• Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/index)—Basecamp is a collaborative project manager website. You are able to use the resource for free if you are only managing one project (you will have to pay for more). This tool is useful because it includes checklists, deadline tracking, and a document sharing tools that compares versions. It’s real strength lies in its collaborative abilities. There are a variety of communication tools and methods within the program to work with other individuals on a project.
•  Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/)—Zotero is tool that helps you to track research (kind of like a social bookmarking tool, with more tools!). I like that it tracks searches and helps with your citations. Of course, you’ll want to be sure to double check everything!

Now, some ideas on how to personalize your Firefox browser (and most of these can work in IE as well). At Firefox’s website there is an “add-ons” tab. Within that area is a list of  “search engines.” Add as many of those that are useful. They will all then be options in a drop down menu in your browser window. Since I use Google the most, it stay up there; however, I also like being able to drop down to IMDB (since I love movies), Wikipedia (it’s an encyclopedia!!), Webster for a dictionary, Weather Channel if I’m traveling, and Food Network if I’m actually going to attempt to do something in the kitchen. You probably also want to go download all the “plugins” so that they various tools work from within Firefox. After that, just browse the recommended add-ons and extensions. You’ll probably find a couple of tools that work for you.

Don’t stop at Firefox’s website. You’ll probably want to also:

• Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com)
• Social Bookmarking Toolbar, both Furl and del.icio.us have toolbars you can download. Check out their “tools” or “help” sections
• Other Google Tools (http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/) some are for your toolbar, others you will have to bookmark somehow. I’m personally a huge fan of gmail, google docs, and the calendar tool is coming along and I’ve bookmarked the “Google Scholar” search page so it shows on my browser window all the time.

As you find other tools on the internet (like Zotero, which is a Firefox extension for tracking research and helping with citations, http://www.zotero.org/), you will find many of them have browser related tools.

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 you (floppy disk, thumb drive). However, those tools are fragile; consider backing up your hard work in the following methods:

• Online storage account (http://box.net)
• Email yourself—Google mail (http://mail.google.com/) is a free email account with a lot of storage space
• Online Document Sharing—Although document sharing programs are primarily for you to give other individuals access to your work, they also must save that work on a server. You can use either Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/) or Zoho Writer (http://www.zohowriter.com/).

• Book Suggestions—This just allows you to type in the name of a book that you may have already found (even if you just found the name). If the name pops up, click on it. You will then get a great listing of resources like:
  • People with this book also have
  • Books with similarly library and subject classifications
  • Books with similar tags
• Zeitgeist—This section is basically the statistics section of the database. Check out one or more of the various categories.
  
• Groups—See if there is a group related to your topic, even if it is only tangentially. If you take a few minutes to skim their materials, you may find something useful.
• Talk—This section shows the more popular, or active, discussion board threads at the site. You may find something interesting.

• Microsoft Word has a simple diagram or organizational chart tool embedded in the program. Go to “Insert” and then “Diagram” to insert one of the visuals into your document. MS Word allows you to “switch” the type of diagram being used, without changing the text you have entered. Switching up the diagrams with your information might give you different ideas on how to cluster, or organize, your ideas and materials.
• Gliffy, a free online diagramming tool (http://www.gliffy.com/), allows you to make more complex cluster maps and diagrams. Gliffy also allows you to export your cluster map as a jpeg image file so that you can easily import it into a document or webpage. With the variety of shapes, colors, fonts, etc., Gliffy allows you to construct rich visual layers to your cluster map. With Gliffy you can try giving different types of evidence (for example, testimonies, numbers/statistics, and examples) different shapes and colors. It would then allow you to not only analyze the amount of evidence you have associated with each reason, but the balance in the types of evidence as well. Gliffy also has tools that help with different types of “mapping” like floorplans and flowcharts.
• Cmap Tools is a more robust concept mapping program that you can download for free (http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/). However, it is both more difficult to use and more difficult to export your cluster/concept map products into a usable format.

• Page set up/formatting—Make sure your document is properly formatted (specific margins, etc.) by checking on its set up. Go to “file” then “page set up.” On the “margins” tab you’ll want to check your margins and page orientation. On the “layout” tab you may want to check your headers/footers options.
• Pagebreaks—If you need to start material on a new page (you should never have dangling sentences/paragraphs at the top of the page), use a pagebreak instead of hitting the enter key a bunch of times. You can usually insert a pagebreak by going to “insert” then “break.”
• Paragraph formatting—Instead of indenting your paragraphs by hitting the tab key, consider indenting them all systematically. Go to “format” and “paragraph.” Under “special” select the “first line” option. This will indent the first line of all your paragraphs. Similarly, when doing your full bibliographic citations, try using the “hanging” option (also under special). This will make all of the lines, after the first line, indent in (just like both MLA and APA citations styles dictate).
• Headers/Footers—If you want to include either headers or footers in your document, do not try typing them in at the top or bottom of each page. Instead, go to “view” and “header and footer.” This will allow you to type what you want in each header/footer only once. Notice that you can include page numbers. Instead of putting each number, select the little page icon with the “#” (number symbol) on it.
• Styles & Formatting Taskbar—Finally, if you start having longer, more complex documents, with lots of formatting involved, consider having the “Styles & Formatting” taskbar open when you work. First, go to “view” and click on “task pane.” Once the task pane opens on the right hand side of the screen, click on the top of the task pane and select the “styles and formatting” option. Not only does it allow you to easily format elements in your document, but it also keeps track of all the formatting options you have used.

