Tag: collaboration

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Sharing Online

Banishing the Bibliography Blues

Does the prospect of organizing reference citations leave you suffering from headaches? Does compiling bibliographies for your papers give you the blues? Never fear, for there is a cure for what ails you: reference management software.

What is reference management software?

If you don’t use a reference management tool already, you will want to start as soon as you finish reading this post! These tools will make your life as a student much easier and cure those citation headaches and banish those bibliography blues. Basically reference management tools are software applications that are designed to help you write your papers with ease and style. They will help you to organize your references, format them in any style you desire (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago) and automatically generate in-text citations and bibliographies. A guaranteed time-saver!

Lots of (smart!) people use RefWorks or Endnote reference management software to organize their citations. As a UBC student, you can create your own profile and use RefWorks for free.  Check it out! Unfortunately RefWorks can be a bit cumbersome to use and Endnote is expensive to buy, but never fear there are many other useful options like Zotero. You may ask “why bother using Zotero?” Well, there are lots of great reasons:

  • Zotero is free! You don’t have to pay a cent for it.
  • It resides right on your Firefox browser and captures information from the Web.
  • The interface is designed with you – the Web surfer – in mind. You can surf the Web and save items at the same time.
  • Zotero allows you to tag, write notes and attach files to your items, drag and drop, mark up pdfs and web pages AND MORE….

The more you know about it, the more you’ll love using it.

What exactly is Zotero?

Zotero is an open source Firefox Add-on which can be easily installed on both your private computers and those in university labs. It enables users to collect, manage and cite research from all types of sources. The citations captured by Zotero can be books from Amazon, Google Books, and online library catalogs (e.g.WorldCat). It also captures papers from Google Scholar and online subscription databases (e.g. Web of Science or ABI/Inform). It can generate in-text citations and bibliographies automatically in wikis, blogs, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer.

To see what Zotero can do, check out these screencasts.

Don’t use Firefox as your browser?

No worries, there are other free reference management tools out there that work great with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer! Mendeley is a free application that has many of the same features as Zotero and features a downloadable desktop application so you can store and manage your references both online and off. You can also import your library from CiteULike directly into your online Mendeley library with ease.

There are also many other up and coming reference tools that are also worth checking out like Citavi and Qiqqa. You can see a comparison of available reference tools here.

So stop wasting time fretting over your bibliographies and let these great applications get busy and take care of them for you!

This post was originally created for the Digital Media Project, a joint project of UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and the Irving K Barber Learning Centre. It has been modified from its original form.

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Sharing Online

Map Your Thoughts!

Do you struggle with organizing your class notes or research papers? Does the thought of writing an outline make your palms sweat? Are you a visual or non-linear learner and want to see the big picture? Then mind mapping may be the answer!

What is Mind Mapping?

Mind mapping is a creative way of brainstorming and creating a visual picture of information in a manner that’s easy to digest. A mind map allows you to create a diagram of ideas that can be arranged to show relationships around a central key term. So what does a mind map look like?

FreeMind Map

Mind Mapping Software

Okay, so mind mapping looks cool, but you’re not sure if you can make one yourself? Never fear! There are some great mind mapping tools available on the internet that are free and easy-to-use. A good place to start for a newbie is with FreeMind. This downloadable, open source software allows you to create and save mind maps right on your computer. FreeMind software lets you create as many maps as you want and has many cool features. You can export your maps into multiple formats including PDF, JPEG and HTML and you can even insert hyperlinks into your maps! If you need some inspiration, check out

FreeMind’s Mind Map Gallery to see examples of maps others have made!

Maybe you’d rather create maps that you can save online and share or collaborate with your friends. Maybe you want to see what kind of interesting maps other people have made. No problem!

If you use Google Chrome to surf the web, check out the Connected Mind web app from the Chrome Web store. You can import maps from FreeMind, insert images and create super colourful maps online that you can save directly to your Google account! Don’t have a Google account? No worries, there are many other online mind mapping tools available online such as MindMeister and bubbl.us. Not all of these tools are free, but many of them offer free accounts with limited features.

Media Moment

Keep in mind when using online software from the U.S. that your information is being saved to an American server and is subject to U.S. privacy laws which differ from Canadian laws. Always remember this when saving personal information online.

NetworkEducation

  • Go to the bubbl.us site.
  • If you want to save your map, click ‘allow’. If not, click ‘deny’.
  • Now you can start making a map on this site without even registering!
  • Click on ‘Start Brainstorming’.
  • Click on ‘Start Here’. Choose a topic for your map and type it into the bubble (e.g. Living Beings) This is your parent node.
  • Click on the arrow pointing down from your parent node to create a child node and type a subtopic into the bubble (e.g. Plants)
  • Click on the arrow pointing down from your child node to create another child node and type in another subtopic (e.g. Grass).
  • Click on the arrow pointing next to your last child node to create a sibling node and type in another subtopic (e.g. Oaks).
  • Let’s try moving some of the nodes around. Click and drag one of your child nodes to the other side of the map. See how easy it is!

