University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI)

Once upon a time, when you put the search term 'UHI' into google, you might have been left with a lot of results about urban heat islands. Now, searching for 'UHI' (from within the UK) will lead you towards the University of the Highlands and Islands website. It's been a long time coming but it only officially became a University in February 2011.

Why do I care, and why am I writing about this? Because I'm from the Highlands, I studied the structure and location of UHI during my MA dissertation research and - most importantly - there has never been a University in this area before. The Highland local authority area is not quite the same as the area covered by UHI, but even on its own it is bigger than Belgium (coincidentally, where I'm going today) - so it meant that young people often had to leave if they wanted to go to University. Now they have a choice.

The University is comprised of 13 different institutions, spread throughout the Highlands and Islands, from Shetland in the far north to Perth in the south. The range of courses is slightly different from other universities and it includes education in Gaelic too.

I'm very happy about this development, though in the history of higher education in Scotland and the UK it could have arrived at a better time!

Exactly how big is the United Kingdom?

Following on from the theme of a recent post, about the size of different countries, I thought it would be interesting to compare the size of the United Kingdom to other parts of the world. The UK covers an area of about 243,000 square km., which is quite big in some ways, but not so big in others (ask any Canadian). It's all a matter of perspective. Some maps and facts below, with the UK superimposed on different parts of the world. Click the maps to see them in full size.

• Russia is 70 times larger than the UK
• Canada is about 41 times larger than the UK
• The USA and China are both approximately 40 times larger than the UK
• Brazil is 35 times bigger than the UK
• Australia is about 32 times bigger than the UK
• India is 13 times bigger
• Sudan is 10 times bigger (n.b. now split in two since I originally wrote this)
• Iran is 7 times bigger
• France is twice as big (this is just the European part, not the overseas départements)

NOTES: I've used an equal area projection so there is a bit more map distortion than I'd like but this was just a bit of fun to make a point and remind myself of the relative size of the UK. For the USA I've shown the continental US and Alaska on separate maps. I've not shown Hawaii this time.

Poll Everywhere - audience response for lectures

I've not blogged on e-learning stuff for a while so time for a new one. Today I'm speaking at the University of Sheffield's annual Learning and Teaching conference. My talk is all about integrating 'low-tech' technology into teaching - the slides are online too. One thing I'm doing is demonstrating Poll Everywhere for audience response in lectures (screenshot of home page below).


It can often be very useful to get feedback from students during or at the end of teaching sessions. Since the vast majority of students now have mobile phone deals with unlimited texts or can get online via their phones, Poll Everywhere is making a real impact in this area. It's very easy to use and it is free for classes of up to 32 students. An example below of how you can also embed the polls in web pages... If you click an option below you can see the results of this crucial poll!

Replace your audience response systems with Poll Everywhere

Many universities in the UK (e.g. Brighton, Greenwich) are now using Poll Everywhere, so it may be here to stay. I think it is a very effective tool for quick feedback from students.

EUROCITIES - Tackling Urban Poverty

Just in case you missed it, 2010 was the year for tackling poverty and social exclusion in Europe, according to Eurocities - well, actually the European Commission, but Eurocities agree! There is a very interesting video about all this - see below. Some interesting examples in the video from across Europe.



What is Eurocities? Here's what they say...

EUROCITIES is the network of major European cities. We bring together the local governments of more than 140 large cities in over 30 European countries.

We influence and work with the EU institutions to respond to common issues that impact the day-to-day lives of Europeans. Our aim is to shape the opinions of stakeholders in Brussels to ultimately shift legislation in a way that helps city governments address the EU's strategic challenges at the local level. A large part of our work is aimed at reinforcing the role and place that local government should have in a multi-level governance structure.

Based on the EU's three key challenges, EUROCITIES' policy priorities are:

• Climate
• Recovery
• Inclusion

The Size of Countries: USA and China

There have been a few blog posts elsewhere recently about the size of Africa. Kai Krause was the original blogger on this with his 'True Size of Africa' map, which is very impressive. This was picked up by a couple of other blogs, including the Economist's take on it and the Spatial Analysis blog at CASA.

I've recently been looking at this kind of thing from a different perspective but still in relation to the size of countries. Some of this has involved playing around with regions, nations and population data. I thought it would be interesting to look at the USA and China since they are very similar in area but very different in population.

Some images below. Click to view them full size. This first one puts the USA and China side-by-side with population data included and the second one superimposes China on the USA's land area.

The Future for England's Cities...

A quick post today on some recent research by the Centre for Cities. Their report - entitled 'Grand Designs? A new approach to the built environment in England’s cities' takes a look at what the future might hold for England's cities in relation to regeneration and the built environment.

Some interesting findings and analysis of population data going back to 1801. One particularly encouraging view is that money urgently needs to be found to continue the work in housing market renewal areas across England.

There are also some interesting maps and animations. I'm not saying they're interesting just because I did them, but because of the patterns they reveal. Honest. The latter can be found on the Grand Designs web page and the former in the report itself. Regular visitors to this blog (if there are any!) may recognise the animations from previous work I've done.

MIT and Great Britain Regions

Some interesting news from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the BBC News website...

Analysts from the SENSEable City Lab have produced a new map of the regions of Great Britain using a novel approach. The new map is based on telecoms data of human interactions (i.e. phone calls) and it is based on a dataset of "12 billion calls over a one-month period, estimating more than 95% coverage of the Great Britain's residential and business landlines". They must have a big computer. What does it all look like? Check out this video:



There's a longer paper on this and it's worth also checking out the Network&Society pages related to the work. You can even download a zip file with all the maps and use them free of copyright (so long as you acknowledge the source). The main map to feature in the BBC story is shown below - interesting when you compare it to some of the flow maps for the UK that I've blogged on before...