Eportfolio Journeys

Come on Carol. I dare you!

2007-10-10T20:56:00.001-04:00

FeedBlitz is fixed (I hope)

2007-04-18T10:24:00.000-04:00

When I moved my blog to my new domain, I forgot to update FeedBlitz. I think that it is fixed now.

Moving my domain

2007-01-09T22:33:00.000-05:00

I've decided to start using a different domain. Once I'm sure all the kinks are worked out, I'll switch email addresses, too. For now, this post is just a placeholder to explain all the excess posts in your aggregator.

An EndNote Teaser

2006-05-24T20:31:00.000-04:00

This summer, I'm teaching as an adjunct. The class is the first in a fully online Master's degree. At the end of their program of study, these folks will be required to complete a capstone project. This class seems like the perfect time to introduce the students to EndNote. At their university, EndNote is available for $50 - worth every penny. I made this teaser movie to post on the course web site. This one is posted on YouTube. I have to figure out how to improve the quality. Until I do, I'll post the original. I hope it catches their attention!

Carbonmade - Portfolio tool

2006-05-12T21:15:00.000-04:00

Today's blogs had another treat in store for me. This one is from Alan Levine. He points to Carbonmade, a free tool to build online portfolios. CogDog points to a link with icons for presentations. This looks like fun!

iSquint - Cool, free, and entertaining

2006-05-12T20:49:00.000-04:00

By way of Trey Martindale, iSquint is a cool free Mac utility to convert videos to iPod format. I gave it a quick test and it seemed to work well. As a bonus, the developer added some amusing dialog boxes and tool tips, too.

What's it like to be done?

2006-05-09T18:18:00.000-04:00

A friend sent me a note this morning asking, "What's it like to be done?" So, I told him that someone had assigned a book for me to read for a workshop I'm attending in two weeks. I've got to start a literature review for a grant application. I'm completing paperwork for an online class I'll be teaching this summer. (Okay, I'm pretty excited about that one) I need to turn the dissertation into a publication or two or three soon. I have to find a job. This feels strangely familiar.

A couple of weeks ago I sent the paper copies to the bindery. They should be done in two or three weeks. Today, I shipped the master to have the DVD duplicated. If all goes as planned, it should look like this.

Saturday Morning, May 6, 2006

2006-05-06T10:30:00.000-04:00

Scads of pre-made and customizable game boards

2006-04-03T09:40:00.000-04:00

Today, Pete Mackay of The Teacher List, sent a link to a variety of game board templates. Some are ready to go and others are customizable templates. It seems these folks thought of everything. The question cards are designed to fit Avery business cards available from your favorite office supply store. They've posted instructions on how to format the games. They've even included a tutorial! Many of the pre-made game boards are available in both Word and PDF formats.

This site is worth bookmarking and sharing with teacher friends!

Friday Morning at FETC

2006-03-24T08:49:00.000-05:00

I have 10 happy, smiling, but sleepy, people here with me. They're anxious to try blogging on their own. I'm going to suggest they start with Edublogs.org.

Blogging at FETC

2006-03-23T16:49:00.000-05:00

I've got a half-a-room of people at FETC. They are less than thrilled about the cost of the (mediocre) food and the outrageous parking. They are teachers and don't get paid enough for this. But they're here any way, and they're smiling. They're even laughing - and not at me.

Today's new tool is FeedBlitz

2006-03-18T21:27:00.000-05:00

I just learned about Feedblitz, a handy little tool that allows those who don't read RSS to subscribe to a blog via email. It's so simple to set up, too! Copy a snippet of HTML code from their website and add it to your blog template. It's all done - in just a few minutes. You can see the results in the navigation bar on this blog.

Bubbleshare Refresher

2006-03-17T22:13:00.000-05:00

For now, I'm splitting my attention between preparing for my dissertation defense and two presentations at FETC. I wanted to make a Bubbleshare photo album to share in one or both FETC presentations and thought I should catch a quick refresher. I decided to combine that with one of my more recent dissertation efforts. The following is the result.

This album is powered by
BubbleShare - Add to my blog

Odeo looks pretty coolio

2006-03-16T04:00:00.000-05:00

The dissertation is turned over to the committee and I should have time to play with more cool tools from this point forward. Tonight - actually, this morning - Odeo is what caught my attention. Notice the send me a voice message at the top of the sidebar. You can make a voice recording to send to me. How neat is that?

Bubbleshare - redux

2005-12-29T23:00:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

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!?!

2005-12-08T02:08:00.000-05:00

What I did today:

Tried to make Adobe Acrobat work convert Word document to PDF with bookmarks.
Failed
Spent an hour or more on Adobe's tech support website looking for the solution to my problem.
Failed, but was motivated to update some software.
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.
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.
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!)
Installed Acrobat on PC.
Moved all of my Mac files to the PC.
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

2005-12-01T20:27:00.000-05:00

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.

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.
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.
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.

A Structured Abstract Makes Sense to Me

2005-11-24T23:07:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-18T21:23:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-18T07:39:00.000-05:00

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!

2005-11-14T20:59:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-13T22:39:00.000-05:00

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:

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?
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.
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.
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

2005-11-05T11:34:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-04T11:54:00.000-05:00

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.