a midyear hands-on learning program for staff and students, brought to you by Murdoch University Library
In this hands-on learning programme a team from Murdoch Library helps you explore free online tools that can be used for teaching, learning, research and managing daily work. It runs from 23 June to 28 July 2009.
Each Friday information about two or three Things , plus exercises about each will appear on this blog.
You can complete all of this from home, or if you booked in you can attend workshops offered by the library.
When you see something on the web that you want to come back to, instead of saving it to the favourites on your web browser, you can save it to an online social bookmarking site . This can be accessed from any computer using any browser anywhere in the world.
The “book-marking” part of social book-marking is the online equivalent of the ‘favourites’ list that you manage from the browser on your own computer. The “social” part of social book-marking is the way you can share with others and search what they have saved.
You can label items you save in whichever way makes sense to you. This is called “tagging”. One website can have any number of tags.
With most social bookmarking sites, you can add a button to your browser toolbar so that you can save something to the site with just one click.
More information is in this Social Bookmarking in Plain English video from Commoncraft.
As well as a place to save and organise your favourite sites online , it is a place where you can discover new sites from people who like to save the same types of things as you do.
1. Set up an account at delicious.com
2. Save and tag four sites.
3. Search to find other bookmarked sites tagged with “mu14things2009″
1. Go to Delicious.com and sign up for an account.
Follow Step 2 of the sign up and add the Firefox extension to the toolbar.
2. Go to these sites and then use the “tag button ” in your browser toolbar to add a bookmark to your delicious account. Tag them with mu14things2009
3. Search to find other bookmarked sites tagged with “mu14things2009“
1. Manually bookmark a site
2. Start at everyone’s bookmarks for YouTube - Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams . Look to see who else has saved it, how they have tagged it and what else they have put under the same tags - follow the trail every which way.
3. Create a tag cloud and embed it in a post on your blog. This is in your settings menu. See the instructions in this tag rolls page .
4. Connotea and CiteULike are aimed at universities and scholarly knowledge. They are good if you are doing research or collaborative work and want to save items from journals, databases, save and tag pdfs. Have a look around at them and try them out.
See Also: Educause Seven things you should know about social bookmarking
UPDATE: 3 August 2009 . The online tool that made tag clouds that we talked about in the workshops was wordle.net. Have a go.
Zotero lets you use your web browser to create your own personal library of resources. Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, released free for the research community.
Zotero “senses” information about the article or page, like its title and author. It then automatically adds them to the saved record that you can also edit later.
You can then just drag and drop the reference saved by Zotero straight into any WordProcessor.
It is a Firefox add-on, so only works with Firefox.
You are not restricted to accessing your library of resources only from one computer. You can log in on the web to Zotero.org and get to your library - and if you like, you can then share your resources with other Zotero users.
When you are somewhere that can be captured by Zotero, a little icon appears in the address bar. You just click it and all the details are added. With one click you can capture the citation, and other information like links to the site. You can even ad a snapshot of the article that can be full text searched later.
This works for lots of fomats, not just text documents, so things like YouTube videos, multimedia, pdfs, and journal articles in databases. You can also add documents manually to your Zotero library.
You can import or export your references from Zotero to other citation managers like Endnote, Refworks and Bibtex.
This 3 minute screencast shows some of the major features. Zotero 1.5 Screencast video from Zotero.org.
Zotero is another way to save and organise your own references.
It has a free license, so it won’t expire and your data is yours as long as you need it.
Look at the video, download Zotero, have a play, and tell the world on your blog post!!
1. On your own computer, download Zotero v1.0 from Zotero.org. Follow the instructions on the screen and restart Firefox when instructed. (In the workshops, Zotero will be already on the computers ).
If you are successful , then when you open Firefox again, you will see the Zotero logo in the bottom right of your browswer.
2. Open the following web sites in your browser. When you see the Zotero icon in your address bar, click on it to save the items to your Zotero Library
3. Click on the Zotero icon at the bottom right of the browser and have a look at them.
3. Create a new post in your blog. In the Zotero window, select the title of each reference and drag and drop them into the post. Publish your post.
