In the undergraduate subject I’m coordinating this semester (Arguments, Evidence, and Intuition – a quantitative literacy undergrad module) we’re really interested in getting students dealing with numbers in real world contexts. How do you critique a newspaper article, see behind a politician’s use (or lack of use!) of statistics, or decide whether a health supplement is efficacious? To support that, we’ve designed assessments that require students to interact with real world data to (1) communicate and data story, and (2) discuss a contentious issue from their own perspective, and that of multiple stakeholders. We’ve also worked to integrate real world resources – datasets, newspaper articles and reports, etc. – into the sessions. To support that, give students inspiration for their assignments, and help the tutors to collate resources around statistical concepts and evidence, I’ve recently setup a new resource that works as follows: 1. I’ve installed the social bookmarking tool ‘diigo’ on firefox & my mobile – this allows me to save bookmarks to a shared online space (that others can also contribute to), these appear in a [subject group]1, tagged with keyterms (e.g., statistical concepts), with a short description of their relevance to the subject (normally a key quote from the article) 2. I also tag the bookmarks with a keyterm (‘aei’) which acts as a trigger for this great tool if this, then that (ifttt) – ifttt lets me set up recipes such that if a resource is tagged ‘aei’ in the diigo feed then do some action 3. The action in this case is to send the resource to a facebook page, I am the admin on that page (but can add others) which allows me to share directly to it, but also means students don’t see my personal profile (if I posted, they’d just see a page admin). Happily I don’t really need to go to the page at all as the process is all automated! This also means I don’t need to deal with the hassle of running a facebook group, including membership and managing student’s comments. So far a few students have ‘liked’ the page, which needs some more love (advertising, a profile pic/cover photo, etc. and a bit more community interaction), but given how low cost the process is, I’m quite happy to carry on with fairly small numbers. Of course it’s also a good system because even if students (and staff) don’t have facebook (or don’t want to like the page) they can still access the resources via diigo, and I’m not doing much more work than reading I’d be doing anyway! Key resources: * [ifttt]2 * [diigo]3 * [facebook pages]4