Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

There are a variety of clustering, or mind/idea-mapping, types of software available for you to use. You might use these tools to help during the brainstorming process. They might help you to organize the data and other research you have collected. They can be very useful in the organization process as [...]

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One of the benefits of using a robust word processor like MS Word, but also try it with other programs, is the various formatting tools available to you. Before submitting final versions of documents, consider using some of the following features to make your document easier to read.

Page set up/formatting—Make sure your [...]

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How many feel guilty for not working in local, national, and international news into your daily, or at least weekly, life? Do you think you might be more likely to if you were able to easily skim the headlines and then click out to anything you want to know more about? Try [...]

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Digg (http://digg.com/) is a social bookmarking site that also ranks articles/websites submitted to the system. For example, once a person submits an article to Digg, other members can start to rank the article. As the article gets more “diggs,” it floats to the top of the pile. Submitting an article/website to Digg is more complex [...]

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(beware…my frustration leads to the blatantly horrible mixing of metaphors)
I’m beginning to feel like my social bookmarking crusade is turning into the continued beating of a dead horse who sure as hell doesn’t want to drink the damn water. I was a huge fan of Furl for years. And as I got more interested in [...]

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Yesterday on the plane I caught up with this rant…

http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/
I’m always excited to find a listing of “new” technologies; however, I’m taking this list to “task” for another reason. Where is the “pedagogical innovation with new technology” award? In other words, it’s one thing to make these tools (and obviously part of the criteria on [...]

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So…I facilitated two “new” technology workshops in our district this semester (2/24 and 3/1). I forgot what I originally wanted to name the workshops; however, because people wanted the name more descriptive, we got: Teaching and Learning with Emerging Technologies: Blogs, Wikis, RSS, and Social Bookmarking. Since I still think “Keeping up with the Jetsons” [...]

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Personal portals allow individuals to construct an internet browser homepage (default page) with tools and links that are relevant and regularly used. Once you set up a personal portal account, you are able to customize your page/s with internet resources that are most useful to you. Most personal portal tools allow you to add specific [...]

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(Remember, I teach first year composition courses. In these courses, especially the ones with research agendas, I have to teach information literacy.)
We are living in an age of information overload. You are probably already overloaded by all the of the information available on your general topic. To help you filter through that information, and to [...]

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(I’m sure some of you are saying, “come on, do you really need to explain this?” And the answer is “yes.” As I love to harp, not all of my students are Educause’s “net generation.” And even some of those who are still do not necessarily understand all of these distinctions.)
Have you ever notices that [...]

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