Follow the instructions on Zotero.org to:
See also: Educause: Seven things you should know about … Zotero or the library guide to Zotero from Emory Library
Thing 12 covers three free sites -YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare.net . You Tube is a media-sharing site for video, Flickr is for images and Slideshare is for slidesets like PowerPoint.
They are like online libraries - except that you don’t get fined if you don’t return your stuff on time. In fact you can use the content to watch the video, view the photographs and images and see the slide shows all for free. Like a library you will need to register if you want to make full use of things.
While these sites let you use their content you can also contribute your own images, movies and slide sets very easily.
There is a plethora of material available on these sites, some of it useful for research.
These three sites are also examples of how you can find information by using social elements like rating, tagging, subscribing, commenting and adding fans.
Material from them can be embedded into other sites, like your own blog.
The way a sharing site works is examined in the Online Photo Sharing in Plain English video from Commoncraft.
For Thing 12 we are going to show you a number of things. All these things have one thing in common. That is they are all different. Different from each other but most importantly different from text.
A word about text
Sure we all know what text is. You still see it all the time, in books, newspapers and magazines. Sometimes even cartoons have text in them. Sometimes we even fill up whole books with text and call them textbooks. The trouble with text is that you have to learn to read to really appreciate it. And to create text you might need to learn to spell (but that’s optional really).
Now how these media sharing sites are different from text is that they are primarily not text (now that should be a word).
So these tools provide a window to the world that is media that is not text.
These three tools can be both fun and - if used the right way- can teach you things and help others to learn things.
Suppose you were teaching counselling and psychotherapy to postgraduate psychology students and wanted to show or demonstrate some different types of counselling and also give it a historical flavour. This is where video really demonstrates that it is different from text.
You could go to YouTube and do a search for “counselling”. If this doesn’t get you there try counselling rogers gloria.
You would get a result list that contained the following in the first few hits. Note that the Related Videos panel on the right pulls together other relevant videos in this series. I always imagined that Carl Rogers would have a lot of long hair!!!!
CARL ROGERS & GLORIA COUNSELLING - Part 1
To complete Thing 12 please do one or more of the following;
5.1 YouTube
Go to YouTube and search for murdoch and desalination. You are likely to find a video of our Vice Chancellor .
You can copy the URL or embed code for this video.
Addng a link to the video URL will take you off to YouTube and show you the video.
Copying and pasting the embed code into your blog post will make the video play in your blog post. When you do this, make sure that you are using the HTML editor, not the visual editor.
Search for a video that either interests you or is on a topic of educational interest that you might find relevant to yourself or others. Use the instructions above, plus the demonstration in the “webcam conversation” to embed the video into a blog post.
5.2 Flickr
Flickr is a photo sharing site. It also allows uploads of videos under 90 seconds long.
You can poke around in Flickr without registering but its more fun to join up and join in.
1. Create an account
Go to Flickr
Select “Create Your Account”
If you are not already a member of Yahoo!, then select “Sign up” near the top of the screen. Enter the required data and select “Create my Account”
When you have successfully signed up, you will see a screen that asks “Ready to experience Flickr?”. You will be asked to verify your account by entering your password. Choose a Flickr Screen name and click Create New Account.
2. Upload photos
Select “Upload your first photos”
Click “Choose photos and videos”
You can then browse to the photos you would like to upload from your PC
Select the image (or images) you want and click open.
You can Add more if you want.
Choose whether you want the item to be private or public and then click Upload Photos and Videos.
Wait while the photos load.
Once it has finished uploading click on “add a description”
You can add a tag to all photos with “Batch Operations” and describe and tag individual photos. Separate tags with a space. You can join two words together (rabbithutch), add in an underscore (rabbit_hutch) or use quotes (”rabbit hutch”).
Click “Save” when you are done.
5.3 SlideShare
Go to Slidehare
Slideshare lets you do the following
“Upload and share your PowerPoint presentations and Word documents on SlideShare. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to make a webinar”
Use the search facility to try to find a slide show that teaches you something you need to know about.
