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The new version of Principles of Molecular Virology is being printed right now :-)

You can order your copy now from Amazon or Amazon.co.uk

I find that there’s still a lot of confusion around the ideas behind open educational resources, so I wrote a short piece for Microbiology Today about the OeRBITAL project:

Guardian University Guide 2012: Biosciences

Study at the University of Leicester: Microbiology or Medical Microbiology

Lot’s of stuff!

You can order your copy now from Amazon or Amazon.co.uk

If you’ve ever taken the time to explore the content on MicrobiologyBytes, you’ll know that in addition to all the microbiology, there a fair amount of maths and statistics. Today I am happy to announce the launch of StatsBytes – a free, online self-directed introduction to the statistics package R. The documents as published today are essentially a first draft and I hope everyone who read this will help by scanning them carefully for mistakes, which I am sure are lurking there. Teaching materials of this sort need to be embedded in academic disciplines for acceptance. StatsBytes is published under a CC-BY-SA licence, so I want people to take it and repurpose it by rewriting the examples.

Originally, I planned to produce this resource as a microchunked uncourse on statsbytes.wordpress.com. In practice, I found that this approach didn’t help me with authoring in this instance (unlike MicrobiologyBytes, which has been my day to day notebook over the last few years and has contributed enormously to the production of the new edition of my textbook, Principles of Molecular Virology), so StatsBytes is now an old-fashioned static website. The one concession to modernity is a trial of a Facebook page as a support site for the course. I’m not yet sure if Facebook is a good choice for this or not, or whether better alternatives are available – I’d welcome your comments on this. And indeed on anything else you spot and want to comment on.

www.microbiologybytes.com/statsbytes

A.J. Cann

… that the page proofs for the fifth edition of Principles of Molecular Virology have been approved, the book is currently being printed, and you can order your copy now from Amazon or Amazon.co.uk!

I have recently started my contributions to the OeRBITAL project. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding my contributions to the Microbiology page. The OeRBITAL wiki is not open for public contributions, but I am calling here for your suggestions of good open educational resources in microbiology, so comments below please!

and on Amazon.com!