Newsreader

I have never tried the newsreader before, and find it a bit off-putting. I don't really keep up with a lot of blogs or online media, other than my NY Times account. I am old-fashioned enough to subscribe to an actual newspaper and read it every morning! But I set up an account and subscribed to a couple of general news feeds, such as Huff Post. And then I found a couple of museum blogs for the New-York Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society, and set up those subscriptions. I teach public history courses, so I thought those could be useful. It was easy enough to subscribe, but I'm not sure how much I will really use this tool. Time will tell, I guess. I cannot think offhand of how I could use it for teaching; perhaps in a public history course I could have students subscribe to a museum blog?

Productivity Tools

I explored Google Docs and Dropbox. I find Dropbox quite useful for work, as I can work on lectures and documents from home or at work. I have been using it a lot for preparing for my classes. I haven't used the sharing or collaboration features, however.

I have used the collaborative features (to an extent) with Google Drive and Google Sites. I had students develop exhibits in a local history course using Google Sites, but they (and I) found it clunky to use. I haven't tried it recently. Last semester I learned about Google Docs in a workshop on campus, and then used it for two of my course projects. For one course, I created a shared document  to which students could post the biographies they had researched and written. In this way we created a class "Biographical Dictionary" of Industrial America, which the students then had to read and discuss in class. I also created an instruction document. I was generally pleased with how this worked, and include a link: HIST 330 Industrial America Biographies.  For my research seminar I used Google Drive for a peer editing assignment. Students had to post their rough drafts and provide access (for comments) to their peer editors, who had to read and comment on the drafts. Again, this worked well, with only minor glitches.

In sum, I would use Google Drive again for course assignments, although I am not doing so this semester, as I do not have an appropriate assignment. I also will continue to use Dropbox, and may explore the collaborative features as I grow more comfortable with it. I could see this more as a tool  for collaborating with colleagues at other universities, for instance.

Blogs and Wikis

I have belatedly looked at this exercise, weeks after starting my blog. It helped to clarify some of the differences between blogs and wikis. I have found Blogger quite easy to use, and would be interested in maybe using it in a class in the future, if the logistics wouldn't be too awful.

I have experience using a Wiki from an NEH summer seminar I went to hosted by Bard Graduate School. They use Wiki.dot, so I got a bit of experience using that. I found it a little more confusing than the Blogger, but I imagine if I used it regularly, that would go away. Interestingly enough, a number of the professors there use Wikis to organize their courses and for student assignments and such. I thought it was pretty cool the way they did that, but the tech guy there pointed out that you would have to have strong tech support for both set-up and maintenance. So I am skeptical of its efficacy at Fredonia. Of course, Bard's is a very small, graduate student only program, and one with the $$ to hire amazing tech support!

Social Media

This one is a bit of a hard one for me. I have resisted joining Facebook for years (and continue to do so), and really don't have any interest in Twitter either. I found out when looking at the list of social media sites, however, that I do use some, such as Yelp. I am signed up for Linked In but don't really use it; it doesn't seem useful to me. I just joined because people I knew kept inviting me. But then I don't see why once I go to the site. I was intrigued by Fakebook, and may use that for a class in the future.

So it was easy to choose Pinterest here, especially because I had heard a speaker at a recent Digital Humanities conference suggest using it for a student project. I am teaching Material Culture this semester, and had decided that my students could use it to create a display (board, in correct terminology) related to the artifact that they are choosing to research. So I read up on it and joined Pinterest. At first I found it confusing. They ask you to "follow" 5 boards at the outset, and then they all show up somewhat randomly on your home screen. I was confused by that. But then I created my own board about places I'd like to travel to; it is a work in progress, as there are many many places I'd love to go to! I found that it is very easy to pin things, and you just write a brief caption and it's done. I pinned several photos of places I want to or plan to go to, and I also re-pinned one from another travel board, and added a comment to a pin about Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. I haven't yet explored whether there are ways to organize your boards, which I think there are.

In sum, I think this tool is fun, but a bit limited. If all you want to do is show pictures with short captions, it's great, and I think it will work well for the assignment I have planned for my students. But it doesn't allow for much textual analysis, and I don't know how much one can organize an "exhibit" on a board. I haven't found a way to do so, anyway. Here is a link to my pinterest board.

Citation Management

I have been using Zotero, off and on, for several years now. I looked at EndNote Web briefly, and it seems to be fairly similar in what it can do. The fact that I do not use it regularly for my own work suggests that I have not yet seen it to be that useful, for reasons I'll get back to later. I have found it most useful when I am teaching research methods courses to my history students.

The good: Many students really like it to collect the documentation on the sources they find. I like that I can create a group library and thereby keep track of their research progress (to an extent, anyway). I have done two courses that focused on local history, and we have created group libraries, arranged topically, of locally available sources on Chautauqua County history. Another professor in my department, working with one of the librarians, created a Zotero library of local history sources on campus, to which classes such as mine can add. Thus, the campus will have a database of local history sources. Finally, Zotero is relatively easy to use, and I love the option of being able to easily import Web pages, article links, etc.; many of these have a little icon that you can click on to automatically add it to your library. You can get a plug-in for Word that enables it to create notes and bibliographies for documents. I love that the library is both online and easily accessible at the bottom of your browser screen; I believe they have made it accessible on other browsers now, although it used to be just Firefox.

