joy at moll projects dot com
I had been planning to give a workshop to students early in the spring semester about free, web-based tools for organizing research notes, citations, and links--all those things one accumulates when working on an academic paper or project.
I struck out with Zotero as I wrote in this post because it only works in Firefox 2. In the same post, I noted that EndNote Web wasn't quite working for this purpose either (although I went ahead and wrote a review, mostly because I told people in my workplace that I would and some did find it useful).
To find more tools to look at, I used these two posts from Solution Watch:
I found interesting things to look at, but nothing I wanted to offer a workshop on. Many of the tools were note-taking tools in the sense that you take your laptop to class and take notes with it, not in the sense of making notes for a project. Since our campus is not fully wireless, a web-based tool for class notes is not something my students can use consistently.
I looked at Studicious and found the note-taking features much to rudimentary for my purposes. And it took several tries to figure out how the grade-keeping feature worked. You put down the assignments at the beginning of the semester, then insert the grades as they are received. The software does all the calculations which is pretty cool, but not that exciting by itself. I couldn't make the Friends feature work at all--perhaps my "Friends" need Studicious accounts as well as Facebook ones.
Notecentric is WYSYWIG. It's purpose is for sharing classroom notes. This might be useful for some campuses, but not ours (yet). It couldn't really be used for making project notes because there seems to be no way to not share notes with this tool. Every note you make is shared with everyone who signs up as belonging to the same class. [Update: I enabled comments this morning and received my first this afternoon--a correction from the developer that Notecentric does facilitate private notes.]
Backpack seems like a good possibility. But I couldn't remember how many pages you get with the free account. And I didn't want to create a new one, since I know I made one a year or so ago. If it's five, however, that might work well for students--one page for each class where the student can store notes, images, calendars, to do lists, and links. Unlike the other tools, this one is more general--not aimed at students, specifically.
mynoteIT has a WYSYWIG editor, a calendar for assignments, to do lists, and the ability to make things either private or public. This was probably the best of the lot, but since I hadn't heard about it before, I was a bit afraid to trust it. Will it be here for the whole next semester? What happens if I teach students about it in January and they lose the site and all their notes in April?
Fortunately, at about this stage in my explorations, another librarian came up with an idea for a workshop. I gave her my time slot and I'll wait until summer to see if any of these tools strike me as being ready for prime time and something I want to tell students about in the fall.
Labels: instruction, reviews
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The Web is a magical place. I joined the 2007 TBR Challenge on 43 Things yesterday. As an afterthought, I threw the post up on my blog as well. This morning, I received email from David Weinberger author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a book on my list! That's so fun that I've been smiling all day because of it.
That, and some other things, have me thinking about Steve Lawson's recent post on See Also..., Experts and Novices. Here's the bit that keeps coming to mind:
People who don't read a bunch of blogs and similar sites through RSS, who don't have any kind of online social/professional network must have a completely different experience of surfing the web from those of us who do. That's why they ask us questions like "how do you even know about all this cool stuff?" It ain't by Googling random keywords, that's for sure.
I have that experience with the library blogosphere and on 43 Things. I briefly had the goal "Lose 30 pounds" on 43 Things, until I discovered that as a community-making mechanism, that goal was useless to me--it drew too many adolescents who either had anorexia or wanted to have it. Not a healthy group and not particularly responsive to the preaching that is the first reaction of most adults when they encounter those posts.
A 43 Things novice might be put off by that and never come back. As a 43 Things expert, I knew there were better places for me to find the group I wanted. In recent surfing of goals (looking at the lists of people connected to me because they share one or more goals with me or because they cheered me on one of my goals), I had noticed a couple of people with the goal eat healthily. I noticed not because of any immediate interest in the goal but because, to my Midwest ears, that doesn't sound grammatically correct even though I suspect it probably is. It turns out that besides knowing how adverbs work, this group has a nice little community of people who encourage each other, share triumphs and failures, and offer tips.
The point of all these thoughts? Mostly gratitude for the connections I make through the librarian blogosphere and 43 Things. But also, this all reminds me that if I want to get more people to use Bloglines or another RSS feed reader (and I'm pretty much of the opinion that almost anyone would benefit from it, especially the people in academia who I work with), that I need to provide them with feeds to get started. From there, they can make connections rather than try to find their own way--encountering a Web that seems wild and wooly instead of magical.
Labels: instruction, social software
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I want to give a workshop to students about keeping things organized while doing research. I want to target this to undergraduates. I spent much of the day looking at EndNote Web that we now get for "free" with our Web of Science database. More on that in another post.
I'm beginning to realize that a citation manager isn't the tool I'm looking for. While I see that this software would be a godsend to someone who has to prepare a bibliography with hundreds of citations, I’m not finding it that useful for the kinds of research I do or that undergraduates do. It’s a lot of work on the front end to make the bibliography easier on the back end.
When I’m finding articles, books, and websites, I want a tool that’s going to keep track of that material and get me back to the full text quickly. Sure, it would be nice if it would make nicely formed citations at the end, but that’s not really what I’m thinking about when I’m in the midst of the research—and I’m guessing it’s not what undergraduates are thinking about until the night before the paper is due. So, it would be a hard sell to get them to learn and use EndNote Web as they are going along—much easier to teach them to go to the Citation Machine or find the appropriate handbook when they are ready to make their bibliography at the end.
