Bubbleshare - redux

Tim Lauer sent some traffic this way. If you're interested in taking a look at what I did with Bubbleshare album, feel free to take a look.

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.

Isn't this a kick in the pants!?!

What I did today:

1. Tried to make Adobe Acrobat work convert Word document to PDF with bookmarks.
2. Failed
3. Spent an hour or more on Adobe's tech support website looking for the solution to my problem.
4. Failed, but was motivated to update some software.
5. Stayed on the phone with Adobe tech support for several hours. Sean was very nice, but we didn't get it working. In the process of working on it, we DID succeed in breaking EndNote.
6. Installed and ran all the updates for MS Office and Acrobat on a different, freshly formatted Mac laptop as a troubleshooting step to see if it was a system problem. It wasn't.
7. Called Adobe tech support again. Talked to Pat who told me Acrobat on Mac won't convert bookmarks. It's a Microsoft problem, not a Macintosh problem - must use Windows version. (GRRRR!)
8. Installed Acrobat on PC.
9. Moved all of my Mac files to the PC.
10. Fiddled around configuring the media players because this is a loaner machine. Why a loaner? Because it turns out mine had a defective power supply and my Best Buy extended service plan entitles me to an oh-so-speedy 3-week turnaround time on the repair.
    

Hopefully, tomorrow will be better. Oh, wait. It IS tomorrow. I'll stop whining now.

My thoughts on Foibles and Blips

I've been reading the Academic Coach blog for a while now. Today she's writing about Formatting Foibles and other Last Minute Blips. She makes three key points and I thought I'd use my blog to lay out what I'm doing for each of those. Maybe one of my ideas will help someone who strays this way.

1. Use the university template. Yep. Check. I've got that one. I've known about that template and am using it. It's a bit cumbersome, but it's a lot easier than applying all those heading styles later. If you don't know how to apply styles, check the Help menu of your word processor. It's worth learning about it.
   
2. Develop a good backup strategy. I suppose my years as a network administrator have paid off for me. External hard drives are the way to go today. They're inexpensive and very portable. Each week (or after a particularly extensive work session), I back up my files to an external drive. Every two weeks or so, I back up to a second external hard drive which I have stored about 60 miles away. Admittedly, having a second house is an extreme back-up plan but when you live in Florida....
   When I worked out of state, I drove back with one external drive in my trunk and sent the other one via FedEx. A car accident - especially a fiery one, and I could have lost all my data. My friend called me "paranoid," but I was just being smart!
   Gmail, and the 2 GB of space they offer, wouldn't be a bad option for backups either. Read their privacy policy first to decide it will work for you. Mac users can leverage a gMail account using gDisk if they want. There's something similar for PC users, but I haven't tried it.
   
3. Craft a file naming scheme to distinguish different versions of the dissertation. I use dissertation.MM.DD.doc as my naming scheme. Each day I work, I save with that day's date. I should probably add two (or 4) digits for the year, but I'm not planning to go into 2007 for this project! Not only does this help me keep track of revisions, but I can also recover if I do some editing I later regret.