Adelaide - Dec 2011

I presented a paper "Extending higher educational opportunities through e-Learning: a case study from Sri Lanka" authored by myself and my supervisors at the 1st International Australasian Conference on Enabling Access to Higher Education in Sri Lanka, held at the University of South Australia - Adelaide. It was a great opportunity to meet people having similar interests and networking. The conference had 5 sessions in parallel making it difficult to select which sessions to attend as all topics were interesting. We had presenters from all continents making it a truly international experience.

The paper was about a total online distance education programme offered by Orange Valley University (pseudonymous) in Sri Lanka. Why students have opted for total online programme and how ready they were for eLearning as well as challenges in implementing eLearning in Sri Lanka were discussed in the paper. This paper presented some of our early findings from a larger project which employed multiple case studies with an ethnographic approach to examine the impact of ICTs on distance education in Sri Lanka.

During the time I was in Adelaide, I visited Wang Wang and Funi - the only Giant Pandas living in the Southern hemisphere - in the Adelaide Zoo. I also manged to visit the beautiful Glenelg beach and do a bit of shopping. The transport system in Adelaide was good and easy to find your way around the city. I did not get the chance to visit Haigh's chocolate factory but their chocolates were yummy, especially the ones with Hazel nuts.

Learning Python - File Reading

I wanted to learn Python and never had the time to invest. I have started learning Python something I should have done years ago. Anyway, as I am new to Python I found few tutorials along with the Python Documentation very useful.

While trying file handling I came across this error
IOError: (22, "invalid mode ('r') or filename", 'd:\x07.txt')

It took me bit of time to realize that I have given the path name with a wrong slash '\' instead of '/' !
Just thought to document this because when I Googled for the error it was not so easy to find what was wrong.

Using EndNote for Citing References

At the last stage of my thesis first draft I changed one reference's author using the Edit Reference in MS Word 2007 option. Alas my EndNote cite while you write tab disappeared saying that there was a major error encountered and I had to search on the Internet and invest few hours to get it sorted (how I got it sorted it is explained in my previous Blog)

This time, when I realized what happened could have been due to this reference being changed I reverted the Author name to be the previous. (Actually I have mixed first and last names of the author). Then I inserted another entry in EndNote for correct reference and let the old reference to be there as it is. It should be possible to remove reference entries but I am not taking any chances until I get my first draft finished - well to be honest I would not risk deleting it until I finish this once and for all.

EndNote and MS Word 2007

I have been using EndNote to help me keep my referencing in place and I hoped that it will help me to speedup writing my thesis. It did the job well when my thesis was in Chapters but now that I have put everything together it is taking more and more time for a reference to be inserted, updated or changed.

But I realized how much I am dependent on it only when my Word software crashed and failed to load the tab that I used to use when citing with EndNote.

After bit of research on Internet I found how to fix it and documenting it here hoping that someone else would find it useful too.

Error when trying to load the COM Add-In: The connected state of Office Add-Ins registered in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE cannot be change

System and Software: Windows Vista Home Edition, MS Office Word 2007 Ultimate, EndNote 2x

Remedy: Click on Windows key -> hold shift key and right click on Word Icon -> Run as admin
Then click on top left word icon -> Word Options -> Add-Ins ->COM AddIns -> Cite while you write

This rectified the problem for me and hope this helps someone else too.