Something for 3rd years who are writing their dissertations.

Have you been using the databases such as Sage or Socindex?

If you have then you'll probably come across the problem that you don't have access to everything. This is simply because I cannot possibly subscribe to every journal; it would cost too much.

If you do see a journal article that you don't have full-text access to then don't give up. One of the few benefits of being a 3rd year is that you can order some journal articles for free. This is one of those reasons you give us course fees.

If you follow the link here it'll take you to the library page which explains how you order your articles. It's pretty simple I assure you.

Contact me via email or phone if you need help with this, or anything else.

Alan

Munro interim report on Child Protection

Hello everybody.

Those of you studying anything relating to child protection will probably want to have a look at the interim Munro report which came out today. There's every chance your lecturers will have already mentioned its imminent arrival so I won't go into depth about the scope of the report, but the initial summary focuses on the need to cut paperwork and proposes to alter a culture of meeting targets at the detriment to the welfare of the child.

Just to say you can find the report called 'The Munro Review of Child Protection: Interim Report, The Child’s Journey' by linking here.


One startling fact from the report states that the listed regulations for social workers is now 55 times longer than in 1974 when it was first introduced.


But I guess that won't come as news to any of you already dealing with child protection issues on a regular basis...

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

Society Guardian.

I know that buying a daily newspaper is fast becoming a thing of the past because most newspapers are free online.

The Guardian has a particularly good online section for social science students called 'Society Guardian'. In the paper edition it appears on a Wednesday.

Have a look here to get a taste of what it covers. It won't do the same job as academic journals, (if you tried writing an essay based entirely on newspaper articles you'd probably fail!) but it offers a good selection of opinion pieces and articles written from the perspective of the client.

You can also set up an RSS feed to the website, enabling the info to come to you. Have a look here for advice on how to set this up.