For example, I like getting my world news from the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/). If you scroll to the bottom of their international edition homepage (the link above), there is a little link called “RSS Feeds.” Once you link on the feeds page, you can find a listing of a variety of types of feeds to which you may subscribe. However, to subscribe you first need an RSS Aggregator (or reader). Popular RSS Aggregators come in many shapes, sizes, and flavors:

• Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) combined internet based RSS aggregator & blogging tool
• Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) internet based RSS aggregator
• Newsgator (http://www.newsgator.com/) internet based RSS aggregator, can also include download on specific computers
• Sage (http://sage.mozdev.org/) Mozilla/Firefox based RSS aggregator
• Gritwire (http://my.gritwire.com/) internet based RSS aggregator with more social software tools
• Sharpreader (http://www.sharpreader.net/) computer based aggregator, you must download software

I suggest you start with Google Reader—it has a lot of feeds for you to initially try and many website give it as a RSS subscription option. Like Google Reader, most RSS aggregators start you off with a few feeds to read. Similarly, you can also subscribe to a bunch of feeds from within the aggregator. However, if you find feeds outside of the aggregator, say your friend’s blog, you’ll need to manually add the subscription by finding the RSS feed URL (web address).

If you want to search for specific blogs about a topic, use these blog search tools:

• Blogarama (http://www.blogarama.com/)
• Feedster (http://feedster.com/)
• Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/)
• Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/)

If you want some more detailed instructions on how to use RSS feeds, especially searching for specific news topics and Google search hits, check out Will Richardson’s “RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators” (http://weblogg-ed.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/RSSFAQ4.pdf).

Most are personal portals only allow for private pages for the individual logging on. Therefore, once you log on to a computer, any computer with internet access, you can go to the personal portal site, log on, and instantly have access to the internet tools you need! Pageflakes, a particular brand of personal portal, has a “public” option that allows individuals to share their portal pages.

Public Portal Tools:

• Google Homepage (http://www.google.com/ig)
• Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/)
• MyYahoo (http://my.yahoo.com/)

If you are someone who does not own your own computer, or uses public computers a lot, you may sincerely want to set up the following trio of accounts:

• Personal portal
• Social bookmarking
• Online storage (http://box.net)

With these three online tools, and some form of local storage tool (a disk or thumb drive, there are 32MG thumb drives on sale for $5ish), you can instantly “personalize” a generic public computer with your personal portal and social bookmarking accounts. And you can save all your documents at box.net, which allows for 1GB of storage for free. You may want to make another back-up of your files by either emailing them to yourself (using your email as storage), or uploading/working on them in a document sharing program (Google Docs, http://docs.google.com/, or Zoho writer, http://www.zohowriter.com/) which also saves the files as well.

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 select some more reliable, and/or useful, sources, it helps to understand the distinction between the world wide web, library databases, and blogs.

The Web—The “world wide web” is a mess of resources located on the internet. Technically, the internet is electronic connections between computers and servers. The “web” is information that resides on those various computers and servers that you can access via the internet, and your internet browser. Anyone can post anything to the web, as long as he or she has access to server space. To help assess the viability of web resources, you probably want to start by looking at the suffix at the end of the URL (web address).

• .gov—government websites, probably pretty reliable (Don’t forget, organizations can be considered authors in citations; however, be sure to spend a little time looking to see if a specific individual wrote the material on the webpage you want to use.)
• .edu—educational websites, again, probably reliable, but realize many students have websites on educational servers. You’ll want to carefully analyze who is writing and publishing the information.
• .org—non-profit websites. Generally these websites are reliable from the perspective of the organization hosting the site. In other words, realize that there are .org sites for both pro-life and pro-choice organizations. You will want to critically analyze the perspective of your author/s at these sites. (Don’t forget, organizations can be considered authors in citations; however, be sure to spend a little time looking to see if a specific individual wrote the material on the webpage you want to use.)
• .net or .com—websites of whomever buys the domain name. So…if you got to whitehouse.com you will get something different from whitehouse.gov. There are a lot of very informative and valid websites in the .net and .com realm; however, like ANY of your sources, you need to critically analyze and evaluate the source.

Library Databases—Library databases are collections of electronic documents from a variety of resources, mostly print periodicals (newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.); however, there are now e-book and other media databases as well. Libraries pay for access to these resources. You can not just access the information from the web, generally you have to sign on with a username/password (proving you are a student). Generally information found in the databases is considered more reliable than just searching, or googling, the web since it has been reviewed in a variety of ways. Most magazines and newspapers have ethical standards of research and reporting as well as editors that review the material before it goes to print. But remember, most newspaper and magazine stories only go into a certain level of detail, and generally do not provide detailed listings of their sources. Scholarly journals on the other hand include detailed bibliographies and are peer reviewed. Peer reviewed means that other experts in the field read, rated, and usually gave suggestions for revision, an article before it is published.

Blogs—Blogs are like general websites and can have any of the suffixes mentioned above. Blogs can be written by individuals, or groups. What makes blogs different from regular webpages is that they are organized like journal postings. The traditional blog homepage presentation puts the most current posting at the top of the page. The second to most current comes next, etc. When the blog author publishes a new posting, the blog homepage dynamically updates and changes. Blogs also include individual webpages for each individual posting. If the blog site allows for comments, the comments are including on that individual page (not the blog homepage). Most blog programs allow the author to categorize his or her postings. You can generally find a menu of those categories on the blog homepage. If you really like a specific blog and want to see anything new that the author posts, you can subscribe to the blog with an RSS aggregator. (If you are interested in RSS aggregators, either email the instructor for more information or wait a couple more weeks for a new tech tip.)