That brings me to Zotero that does seem to be the kind of tool I would love to teach my students. Unfortunately, it only runs on Firefox 2.0 and we've been asked not to download that in the library. Of course, students can download whatever they want on their own computers. I wonder if it would be worth bringing in my laptop to do a demo?
Labels: instruction
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Our second session was "A Few Seconds a Day Keeps the Tech Guys Away," given by Tom Bell of John A. Logan College.
He shared an idea that has proven very successful at his institution--emailing a 30-second tutorial to faculty each Friday morning. Each one has four or five screen shots and a little text. It covers one small thing like how to get a signature in your Outlook email or how to burn a CD. Each tutorial takes an hour or so to prepare, but only thirty seconds (or maybe a minute or two) to understand. Tom designed a nice graphic logo banner so that the Friday tutorial is easily recognized from the branding.
He says that he gets a remarkable amount of positive feedback--more than a dozen thank-yous for the first couple and two or three from different people each week even after several months of sending them.
He uses SnagIt for the screen captures, Photoshop to optimize the size of the graphics and add arrows and text, and Microsoft Word to put it all together.
I don't believe that sending tutorials out to faculty from the library would be possible in our environment, but we could do something similar that goes to library staff.
Labels: conferences, instruction, screen capture
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Multimedia Tutorials for Remote Users
Christina L. Biles, Oklahoma State University
This was mostly about Camtasia-created tutorials, although she thinks Captivate is just fine, too. She also mentioned cheaper options that would also do the trick: My ScreenRecorder and InstantDemo. Someone from the audience also mentioned Wink on Linux, which is Open Source.
She can make a Camtasia tutorial so quickly that she uses it to answer reference questions. When a telephone exchange hasn’t been fully satisfactory since the patron can’t see the librarian’s screen, she makes a quick tutorial to show the process and emails it off to the patron.
Of course, one of the advantages of tutorials is that they are repeatable, so rather than explain over and over again how to set up the proxy, record the instructions as a tutorial. Then future users can learn from the same material.
A quiet physical space is required. Although if you don’t get too good of a microphone (that picks up every single sound), it doesn’t have to be completely silent.
She suggests writing a script and reading it over until it sounds natural. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with annoying “umms” and “errrs” in the recording. She often uses someone else to move the mouse while she talks. It’s also possible to record the screen movements separately from the voice and put them together at the end.
Recording things in small chunks has a number of advantages. It’s easier in the software to string small things together into a larger piece than it is to go the other way around. Small pieces can be mixed and matched. People seem to prefer smaller videos that only take a few minutes to watch. At OSU, they have found that the video tutorials are accessed more frequently than the HTML and PDF tutorials that are available on the same page.
Labels: conferences, instruction, screencasting
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It’s About Time, It’s About Place: Designing Interoperable Modular Web Applications for Delivering Online Library Instruction
I made a blog post about this session at the LITA blog.
Labels: conferences, instruction
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A down-side of conferences is that my brain gets super-activated, a state that is inconducive to sleep. So here's a 5:30AM brainstorm that combines an idea that someone threw out for a program during our Computers and Information Technology SIG meeting, "lightning talks" where everyone gets 5 minutes (and not a second more!) to describe something interesting at his or her library, with an idea we've been throwing around our department for months to give mini-workshops that last 15 minutes or less.
Lightning Learning at the Library. These would be 15 minute workshops offered in our offices or the learning lab in the library at 12:15, 12:45, 4:15, and 4:45, say. Possible topics: how to read your friends' blogs fast (Bloglines), Google Tips, Beyond Google, social bookmarking, Pimp Your MySpace (that was in Stephen Abram's talk).
Marketing possibilities:
Labels: instruction
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Presenter: Jennifer K. Martin, Ph.D., Hall Family Foundation Professor of Theater, University of Missouri-Kansas City
I went to this because I got some tips from a teaching workshop that our library did about moving around a classroom that I've found really helpful. This session was that idea on steroids. Think about explaining a "on the one hand and on the other hand" concept--it's so much clearer if you use your hands, right? Now, think about making points in a lecture by starting off at home plate for the introduction, standing on first base for the first point, moving over to third base for a different point, and moving into the audience (second base) to tell them something a bit more intimate.
According to Dr. Martin, or rather some research, people take in information through hearing, through facial expression, and through body movement--and it's actually that last that is the favorite method for most Americans.
Some things I'm going to try at the Reference Desk:
Labels: conferences, instruction, presentations
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Like Jane, of a Wandering Eyre (here, here, and here), I've been teaching, preparing to teach, or debriefing my teaching for over a week.
We get library preparation assignments from each student before the 50-minute one-shot session. When everything works well (the prep assignments come in more than 24 hours ahead of time and they actually reflect the topic the student will be working on all semester), this is great. Although it takes an amazing amount of time, I write notes with research ideas on each assignment and hand them back to the students at the beginning of the library visit. This means I've looked at each person and said his or her name. I really startled a student in mid-class last week when I called on him by name. But he was a good sport and answered my question about what disciplines might provide fruitful research on his topic.
Marking up each prep assignment is a mini-research project, or a maxi-reference question. I feel more like a librarian when I'm working on those prep assignments than I do at any other time.
Labels: instruction, library insider
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