I’ve been spending some time perusing the empirical research related to social media and learning, and courtesy of Henry Jenkins blog I came across the 2010 Digital Media & Learning Conference They’ve posted videos from the plenary and keynote sessions, and I’m hoping to write some more detailed posts on these later this week. For example, Brigid Barron (well known for her work in Problem-Based & Project-Based Learning) is one of the panel participants.
Allan Collins and Richard Halvorson recently published Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology. Today, Dr. Collins was at Penn State where he gave a great talk that related to some of the points outlined in his book.
One of the many thoughtful points I jotted down was: School will become less important as a venue for education Interesting in this is how it suggests a shift, … a shift, for example, that moves the student more to the center, and more as the one who assumes control over their learning. And as they assume more control, it becomes interesting to see what sorts of creative directions the student can then take it.
Zotero is a great research tool for students and academics. I find it immensely easier and more intuitive to use than EndNote, RefWorks, and other sorts of similar packages. If by chance you’ve been missing out on all the fun, you can get a quick overview here. Their latest and greatest effort is a standalone version that would work with browsers beyond the ever-extensible Firefox.
One thing Zotero makes easy to do is sharing. It’s drop-dead easy to create groups ( essentially, click the group folder icon and send email invitations). One thing I’ve noticed with Group libraries though is the lack of a search function within a specific group’s bibliographic library. This isn’t a big deal if the group doesn’t have a lot of cites that they’re sharing, but if there are a bunch of cites being stored there (e.g., more than 50), searching for them becomes a little unwieldy because you’re going to have manually click through multiple screens. I don’t know how widely the Groups feature is used among the Zotero community, but if it’s a feature under consideration, I’d vote for it in a heartbeat.
Despite Twitter, I’m still a frequent user of RSS, and when it comes to readers, I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire (both the desktop and iPhone versions). It’s got that Mac look-and-feel and the 3-pane capability (folders, titles, posts) that saves me the hassle of launching full posts in a separate browser.
But recently the desktop version has been giving me troubles with what should be a very routine function: deleting folders. For some strange reason, every time I delete one, it magically reappears.
Apparently, there are others who had the same problem and they had good luck with a clean reinstall, so I tried that. But as a likely omen of things to come, quick and easy success was not to be had.
So, on to other options … Because I sync it with Google Reader, I thought that might be the culprit, so I turned off the syncing. But no luck there either. Then I tried unsubscribing on the odd chance that the problem was one of semantics (especially since the current version of the NetNewsWire UI no longer included a simple drop-down menu option for deleting folders). But still, no dice. So that left with me checking out some CTRL-Click options. The Show Info option kind of surprised me with its depth; it displayed five layers: Name, Refreshing, Persistence, Exporting, and Enclosures & Podcasts. Refreshing seemed to be the most relevant to my problem, so I ticked the Don’t Refresh option thinking that maybe the reason the folder kept reappearing was that the system kept wanting to refresh it as long as it had a connection to the Net. But I struck out there as well.
The Columbo-like detail in this puzzle is why they removed the Delete Folder option from their previous UI. It seems like a pretty standard option to me and one that wouldn’t really add much bloat.
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Apple, NetNewsWire
Looking for a list of qualitative research tools? Looking for a tool to collect data? Analyze data? Dynamic mapping? Transcribing? The Digital Research Tools wiki (DiRT) is definitely a good addition to the academic researcher’s toolbox. In my web perusals, I haven’t been able to find anything that comes close to its scope and comprehensiveness – kind of a research tool headquarters. Lisa Spiro of Rice University does an excellent job as the wiki’s editor, and true to the wiki spirit, it thrives on contributions from others. Check out the guidelines for the details.
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Rice University, Lisa Spiro