A heads up on battery management

Just for information, we hit a problem in Dec/Jan with the tablet battery charging. For no apparent reason they stopped charging, even though they were all plugged into the charging trolley and everything seemed to be working normally. On checking each of the computers we realised that the problem was with battery management, and in many cases the computer had stopped seeing both the batteries. It turned out that this was the result of missing a BIOS update, together with missing a whole set of Vista updates as the computers hadn't been used for a couple of months over the summer. Quite why it should raise its head when it did, and why it should have the bizarre effect of making the batteries appear missing isn't clear, but at least we know that updating the BIOS and Vista solves the problem. Just a heads up for anyone out there experiencing the same problem.

Practising research interviews in Second Life

The picture here shows the interviewing stations in the Research Observatory in Second Life, where students can go in pairs and practice their research interviewing skills in formal, informal and relaxed environments. In each of the interview stations the avatars take on different animations (body language) and they are prompted to reflect on the pros and cons of the different environments with regard to how the interviewer and interviewee might feel in these settings. Also, how could you capture the data in these settings?