The bad: Zotero can be a bit clunky to use, and unless one uses it regularly, it is easy to forget the basics. The navigation isn't as intuitive as I'd like. One of the biggest shortcomings isn't really the fault of Zotero, but leads to problems when my students use it construct their notes and bibliography. The beauty of the program is one can just import the citation to one's document. But, as I tell my students, it is a computer and what gets put in is what will come out. So if you pull a citation from JStor and the title of the article is in all caps, that is how it will show up in the bibliography. And I will then mark it down and tell them they need to correct their citations! So I have to remind them constantly that they are responsible for cleaning up their citations. One issue that annoys me is that you cannot just "move" citations from library to library. Yes, you can move a citation, but it stays in the original spot and is just copied to the new library. So you now have it on your computer twice. And if you decide to just delete it from one of those, it deletes the citation entirely from all your libraries. So I find it difficult to organize well.

Bottom line: Despite its shortcomings, I find it most useful as a tool to assist my students when they are learning to collect, organize, and properly cite their sources. Because of its shortcomings, I do not find it particularly useful for collecting and organizing my own research sources. That said, I do find it useful as a place to collect articles and other materials that I encounter on the Internet. I can save these on Zotero and go back to check them out later. I will continue to use it sporadically for my own research, but I will also continue to use it regularly for my history research courses.

Here is a link to a group library my students made last semester in the history senior honors seminar on local history: HIST 499 Local History Zotero Library Fall 2012.

Presentation Tools

So I chose this category today since I was short on time and have already used Prezi many times. But I did investigate a couple of the other online presentation tools suggested here. SlideRocket is described as PowerPoint on steroids, and I looked at a couple of the presentations there, which did look pretty much like gussied up Power Points. I also checked out the Design Guide for Rockstars, which suggested that one could make a presentation that would look much more creative and less PowerPoint-esque, but also that it might take some time and talent to do so.

The other tool I looked at here was Glogster, which sounded intriguing as a potential venue for student presentations. The video seemed geared at K-12 teachers, however, which was less interesting to me. The problem I found with Glogster was that its site was confusing. I went to the Glogpedia at the EDU Glogster site in order to look at some examples, but found there that one had to have a paid license to view any of them. I could not find a way to see an example of a Glogster. On the regular Glogster site I could find examples, however, but they were rather different. Bottom line is, the concept of a digital poster is cool, but I would like to find more out about this before jumping in and opening an account, and this seems difficult from the website. Therefore, I probably will not pursue this one.

This brings me to Prezi, which I have been using for about a year and a half now. I like Prezi a lot, as I find it more dynamic than PowerPoint, and I have been converting my course PowerPoints to Prezis. I will admit that I am not the most adventurous or creative of Prezi users; my creativity tends to vary in direct proportion to the time I have to spend on the project. But I love how easily one can integrate videos, music, and images, and how easy it is to convert PowerPoints. I find Prezi frustrating at times; it changes quite frequently, which can be confusing. Just when you figure it out, they change it. But I will say that most of the changes have been for the better, and have made it easier to use. I have even given four workshops introducing Prezi on my campus.  I have also shown my students how to use it in a couple of classes, and some students have used it to create class presentations. So this is definitely an online presentation tool that I recommend enthusiastically. There is a bit of a learning curve; it takes some time and effort to learn it well, as with most of these Web 2.0 tools. I consider myself to be still in the learning mode, but am considering actually paying for the upgraded license so I can have the desktop version. Here is a link to a Prezi I created last semester for my course, Industrial America 1890-1920: 'Women and Progressive Reform".

week 1

After hearing the 7.5 habits, I would have to say that the one that is probably the most difficult for me is to view problems as challenges (#3). I tend to have a low tolerance for frustration, and the more frustrated I get, the stupider I tend to get. This, of course, is not good in most situations, but is particularly not a good trait when trying to learn new technology! So I am going to try to work on this. I did manage to learn Prezi, even if I still get frustrated a bit with it from time to time, so I know I can get through the learning curve for new technologies if sufficiently motivated. For some of them, I think I will be; for others, not so much.

As for the one that I find easiest, I guess I would say accepting responsibility for my learning (#2) (although perhaps blaming technology when I get frustrated is not a good example of that!). I like to learn new things of various kinds, whether it is learning about other societies and cultures (through both travel and reading) or learning new technologies to use in my teaching and research. I think that anyone who goes through the years of school required to get a Ph.D. is pretty much someone who accepts responsibility for learning.

Actually, in terms of hardest things, I would say that this blog will probably be one of the most difficult things for me to do. Not just the technology (with which I've already encountered frustrations, such as where do you find the "settings-basic" tab to change the privacy/permissions??), but with the very concept of blogging. I have never been one to keep a journal or diary. I do keep a travel journal on trips, but it isn't very reflective. So this kind of sharing will be rather difficult for me. But hey, I guess I have accomplished the first step anyway.