Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

Although the two tools listed below might have been extremely helpful for you during your research process in this course…we can only cover so many things, right? Now, if you plan on continuing your scholarly endeavors (or heck, do research in your profession), check out the following two tools:

Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/index)—Basecamp is a collaborative project manager [...]

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If you own your own computer, it is worth the time to personalize your tools so that you are more efficient and don’t have to remember where everything is. One of the easiest ways to do that with your internet tools is with your internet browser. First, let’s talk about your [...]

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Rule #1: Always save your work!
Rule #2: Always save your work in more than one location!

Consider savings current versions of all your major projects after you work on them in a number of locations. Of course you will want to keep them on some type of portable storage that you keep with [...]

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LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/) is an online databasing tool for people who like to read and/or own a lot of books. It has a few tools that might help you find some more resources, especially books, on your topic. Go to the librarything homepage and wonder through the following tags:

Book Suggestions—This just allows you to type in [...]

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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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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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