• Zotero

    03Feb
    Author: Katherine Pisana Categories: Educational Technology, Mind Amplifying Tools Comments: 2

    2009-02-03-post

    As I’ve just started studying (online) again, my mind is tuning back into things it normally only focuses on when I’m in hard-core academic mode. This morning, for example, (well, actually, for the last two mornings) I’ve been reading through the introductory materials on both of my course websites, and I ended up going through a lot of information related to library resources and referencing tools. The most common bibliographic and bookmarking tools that we’re being recommended are RefWorks and Furl, respectively.

    refworksRefWorks is only available to us while we’re registered students. After that, unless we’re affiliated with an organization that pays for access OR unless we want to pay for an annual subscription ourselves, we loose all of our research collections at the end of the academic term. Basic translation: if you want to be able to access the information you collect and store using RefWorks over then next 6-8 months, this might not be your best choice.furl

    Furl, on the other hand, is a social bookmarking service with many features, accessible from anywhere and free to all. Although they’re not direct substitutes, if I hadn’t already been hooked on Zotero when I first learned about Furl, I probably would have given Furl more of a chance.

    Now we get to the reason for this post! I wanted to share a bibliographic management tool with you that I have found to be invaluable during my courses of study (and tangential resource endeavors). Zotero is a free, open source Firefox plugin that allows you to capture resources as you come across them and organise them into neat research collections. I find it thoroughly enjoyable and intuitive to usezotero

    Zotero allows me to make sense of the piles of information I collect each time I brave the plethora of resources available within just a few clicks of a mouse. To help bring my point home, imagine that if all the files and links I collected were stacks of random pieces of paper covering every square inch of my inevitably invisible imaginary desk, then Zotero would be like the magical fairy that instantly organises all the information into a beautifully systematic filing system that I structure and that is completely aligned with my thought processes. Essentially, it allows me to know where to find stuff when I need it – whether I’m on or off line.

    It also lets me summarise reference collections almost instantly. Let me show you… I’ll share a report I generated from a collection of resources I built relating to online language learning. It generates the report in html format, so I just saved that page as a pdf file which is now available to you simply by clicking here.

    Now that I’ve got you hooked ( 😉 ), let’s watch the video intro together (the video below opens in a new tab/window):

    Zotero even has a social feature called Zotz that allows you to share your reference collections with communities. More info below:

    Here’s an exhibit I just generated. The Zotz add-on still needs a little ironing out, but it’s an exciting new development of an already exceptionally functional information management tool.

    There’s even a WordPress plugin available that helps Zotero better recognise the information in your blog entries which makes for more seamless referencing of this type of information as well. From the screenshot below, you can see the little additional icon that is displayed in your address bar once this plugin is activated. When you’re viewing a WordPress blog, once you click on this icon, a window pops up (as seen below) asking you which of the entries available on the page you’re on you would like to add to your Zotero collections.

    zotero-plugin-screenshot

    Lots of other screencast tutorials are available for those interested in exploring the tool further.

  • Keeping up with technology – choice or necessity?

    01Jan
    Author: Katherine Pisana Categories: Mind Amplifying Tools, Technology Comments Off on Keeping up with technology – choice or necessity?

    20090101-postI’ve been writing this post for the last THREE DAYS. Did you know that you can’t have a blog with embedded Flash content if you’re using WordPress.com? As a matter of fact, you can’t do it with most mainstream blogging platforms. TypePad.com seems to be one of the only ones that allows it, but that’s a paid service, so it might not be for everyone. I’m partial to open source, so it wasn’t for me as long as there was an alternative.

    Anyway, it’s taken me 3 days to finish this post because I’ve been researching what blogging platform to switch to – not an easy feat since I really like the WordPress.com interface and was looking forward to making it my home. But, after reading through its support forums (here and here) I realized that many people are in the same boat as me – people who want to use technology to connect with others BEYOND text-based communication – and either end up settling for not being able to incorporate Flash into their entries, or switch. I’ve had to switch – to WordPress.org. What’s the difference? Read about it here.

    And speaking of reading, here’s that post I’ve been writing for three days!

    I’m intimately familiar with the pressures of keeping up with cutting edge applications of technology. I didn’t think that I could be more in tune with this pressure until I moved to Silicon Valley where so many of the brilliant minds that develop innovative uses of available technologies collect in the numerous office complexes just down the street, around the corner and up the road from where I live. Now, not only do I feel that I have to keep up with fellow technologists, but I also feel that when I signed my lease to move here, I inherited some obscure self-imposed duty to not just be up-to-date but to be on the raiser’s edge of innovation as it happens. (Feeling I have the duty and actually doing it are two different things 😉 )

    To be honest, I thought that living in California would seem different. I think I was expecting flying space crafts floating people to work – carbon free and totally Green space crafts of course! Instead, the roads look the same, the people still go grocery shopping and trees still grow toward the sky in this high-tech hub of Apples, and hard drives and intangible technologies that make venture capitalists millions (or break their banks – depends on the day).

    Anyway, the point of my ramblings today is that there are lots and lots of totally phenomenal programs, tools, platforms, and ready-made vehicles just waiting to be used to make our lives easier, funner and more fulfilling. All we have to do is look for them…

    but how do you search for something you don’t know about yet??

    …find them…

    but how do you know when you find an answer to a question you didn’t know you had??

    …pick the ones that best works to satisfy your needs…

    but how do you do that when you didn’t know you were missing something in the first place…and…which one do you pick if only a small percentage will survive the incubation period and make it into mainstream culture??

    …and revolutionize the way you perform your most common processes.

    But…doesn’t that sound like a lot of work??!?

    The questions in italics are still questions that I’m trying to figure out for myself. I know that they’re real, relevant questions with significant meanings. After all, the answers to them could change the way we think about technology, alter how we use it and update our expectations of it. Not only that, but they could also make the learning curve even steeper for those who are just starting to learn how to use a computer for the first time. That’s where us learning technologists come in!

    One thing I want to do with this blog is to use it to share with you when I discover cool technologies that work for me, show examples of how they work, and invite other users to share they experiences.

    SproutBuilder logoSo, that brings me to Sprout Builder. AMAZING!!! Have a look at their online demo if you haven’t heard about them yet. I’ve been using this online development tool for about a year now and it’s made my life easier and so much more colorful! From redesigning PowerPoint presentations for teachers and turning them into impressive flash presentations, to marketing materials, to online course content that makes up part of distance learning programs, I just keep finding new ways of using this tool! It’s really great because it makes content development SO easy. The interface is intuitive and there are so many things you can create with it.

    What I’ve ended up with is an ever-growing portfolio of materials that I’ve already re-used, edited and improved upon many times over the last year. The only thing that could use some improvement with the tool is the way the designer saves and stores developed content. At the moment, there’s no way of keeping a backup on your own computer – it’s all stored on the SproutBuilder servers. They say they’re working on a solution. In the meantime, I’ll continue sprouting (conservatively)!

    Here’s an example of a Sprout I created to help educators in the UK learn about the importance of copyright laws as they relate to online course development:

    Get Adobe Flash player

    I’ll publish other Sprouts in future messages for those who are interested.

    From: Virtually Scholastic