With Slideshare you can do the follwing;
PLAY AROUND AND EXPLORE FLICKR
Try adding a note to your photo. This will appear when you move your mosue over the image. “Add Note” icon on top left of photo.
If you want more from Flickr there are a plethora of open free tools to use.Try Flickr Tool box for over 100 interesting tools to use with Flickr. Have a look at Flickr Search for Creative Commons
Want to see what happens when Creative Commons meets Photoshop? have a look a the Re-Picture Australia Flickr group.
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Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that provides licences allowing the creator of a work to free up the distribution of that work and to let people know how they can use it without having to seek permission, or risk infringing copyright.
Creative Commons licences are probably the most commonly used of the generic Open Content Licences that enable the easier and more widespread use of copyright protected materials through, for instance, Open Access journals, repositories, and so on.
You may remember from my mini copyright guide on this blog that as soon as you take a photograph, write a blog entry, write down or record a song, draw a diagram, etc. it’s automatically protected by copyright with “all rights reserved” . A CC licence specifies which of those rights the creator is prepared to share with other people: it says “some rights reserved” rather than all of them.
The exclusive ‘rights’ that an author (or other copyright owner) has in their work include copying, publication, performance, adaptation, and communicating online - these are activities that only the copyright owner can do with a work - unless they give someone else permission to do it (or unless the Copyright Act makes an exception such as Fair Dealing).
By using a CC licence the author isn’t giving up their copyright (though that can be done with a Public Domain licence), but they are saying that they only want to reserve some of their rights - maybe, the right to be attributed as the author and the right to commercialise the work. Under those conditions a user could copy and publish the work on a website, they could adapt or add to it, perform it, and so on. They would probably also be required to use a similar licence on any work based on the original.
For instance, the mini copyright guide is based on the Blog, Podcast, Vodcast and Wiki Copyright Guide for Australia which was published with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License. Seeing this licence meant I knew that, without seeking any further permission, I could adapt the blog guide to suit this programme so long as I attributed the original work, applied a similar licence to my work, and don’t use it for commercial purposes.
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When we use these tools we’re actually being both users and creators of copyright protected materials - if you want to include somebody else’s work - a photo for instance - in your blog you usually have to have their permission in some form, but if you find an image that’s already got a Creative Commons licence you know you can go ahead - and if you want to make your own photos, music and so on available for other people to work/play with, you can add a creative commons licence to your own materials.
Creative Commons licences are being used by musicians, photographers, Ridley Scott, ecologists and other scientists, universities, the government … even just ‘ordinary’ bloggers like the participants of this programme.
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1. There are millions of CC licensed image; these are just a few of the ways to find them:
2. Select and embed your chosen image
2.1 Search for your image
2.2 Embed the image
Here are some more sites where you can download CC (or equivalent) licensed works .
You may even want to share your own creations - maybe via the ABC’s Pool Project , which offers archival material as well as participants’ . Once you’ve uploaded something the conversation can continue through this and other similar projects.
Mashable offers more than 150 online video resources and tools for creation and collaboration
sitepoint has 30+ really good CC licenced media sites
The Internet Archive has great moving image and live music collections - but you will need to check the terms of use on specific items
5 minute Life Videopedia is a a site that makes its own ’some rights reserved’ terms of use - it hosts fab 5 minute videos about magic tricks, recipes, business, techy stuff, spirituality, sewing - anything someone wants to tell the world about… that someone could be you - remember ‘creative’ doesn’t necessarily mean arty-farty
In this morning’s session, I promised to post a couple of links. Here they are.
ETHERPAD
Etherpad is a useful “throwaway” site where you just create a document for sharing without needing to login or have a profile on the site - just log in and all start writing together.
GOOGLE DOCS IN UNIVERSITY TEACHING
Michael Wesch, from Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University used a Google Doc with his students to create a collaborative image of where they spend their time and what university life means to them. The resulting video, A Vision of Students Today is easy to watch, uses some innovative digital storytelling and raises issues worth thinking about.
