be able to see what it looks like below. I’ve made parts of the reference links, which help connect directly to the post and the website, but do not greatly affect the official style.