January 2012

UK GovCamp 2012: Public service delivery, digital tools and the voluntary sector

  • January 30, 2012 at 1:09 pm
  • Categories: Citizenship & civic engagement

  • In one of the UK GovCamp sessions last week we discussed the use of digital tools and third sector organisations in public service delivery. I recorded most of the session. At some point I will try to write it up, but for now you can listen to the audio and read the transcript. The transcript is [...]

I was lying in bed, trying to remember the name of a song

  • January 28, 2012 at 11:13 am
  • Categories: Ramblings

  • I was pretty sure the song’s title was also that of a sitcom starring Geoffrey Palmer and Judi Dench, so I could easily have Googled it. But that felt like admitting early defeat, so I closed my eyes and tried to remember. A tried and tested trick (by me, at least) is to run through [...]

Embedding pdfs without any Issu

  • January 26, 2012 at 12:09 pm
  • Categories: Ramblings

  • Sick of relying on Issu, or other bloated third parties, simply for embedding documents? Well, it turns out you can embed .pdf and .ppt files via Google Docs using a simple iframe. You don’t even need a Google account. <iframe src=”http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://document.pdf&embedded=true”></iframe> Simply replace the bold text with your document’s url and style the iframe with [...]

Is ‘gamification’ just making bad processes palatable?

  • January 22, 2012 at 11:54 am
  • Categories: Ramblings

  • I don’t like the term ‘gamification’. Maybe I’ve missed the point, but if we have to turn something into a game doesn’t that suggest it’s not fit for purpose anyway? Eight or nine years ago a man from Immersive Education introduced my colleagues and me to Kar2ouche. He explained it was the result of some Oxford [...]