Workshop For Peer Review

Some of the bloggers I read (Alan Levine, David Wiley, Alec Cuoros, and others) have been posting links to presentation wikis and slide shows to collect suggestions and get peer review before their sessions. I applaud this practice and am always thrilled to find new nuggets of information in their work.

It's time to open one of my planned workshops up for similar review. I'm looking forward to suggestions about tools I'm missing and links to useful posts I might have missed or forgotten.

The workshop is called Survival 101: Software to Support Your Scholarly Life. This is a half-day tutorial accepted at the Association for Computing Machinery Southeast Conference in March. The proposal for this workshop was inspired by my dissertation experience. I have been constantly surprised by the extent to which I've needed to brush up on software tools and techniques to collect and manipulate data and to manage the process.

The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce scholars (undergraduate, graduate, and professors) to tools and software that support scholarship and research. The workshop will focus on tools that are not likely to be introduced through regular coursework, but should increase researcher productivity and research quality for professors and students alike.

Our plan is walk participants through the various tasks in a research project throughout the workshop. I'm not sure what topic we'll use as our working example, but I'm kind of leaning to something to do with social software. We're going to set up side-by-side projectors and screens. It turns out Andy and I tend to have different preferred tools. In each class (or sub-class) of tool, he'll present one or two, I'll present another one or two, and we'll give participants a bit of time to try one or two for themselves before moving on to the next. We'll have a small collection of files to use as appropriate so we don't spend too much time with data entry. We don't have those files made yet but they'll probably go up on the workshop wiki once they're done.

The abstract for the workshop follows:

Research and publication are time-intensive. Productive scholars can take advantage of a variety of free or low-cost tools to streamline tedious tasks. This tutorial will introduce attendees to two classes of tools:

• organizing tools (including project management, bookmark management, and a dissertation/assignment calculator)
• writing tools (including graphic organizers and bibliography management software)

A fully charged battery and wireless card are strongly recommended for this hands-on workshop focusing on software and tools for the Macintosh and Windows platforms.

Perhaps in another workshop - or a longer workshop - we'll add the third class of tools we wanted to include: data collection tools for audio and video data (including editing, voice recognition, and transcription). You'll notice a page for that topic, we just don't plan to cover it in the workshop.

Thanks to The Academic Coach for her link to this blog and Welcome to her readers! I've been thinking about making this post for a while. I hope you find some of the tools in this workshop useful as you work on your own research projects.