USING WIKIS IN UNIVERSITY TEACHING
Richard Buckland from Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales has been using wikis in his classroom since 2000. In this video he gives 53 Useful Things you can do with wikis in large class teaching.
Please don’t get confused when we release four new webcam conversations this week.
Things 11 and 12 are for next week and Things 13 and 14 are for the week after.
Release! Uploaded to Flickr on February 12, 2008 by Destinys Agent
The last Thursday workshop - covering the last six Things - is on Thursday 23 July. If we released Things 13 and 14 on Friday 24 July, then they would not be released in time for this workshop…so we are releasing them a week earlier.
A wiki is a type of easily editable web site.
It can be used by just one person to store private information, or opened up so thousands of can create a site together.
Wikipedia is the most famous wiki - but they are used in many other ways too.
Does it mean that we are showing people how to create an online encyclopedia?
Only if you want to!!!!!
Wikis can be used by a group to plan an event, by students to collaborate to work on an assignment. Wikis are used to create procedure manuals or class handouts or keep a record of recipes.
You can embed videos and images and slideshows in them too.
How you can use a wiki:
Private or Public access? Can everyone see the wikis I create?
No, You decide how open or closed you want your wiki to be:
This short 4 minute video gives you a fun introduction to the art and value of wikis Commoncraft explanation of wikis in Plain English (Video - duration approx 4 minutes)
1. Set up a wiki using PBWorks
2. Post a link to your wiki from your blog
Decide what you want to use a wiki for! If you can’t think of anything, use it to list your five favourite holiday destinations.
We are using software called PBWorks. It takes about 2 minutes to set up your wiki and send a confirming email to your account. Once it is set up you can spend as much time as you like making it as simple or complex as the “wiki” requires.
We will use the workshop time to create your wiki.
HOW TO SET UP A PROFILE AND GET YOUR FIRST WIKI
3. The URL (web address) you set up is the one which will “for-ever more” stay with your wiki. So think this through carefully! Capital letters do not work.
4. Select the type of wiki you are setting up - fill in the forms. You can change access settings later - see below.
5. Open your email account in another browser. You will get a confirmation email.
6. Click on the link in the email to finalize the set up of your wiki:
7. Choose security settings and accept Terms of Service:
EDIT YOUR WIKI
Edit the front page of your wiki using the EDIT button. The editor is nearly WYSIWYG - and uses code similar to html in the background.
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Add images - use the links in the right panel of the wiki.
Insert one link to an external web site in your page. (This clip shows you how to do this in an older version of the wiki: Atomic Learning PBwiki - Screencast 1 in Part C Working with PBwiki).
Edit the front page and set up some other pages on your wiki.
Add information/pages/links to it.
Decide who you want to share your wiki with others in the class or anyone else!
Here’s how to find the “get a wiki” page from the front page of PBWorks:
Decide who can see the wiki you create. Your options are to make it visible to everyone, or just by invitation, and in the same way you can limit those who can edit your pages as you choose. Do this in the wiki by going to Settings > access controls security.
SCREENCAST video clips - these are a bit old in that PBwiki has had an upgrade and is now PBWorks with a few extra “bells and whistles” However these 2 minute screen casts from Richard Marchessault Creating a PBwiki site, accessible at the Atomic Learning PBwiki - Wiki workshop will still be useful for some people. It is screencast 3 in Part B - choosing and setting up a wiki. The other screencasts tell you about other features of wikis in general and of PBwiki in particular.
They are things like online documents, spreadsheets, calendars, surveys, and personalised web pages. We’re going to use the Google suite of these tools because you need a gmail account and you’ll already have that from Thing 2.
My personal favourite, as I said in the webcam interview, is Google maps - I use them to work out how to get somewhere and I can embed my own maps in blogs and wikis and other web pages. I’ve also seen Google maps of New Zealand downloaded to a mobile phone so the owner could find his way around while he was on holiday there.
