The first ever funny story about Peer Review.

This morning on the Today programme I heard a story that made me laugh.

A serious academic journal called 'Environmental Microbiology' has published a whole list of comments that have been written by experts engaged in peer-review. For anyone new to this term, peer-review is a process that authors go through to have their reports published in high quality academic journals. It's like being at school and having your essay marked by the smartest kid in class.

If you're a student who's received some brutal feedback from a lecturer recently have a look here and see how the professionals do it! Some people are very hard to please!

Happy birthday YouTube.

YouTube is officially 5 years old.

Blimey. Is that all? It does seem to have been around longer than that.

Below is probably my favourite video ever from YouTube. It's by an amazing man called Michael Wesch, a college professor who writes about how technology changes society. Now take 4 minutes 33 seconds out of your day and click PLAY.

Newsbank.

Have you ever wished you could search newspapers for articles on any subject?

Well you can.

We have a fulltext database that is just newspaper articles, and it's pretty easy to use.

Have a look here to log in and see what's available.

And let me know if you find anything useful!

What else are you doing when you're writing your assignments?

I've been talking to students recently about the dangers of splitting their attention whilst trying to write essays. People readily admitted to emailing, watching TV online, Facebooking, downloading music, tweeting and playing games whilst writing assignments.

Farmville seemed to come up quite often too! Have a look here at what Stephen Poole (one of my favourite writers) thinks of Farmville. It contains one swear word so you've been warned!

Don't be surprised if I continue to ask you what else you do when you're supposed to be writing essays. I find the whole subject fascinating and I promise not to be judgemental. This is mostly because it'd make me a big hypocrite as I too am very bad at sticking to one task for longer than 10 minutes.

Have a look here at the original article from by Nick Carr which first introduced me to the dangers of dividing my attention to distraction. It's brilliant.

Al