Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

If you are like I am, having students demo all different technologies each semester, it means both you and your students have accounts all over the web. Tabber looks like a tool that can help an instructor bringing it all together. So, if you have students with multiple accounts (for example a social bookmarking and blog) this tool could be one way to tie it all together. It looks like you could tag profiles you subscribe to (with a class number and semester). Finally, you could keep track of what students are doing with the various technologies after the course ends. I’m always trying to figure out new ways to track student work as well as periodically follow up on their use of the technology…Tabber could do both. This could also be an interesting way to keep track of other folks (friends, scholars, etc.) doing cool stuff on the web.

You know how much I love social bookmarking; however, I’m beginning to think I might start having my writing students use various social annotating sites instead. The difference?

• Social Bookmarking: bookmarks page, allows annotation, allows tagging, allows various social forms of sharing
• Social Annotating: everything above plus clipping text, images, videos, etc. from the pages being bookmarked

Over the past academic year I have converted–yes, as in “praise be” converted–to the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. I loved how “social” del.icio.us is. It is possible to make connections to other resources, other people, through tagging, sharing, subscribing, networking, etc.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been playing with various social annotating tools. The difference? Not much, they just make it much easier to “clip” copy and images from webpages and take notes on the site. I also like that they allow you to word search both the text you clipped as well as your notes.

Some of these social annotation tools include:

• Stickies
• Clipmarks
• Google Notebook

And Google Notebook, of course, will easily transfer materials to gmail or google docs.

I’m sure some of my colleagues would be unhappy that these programs promote blatant copying from the webpages; however, its the same thing as highlighting and annotating on a hardcopy. I think this tool, paired up with something like Turnitin.com,  will give instructors great tools to help teach students to summarize, paraphrase, and cite sources.

I went to this wonderful presentation at CCCCs about how a faculty member assigned podcasts in her writing class. Now, I am a stickler for saying that podcasts are periodically published texts; however, she had her students follow the general conventions that are emerging in the world of podcasting. (So…they made audio files structured whose formats followed individual podcast structures). I really liked the idea of having them listen to podcasts, and then emulate them to dabble in multi-modal composition. Last week I found this article about 5min.com (oops, forgot to save the article). I wonder if we’ll start seeing video sites like this, or themes/threads within YouTube and Google Video that have conventions of short syndicated information video segments (or the advanced Podcasts, or videocasts). In other words, getting format and content conventions to emulate, just like with Podcasts.

Ultimately, I’m thinking it could be interesting to have students make short “casts” (whether audio and/or video) that would build, over time and classes, into a repository of information about the topic/course. This would be the same type of idea of having students adding to a course wiki that would expand over time as a resource for future classes.

Spock
(from: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9708718-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware)

If Spock works…it could be an interesting way for individuals to clean up their identities on the web. Think about your students with “2sexxxy4u<at>yahoo.com” email address, or, other stuff graduate students have done and don’t want found when they go on the job market? Although I don’t see this tool being anything that I would specifically build into a lesson, I can imagine having some interesting discussions about it, especially in my technical writing class. Our tech writing course curriculum requires that I have the students write a job application packet. I think it could be interesting to discuss the hows and whys a site/tool like Spock becomes necessary. It might also be a great discussion to have with students before asking them to open/start some new account.

Ever wonder why/how we lose our students in web based coursework? Maybe various screen capture tools will help us figure it out? Last week I read about Robot Reply, a tool that will track what web site visitors do while on the website and thought “cool, maybe this tool will work!”

I’ve wanted to have students screen capture their work on the web, especially after I’ve asked them to work with a new technology. Last year I tried having students download a free 30 day trial of Captivate to record their sessions as they were working with a new technology. Don’t ask…it was messy. I like this idea of Robot Reply, where you set up the capturing to be done on the webpage/server side…nothing to ask of the students. However, it appears you have to have a lot of control over your webpages to add a line of code to the bottom of every page on the website. This wouldn’t be a problem with CSS coded websites; however, it still implies that you have access to the website. The “new” tools I’m using are usually web-based and hosted off site. And I can imagine many instructors wanting to track how their students move their a course management system…yeah, get access to that base code, snort!

But I’m excited to find Robot Replay. As I played with it and a website I did have some control, a wiki I’m playing with, I realizing that the wiki has templates. This summer I was going to have students construct a class wiki. I think I’ll combine these tools and track what the students do this summer with the wiki.

I also found CamStudio, a free screen capture software, as I was writing this blog entry. I think I’m also going to spend a little time trying to find some open source screen capture softwares to re-attempt the work I did last spring. That type of screen capture work might have to wait until next fall.

http://lifehacker.com/software/pdf/geek-to-live–organize-your-pdf-library-with-itunes-240447.php

Wow…and I’ve spent lots of time finding stuff to organize web research, but this is cool! I’ve been sold on social bookmarking sites for a couple of years now. And now I’m starting to like these various “clipping” or “notetaking” type bookmarking tools as well. However, the problem with most of them is that they do not bookmark, clip, or save/cache PDF files from library databases. Now I’m trying to teach my students that research in library databases tends to be a little more authoritative, scholary, academic, etc. than what they find on the web. And some days I can’t blame them, it is a whole heck of a lot easier to work with texts on the web, than the stuff in the library databases.

