Zotero fans – here’s some great tips, even though they’re from 2008: 12 must know Zotero tips and techniques from The Ideophone. I still think that one of the best short introductions to Zotero is this guide from The Old Bailey
Posts Tagged ‘IT’
Great Zotero tips
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011Ha! I was right: singletasking IS the new multi-tasking
Monday, June 14th, 2010You may remember that I posted about the natty little program called Freedom that turns off your internet access for a time designated by you, so you can get on with your work? And you may remember that I have a thing about multi-tasking: I think it’s a myth, and a rather dangerous and antisocial one at that.
Well now all those themes come together in a nice article from the Monitor column of The Economist called Stay on Target. It’s about programs like Freedom that help you to ‘clear your screen and clear your mind’, and concentrate on singletasking. That of course is tautologous, because concentrating means just that – focusing on a single task. It is central to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow (that being in a ‘flow’ state is by definition one in which you are ‘lost’ in the thing you’re doing). So how ever did we come to think that multi-tasking was cool, socially acceptable, or even safe?
I have to confess that I got the link to the article via the Guardian’s tech-feed on Twitter which linked to this technology blog. But now I’ve read it, I’ll be turning on Freedom. Goodbye.
Freedom at last
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Freedom: does what it says on the tin
In just less than 4 minutes, I will turn on Freedom for the severalth time, a tiny application that I installed last week on the advice of a friend. All it does is turn off your computer’s internet access for a given number of minutes that you stipulate in a pop-up dialog box. When I first heard about it, I thought ‘What kind of slattern needs a program to tell them not to access the internet for a bit? Whatever happened to self-control?’
But then a few days ago, I gave it a whirl anyway, and it’s transformed my early morning working life. The magic figure for me is 90 minutes. 90 minutes in which every attempt to ‘just’ look this up, follow that link, check your email, respond to an incoming alert, nervously search for related articles etc. is thwarted, while you just get on in perfect peace with good old-fashioned, enjoyable work. And if you’re having a good day, you can say, OK another half hour and I’ll make myself a coffee, so you set it again, thus ensuring that your precious half-hour isn’t dissipated into a hundred pointless online excursions. Although you can use it for free, I am so grateful to its inventor, that I donated the suggested $10 after only a few days of experiencing the Freedom advertised on the tin.
That’s it. Goodbye for now -my time’s up. I’ve finally found web-discipline.
The future through the back door
Monday, February 15th, 2010
OK, I have found it, possibly the coolest thing ever to hit my corner of the internet. The Backdoor Broadcasting Company go around recording your event, and broadcasting it on the web when it happens, with an archive to listen to if you missed it.
It came my way via an ad for a forthcoming lecture by Andrew Bowie on philosophy and improvisation. He’s given the lecture elsewhere before, so if you can’t go, you can listen to the broadcast (Here it is: called Background Capabilities and Prereflexive Awareness).
There’s an elegant and beautifully reasonsed apologia for the audio medium on the impact page with which I wholeheartedly agree. Youtube has its moments, but moments are what they are. This kind of guerrilla radio captures the big thinking from the margins and distributes it from another centre. Not for everyone I know, but for me, this is what the web and digital techology are for.
InvisibleHand add-on for Firefox
Sunday, February 14th, 2010If you use Firefox and do internet shopping, Invisible Hand is a great add-on. It sits there quietly and unnoticed in your add-ons in Firefox, until you start looking at a product on the web that it has found cheaper somewhere else. Up comes a discreet yellow bar at the top of your screen telling you where to go to get it, and any other price offers, as in the screenshot below, where it turns out Asda have a better price on an academic text book than Amazon.
How I got attached to Thunderbird
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
We’ve all done it – you send an email saying “I’m attaching my essay/file/picture” or whatever, and then if you’re lucky, 30 seconds later, you realise that you’ve sent it without attaching it. If you’re unlucky, you wait 10 days for a response, then get all incensed at the person you wrote to, and say ‘Didn’t you see my file?’ then realise they never got it because you never attached it.
Everyone does it, no matter how intelligent or IT savvy they are. I do it regularly. It’s always struck me that since computers ask you if you’re sure about every other darned thing, why the hell couldn’t they ask you, before you send an email ‘Is there anything you want to attach to this email before you send it?‘. Spellcheck, signatures, virus checks, yes, but the most common error in emailing, no.
Until Thunderbird: in Thunderbird if you write the word ‘attach’ or ‘attaching’ or ‘attachment’ or ‘attached’ (and maybe a few more versions of ‘attach-’) up comes a little yellow window at the bottom which says ‘Found an attachment keyword’ and then an option to add the attachment or remind you later.
That’s one big step for mankind. Well done Thunderbird.
Thunderbird website: download it and free yourself from Micros**t
1984 comes to 2010 – schools, IT and BETT
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
BETT 2010 at Olympia
Spent the afternoon at BETT yesterday, a trade show for educational technology. One reason for going was to drop in on Andrew Holdsworth’s Percy Parker’s Flying Bathtub, just published by Scholastic, and very nice it looks and sounds too.
But most of BETT I found profoundly worrying. I don’t have figures, but it seemed to be predominantly men touting software packages and ‘solutions’ for schools. Every other stand seemed to be about protecting, preventing, surveillance, policing, managing, storing, and even ‘performance managing’. This program will automatically text all your truants and their parents; this fingerprinting device will register your child (“biometric multilesson registration and cashless catering” was one of the more 1984-ish captions), this will keep your children safe from unsuitable internet sites, this hardware will back up all your data and provide a network for your school. Online assessment, online registration, automatic this, multi-that.
With a very, very few exceptions, I had almost no sense of teaching, learning, teachers and pupils, intellectual curiosity, or any of the rich human interaction that goes on in learning. Instead, it seemed I was at a trade fair selling expensive ‘solutions’ that appeared to criminalize an entire generation of children, or treat them as a workforce that needed managing, assessing and controlling. An image began to emerge of a child tightly bound in a technological network of biometric data, they and their families summoned and communicated with by text, every online transaction prescribed or prevented, stored and tracked electronically by an emergent army of male IT personnel, every academic subject reduced to an onscreen interaction with predigested, generic content. Media-rich, yes, but piss-poor as human interaction.
I’m not usually prone to technological determinism, the idea that society is helpless in the face of the ‘power’ of technology to shape and control it, but I came away from BETT wondering whether we do all this stuff to kids because we can, not because we must. And in any case, there were plenty of technological determinists touting their wares at BETT: this software will help you build an online global learning community. Really? Anyone who’s tried to run an online forum knows that it’s people and people alone who build communities, all the software in the world can’t do that for you. Nobody buys a bassoon thinking it will make music for them, but people seem to fall over themselves to buy into technology that needs staff, time, expertise and commitment, not just a power supply.
My final rant? As I was walking around seeing all this stuff about protection, walled-gardens, security, safety and so-on, I had my barcoded badge scanned aggressively and without my permission by at least two staff on the stands, data-mugging in broad daylight.
