A Structured Abstract Makes Sense to Me

You know how annoying it is. You find an abstract, you think the article will have useful information, and you decide to track it down. That's when Murphy's Law kicks in for me. The paper I want is not available online, but it IS in the library so I can't use the handy-dandy ILL service. I have to make the trek over to campus and pull the journal off the dusty shelf. That's when I find out the paper has absolutely no relevance to what I'm doing, despite the interesting abstract.

Mosteller, Nave, and Miech must have had similar experiences. They proposed a structured abstract for education research [pdf]. I have to say I'd like to see this idea put into action - at least to see how it goes. According to them, the structured abstract is already very popular in the medical community. I'd like to give it whirl. I think it would make a fine format for my dissertation abstract.

What would committee members think of this idea?

Research Driving Policy: Implications of Research on eFolio Minnesota

I need to keep track of this entry from Darren Cambridge. I think I my dissertation research falls under his third approach. This will be good info to use when I get the inevitable "so what?" question.

Just Playing Around

This morning, I found a virtual conference. They were using Frapper - a Friend Mapper. There was a neat little widget that you can put on a web page. The whole purpose for this post is to see if I can get it on my blog. It turns out Blogger won't allow a script tag, so I failed on that. Oh, well.

I also found Planzo. This online calendar tool also has a notebook feature and to do list functionality. That was easy to add to my Suprglu page, although I've since taken it off since I was just playing around with the demo calendar. Very neat!

I think I would use both of these tools in an online class: Frappr to develop community and Planzo for important dates including holidays and assignments.

ATLAS.ti Rocks!

Every now and again, every software user makes one or more silly mistakes. This weekend, one of mine was to mistakenly operate off my flash drive when adding and coding photos with ATLAS.ti. This evening, I transcribed the day's notes and added them to my hermeneutic unit. Imagine my dismay when the photos I had worked so hard to resize, name, and code were grayed out on my lists! The pictures were unavailable. I decided to right-click to check out the properties. It turns out there was an option called data source monitor. That's when I discovered my path problem. Fortunately, they also had an option called change path. Theoretically, I should be able to replace the path with the correct one, but when do things work as you hope? What did I have to lose? I proceeded and - to my surprise - it worked like a charm! ATLAS.ti not only found my pictures, but it maintained all of my codes in the right places. Don't you just love it when things work?

Aunt Becky Goes Christmas Shopping

About a year ago, I stumbled onto an article similar to this one and forwarded it to my not-very-techie pregnant sister. She scoffed at the idea of googling a baby name as part of the selection process. (I wonder if she did it anyway). Since then, I've been thinking I should buy domain names for my 3-year-old niece and my 10-month-old nephew and have been wondering what to choose.

There's a lot to think about:

1. My not-so-techie sister is very nervous about revealing too much about baby. Fortunately, my other sister (niece's mom) is less nervous about this. Maybe I'll use my nephew's initials?
2. I'd like to choose something they'll be happy to have - even as adults. Initials won't work because my niece's last name might change.
3. The domain name has to be manageable as an email address. I should have done a better job on this for myself. I'm forever using the phonetic alphabet over the phone. People probably think I spent time in the military.
   
4. Now, I read this from Alan Levine!

It's not just the selection pressure. My sisters can't/won't maintain the websites which probably means I'm signing up for webmaster duties until the kids are old enough - or interested enough - to do this for themselves. Maybe the dads will do this? Or, I can set up a Blogger account that publishes to their new sites. Everyone can handle that! It's worth a try. Off to Go Daddy to find out what's available.

Transcribing and More Transcribing

I thought of an easier way to do this! I love how Transcriva (recommended by Alec Couros) lets you control the sound file playback with the Ctrl+Space key combination. Transcriva is only available for the Mac. However, I also like how well Dragon Naturally Speaking (PC only) handles voice recognition, but controlling the software playback is inelegant. Then it dawned on me that I could use both!

I put my iBook and my Toshiba side-by-side and plugged the microphone jack in the sound card of the Toshiba and the headphone jack in the iBook. I used Transcriva to listen to and control the audio file through the Mac using the key combo. I spoke what I was hearing into the Dragon software through the PC. This new approach shaved a surprising amount of time off the transcript I typed last night and decreased the frustration level substantially. I wish I had thought of it sooner. There's probably an easier way and maybe someone will leave that info in a comment before I finish my last transcript. Until then, it looks like this approach is the one for now.

Bubbleshare - Audio slide presentations

Dr. B. sent a nifty photo album using Bubbleshare. I had to find out how she did it. I had a narrated slide show ready to go in no time. Then I found some code to embed the slide show in my blog.

To do this, I used the built-in microphone on my iBook and some digital photos I took of my classmates in an Ethnography class. (Instead of writing up a paper, we presented our studies in poster session format.)

Is this procrastinating from work on my dissertation? Maybe. I prefer to think of it as preparation for FETC.