So…why not use a tool many of them already know and love, iTunes?

As I read the instructions for how to do this, they reminded me of the major drawback…it’s just an organizing plan; iTunes doesn’t have a PDF reader within it. However, the blog entry also lists the major plus for using iTunes to organize research PDFs, tagging. Currently I have all my research related PDFs saved in the files with the projects that I found them with. Now, most scholars know that they use the same resources for many projects. By tagging, instead of filing, iTunes allows you to associated the PDF with any past, present, and future project it needs to be associated with.

The one change I would make…the instructions linked to above mentions that you could leave your PDFs in files all over your computer. That is part of my problem! I’m now thinking put ALL research related, heck maybe just all, PDF files into one file folder. Then organize them within iTunes as outlined above. And then, as also mentioned in the article, use Google Desktop to search the text in the files for the exact PDF needed. (yes, you read that correctly, once Google Desktop scans all your files, it can read all the text in your PDF files). That just gave me another techno-clean up for this summer:

1. organize bookmarks in delicious
2. finish digital list of DVDs (insurance purposes, ya know)
3. dump all PDFs in one file & organize in iTunes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/06/AR2007040601544.html

That’s it…I’m tired of these types of posts/articles/etc. about how faculty members are banning laptops from their classrooms because they are too distracting to the students. And all this particular faculty member is reported to do in class is lecture and ask questions. Haven’t these people heard of the research that says people fade out after 15 minutes? Haven’t they heard of the various short collaborative assignments/activities or classroom assessment technique activities they can work into the class period to break up the lecture and engage the students? If this faculty member had consistent, formative assessment and feedback with the students, they would know whether or not they needed to lay off the web surfing. But, if this is a traditional lecture, lecture, lecture…and only mid-term and final tests…yeah, students aren’t going to know they are not “getting it” until it’s too late. In other words, I’m wondering if bad teachers are blaming technology for bad results in their classes. Technology used, and/or allowed, in educational settings can be both positive and negative. And we’re talking all “technologies” here, books, pens and paper, etc. I used to read pulp fiction in my High School English classes because I was so bored. If that instructor had asked me a question, I would have needed it repeated.

Folks, and I’m probably preaching to the choir with my blog, there are lots of ways to pedagogically “spice” up your classroom…and technology is only one of them. I’m forever grateful to various mentors introducing me to collaborative/cooperative learning, CATs, JiTT, active learning, case studies, etc. Generally, I find, I’m using technology to supplement one of these other methodologies, as well as the good ‘ol lecture.  And why not make the students with computers responsible for adding technological elements to the lecture, discussion, and other activities? Why not have them do synchronous collaborative notetaking or Google Jocking? Just as we sometimes need to teach students study skills, we might need to teach them how to “study” and “learn” with the technologies they only know how to “play” with.

MakeUseOf gave the link out to HiTask as an advanced to-do and project collaboration tool. Currently I’ve been pretty happy using ToDoist as my personal to-do-list; however, it really doesn’t have a share feature. It appears MakeUseOf has a comparison listing of to-do and project collaboration tools. Ultimately I can see these types of tools, especially with the collaboration features, being useful in academia for two reasons:

• helping students collaborate on projects, and
•  helping scholars collaborate on projects.

However,  what if you used one of these types of tools as a course management system? All the students were collaborators, and everyone would have an idea of what one another is doing. Humm…maybe try that out on a smaller class.

http://futuremail.bensinclair.com/
(from: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/makeuseof-extra-43-web-goodies-and-tips/)

How would I use this with my students? Easy…have them set up email reminders for deadlines and such on the first day of class. How wonderful is that? Honestly, however, I’m thinking this could be a useful tool for myself as well. I’m constantly emailing myself with notes. Wouldn’t it be great to acknowledge that sometimes I don’t need those messages to self, yet?!

PS…as I’m chatting with people in the CTL we talked about how useful it could be to have your students email themselves goals for the course, and then get that emailed to them right before the final, or something like that?!

http://www.fortysomething.ca/mt/etc/archives/006375.php

James, one of the cool and hip dudes in our CTL, just told me about the Firefox addon Snapper. It basically allows you to snip images from a webpage and downloads them as PNG (Portable Network Graphic) files. For those of us who ask students to play with new technologies, and need to make “how-to” sheets, this at least allows you to capture specific images on the page (instead of doing a “PrtSc” and then cropping). However, the best part of this app is that it puts a little red fish on the lower lefthand corner of your browser window (next to the monkey for Greasemonkey, I’m starting a zoo). When you click on the fish, it opens its mouth, and you can capture the image. How “cute” (nudge, nudge James) is that?