Research

In the past week both The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed have run stories about professors at Middlebury College taking a “stand against” Wikipedia. But this really doesn’t tell the story. In fact what Middlebury has done is tell students to not use Wikipedia as a primary source, and including such language on the syllabus. …..

In my spare time (yeah right what spare time, honestly as a means to procrastinate) I have been reading John Willinsky’s The Access Principle which you can get for free from MIT press. Willinsky argues for both the ethical and practical reasons we should move to open access journals. The key part for me is …..

I don’t know how long this has been available, but I was doing some researching via Project Muse today and noticed this: Let me zoom in: That’s right you can subscribe via RSS to a journal, and you will be sent updates when the new journal is issued. I tried this out on a few, …..

Michigan State’s BlogsforLearning points to this article at Inside Higher Ed, about the, frankly hideous, information literacy levels of some students. In the interest of fostering some information literacy here are some resources: Alan Liu’s policy statement on Wikipedia: Alan Liu (of Voice of the Shuttle) has long been concerned with questions of technology, knowledge, …..

The National Council of English Teachers, has a set of resources designed to encourage teaching students in a range of media literacies. Some of the findings are surprising, as they indicate using computers and multi-media classrooms, markedly increase students engagement with the material. Not that I am surprised by these findings but surprised that they …..

Dan Cohen is trying to recruit people to help with Zotero. (Zotero is the free citational manager which Dan promises will soon develop into a great deal more.) Specifically Zotero needs some help from librarians or other appropriate people on campus to become representatives for Zotero (help spread the word), and for some more tech …..

Having lost a hard drive earlier this year I always appreciate the reminders to back up files. Devon issued a tip on their blog about how easy it is to back up your Devon database. Although I back up my whole hard drive frequently, this back-up is super fast and allows me to export the …..

File this one under stupid but simple, wish I would of thought of this . . .except I’m not finished with the dissertation yet so . . . hint to recent PhDs wishing to publish their dissertation as a book: “ At the very least, do a search and replace of your document so it …..

Ran across this today via the Chronicle for Higher Ed. Textbook Revolution is a collection of online (read free) textbooks for students. Apparently started by a student who was frustrated at paying so much for his class textbooks (what a corporate racket the market is) he decided to take matters into his own hands. The …..

Okay not quite . . .but. . . many people have emailed asking what the Windows alternative to Devon is. My answer is: Nothing. I did however find this today (via Lifehacker), Evernote, might be your best choice. Fair warning, I haven’t tested this as I don’t have an Intel Mac, or quite frankly the …..