iterativelearning

Undoubtedly, reading constitutes a big part of the academic life. While journal articles distributed as pdfs are easy enough to organize into local research folders, websites present a little bit more of a challenge. Zotero is certainly an excellent and free tool, but for those sites you only want to read once and not have to worry about storing, then the Firefox extension, Read It Later, is a good option to consider. After you’ve installed it, you simply click the check-mark that appears in the address bar to identify it for later reading.

To access any websites you’ve checked, you click the book icon in the upper-right corner of your Firefox browser. When you do that, you can also see other options such as syncing with another computer and creating RSS feeds.

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Zotero, Read It Later

For those of us who like to do lots of web clips, Evernote is definitely a tool worth checking out. It can clip text, visuals, or audio. It’s very intuitive and shows off a cleaner UI I think than Google Notebook. It also offers the option of emailing web clippings to your account. One of the best features I like is being able to sync your account across devices. And even better, a basic account is free — the right price for cash-strapped educators.

Matthew Ingram has a good, thought-provoking post on the relevance of social bookmarking. Because these tools make bookmarking so easy, it’s equally easy to accumulate a pile of urls that make it difficult to locate that site you’re looking for when you’re scrambling to meet a deadline. Yet, as an academic, I still find social bookmarking tools pretty useful. I like being able to locate a resource that I’ve bookmarked regardless of where I’m at or which computer I’m on.

Although, I think technically speaking it’s not a social bookmarking tool, Zotero, seems to be moving in that kind of direction with its upcoming sync tool.

I also like the potential for social bookmarking tools as a teaching tool; especially when I teach in online environments, the option of creating resource-sharing networks or groups can help build community. One relatively new player in the social bookmarking scene, at least to me, is Diigo. Among many of the standard features, it allows you to create private groups, which some faculty and/or students prefer when it comes to resource-sharing.