Map of Mind Mapping Software

Mind Mapping Tools

Links

Comparison Chart of Mind Mapping Software

Mind Mapping Software Blog

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Working

Evernote… A Crafty Note-Taking Tool

Taking notes is a daily event in the student life. Whether you’re taking notes in class, taking notes for course readings and assignments, or keeping track of things you need to get done throughout the semester – a note-taking tool is a necessity. For some students, the tried and true traditional method of pen and paper is good enough for getting the job done. However, if you want to go digital, Evernote is a really useful tool.

Evernote is a note-taking app that works on Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, etc. and allows you to sync between devices and the cloud. With the app you can create digital notebooks, setup checklists, capture images, upload images from your smartphone and digital camera, bookmark webpages, tag notes, tag bookmarks, and copy and paste online text/images into your notes.  It also recognizes text within images (using OCR) so that you can search the images and text at the same time. So if you still rather take notes with pen and paper, you can just take a low resolution photo of the notes (keeping the file small), upload it into one of your notebooks, and still be able to use the handy searching feature. Evernote also allows for sharing of notes and notebooks, and so it can be used as a collaboration tool. Keep reading though because there is some fine print that you should be aware in deciding if you want to use the app…

Evernote is ad supported, which means you can use it for free because a little ad at the bottom left corner of the window is how it gets its revenue. In the ad supported free account you get 60MB of upload space per month. If you want more space, you can pay $5/month or $45/year for the Premium option of 1GB of space. If you’re just taking text notes and not uploading many images, the 60MB/month is plenty of space for a semester’s worth of notes. However, if uploading images is really important for your note-taking purposes, then depending on the file size of your images, the 60MB is going to go fast, so you would probably need to pay for Premium space. The other important thing to mention is that the ad supported option only lets people who you share notebooks with view them. The premium option lets those you share notebooks with to view and edit them. Therefore, as a collaboration tool, Premium Evernote is a better option.

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Sharing Online

Google Docs: More than just documents

Yes, we all know Google is master of the search universe, but did you know some of the other cool stuff Google is developing?  One awesome collaborative tool for the digital student is Google Docs.

If you’ve used it before, skim down a couple sections for highlights of some less-used and new tools available in Google Docs.  But here’s some basic information if you need an overview…

The basics first

Google Docs is most aptly compared to a wiki, so go read that article first if you’re curious. Similarities include the ability to upload documents in several formats (such as MS Word, Powerpoint, and Excel), the ability to edit privacy settings, and the ability for any number of collaborators you may choose. Contrary to some beliefs, you do NOT have to have a Gmail account in order to use Google Docs – any email will do. If you don’t have an account yet, it’s easy to start one…

NetworkEducation for Beginners

  1. Go to docs.google.com
  2. Explore some of the different types of documents you can create on Docs by clicking on the icons for Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Drawing, or Forms. Documents works pretty much like MS Word, Spreadsheet works pretty much like MS Excel, and Presentation works pretty much like MS Powerpoint, which most people are more familiar with; so I’m not going to spend much time talking about those. But if you want some tutorials or directions on those, go here and watch some of the tutorial videos https://www.youtube.com/docs
  3. Click on Try Google Docs Now to try a live demo.  To start an account, click the Get Started button.  Fill in the required information: email, password, some demographic information.
  4. Go to your email and click on the verification link.
  5. Go back to docs.google.com and log in.
  6. You should see a screen like this — click to see a bigger version with some highlights: Google docs screenshot
  7. Choose Create New document, spreadsheet, or presentation. Create and save a couple practice files, click Share to invite your best friend to collaborate, and by now you’re ready to go on to the….
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Categories
Sharing Online

Wikis: Fast, free, and simple!

What exactly is a wiki?

Wikis are basically simple websites that do the coding for you and allow multiple editors. The word “wiki” is a Hawaiian word for “fast,” and they are indeed that! Since wikis use a simplified coding language, you don’t have to be a webmaster to create an online site – anyone can create a wiki, just as with blogs.

Probably the most famous use of a wiki tool is Wikipedia. It was created as a free, online, collaborative encyclopedia.  Any user can quickly and easily contribute to update the site content.  That’s right… you could update a Wikipedia article.

But unless you are an expert on Karmichael Hunt or the events of November 21, you are more likely to use wikis to collaborate on smaller-scale projects. Because they’re available online and editable by anyone who has the right permissions, they’re perfect for

  • group projects
  • taking class notes – easy way to get the notes from last week when you were, um, indisposed.
  • sharing thoughts
  • organizing events – everybody sign up for what you’re bringing to the party next weekend!
  • using all the great features of a website – hypertext linking, media sharing, easy page organization – without having to know any HTML coding.

There are lots of free wiki sites out there, and most are pretty easy to use. There are occasional issues with cutting and pasting from (or into) a program like MS Word, and sometimes the “back end” – where the magic takes place – does formatting things you don’t want it to do. If you’re using wikis simply for group collaboration and then will hand in a final project or paper in another format, you can copy and paste information from the wiki over to some other program, but sometimes the formatting will require a little correction. But for publishing your information online, 99% of the time, wikis are the fastest, cheapest and simplest way.

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