Another personal favourite is iGoogle - I can create a personal page and pull onto it all the websites I use frequently so they are in the one the same spot.
You make up the page from little gadgets. We even have a library gadget that you can add to your own igoogle with one click. It lets you search library resources.
However, today we’re going to start with Google Docs.
They’re great for working collaboratively with other people to create and work on documents with other people. The docs are on the web so you don’t need access to intranets, shared drives etc. You can work with the person down the corridor or with a friend on the other side of the world. You don’t end up with different versions of the same document in your email inbox. And it’s not just text documents - there are also slide presentations, spreadsheets or surveys.
It’s all explained in this CommonCraft video, Google Docs in Plain English .
Create a Google document about anything you like - your next holiday, latest movie you saw, your pets, your garden, your hobbies - whatever you like. Or something to do with work or study if you like …
Invite someone to share it and ask them to edit it.
Write a post in your blog - what do you think of Google Docs? Would you use it? When would you use it?
4. Create your own iGoogle page.
Create your own iGoogle page - put the ‘you’ into Google. Read what Wikipedia has to say about it and watch this video.
Then go to http://www.google.com/ig, sign in and create your page. You can even add Murdoch Library’s Google Gadget!
Think about it … would you create your own iGoogle page? If yes, what would you put on it and what would you not put on it?
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‘Open access’ is an approach to knowledge that says it should flow freely: metaphorically and literally.
It’s an approach driven by consideration of increasing the Public Good as well as enhancing the impact of research.
Open Access journals, repositories, and collections publish and/or archive peer-reviewed full text scholarly works from all disciplines. They distribute these online using Open Content Licences such as Creative Commons (Thing 11) - free for anyone anywhere to access and use, whether to inform a community or in response to their own research.
Until very recently, much publicly funded research output has been available only through increasingly expensive subscription-based journal databases. The high cost of such subscriptions means access to such databases has been limited, mostly, to well-funded first-world institutions.
Now, however, more and more research institutions and funding agencies (including the ARC) either require or expect that publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public either in online Open Access journals or through institutional or disciplinary repositories.
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What we mean by “publishing” is changing. Web tools such as wikis, blogs, google docs and Creative Commons licences can enhance research communities’ ability to communicate and cooperate; rss feeds and Libx can enhance your ability to find new output; whilst Google Scholar can enhance the world’s ability to find your output.
The expansion of the internet means that publishing is no longer limited by the demands of physical printing and distribution – timely, free, online dissemination of research work to anyone who has an interest can become the norm with the development of web tools such as open source publishing software.
Whether you are general or academic staff, under- or post-grads, you will need to become aware of the principles behind Open Access, and how the principles affect your use of online materials as well as your own future publications.
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1. Have look at a specific OA journal, an OA database, and an OA repository.
2. Write a short post to your blog linking to an article you have found in the Public Library of Science .
1. Look at JASAL - the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature - a highly respected peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
2. Look at Murdoch University’s recently created Open Access research repository .
3. Add a link from an article in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) to your blog. PLOS is one of the best known collections of scientific and medical information, journals, and all sorts of other materials .
How to do this:
1. Go to the search page on PLOS
2. Search for a topic that interests you.
3. Click through to the full text of an article.
4. Copy the URL for the article’s page from the address bar. (You may need to use Select All to do this)
5. Start a new post in your blog.
6. Enter the text that you would like to link.
7. Select the text you would like to link.
8. Select the “add link” button.
9. Copy the URL to the “Link URL” box.
10. Select Insert.
Watch the brief videos by contributors and users of PLOS at http://www.plos.org/index.php. Comment in your blog on the differences OA may make to your current research or work - or the differences that it is already making.
PLOS has a list of Other Open Access Resources (have a look especially at SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition - “an alliance of academic and research libraries and organizations working to correct market dysfunctions in the scholarly publishing system”)
Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a free software program - used by JASAL amongst others - for the OA publication of peer reviewed journals.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. We know that lots of people at Murdoch use Google Scholar because they are used to doing a Google search and they like the journal articles they can find there.
When you are off-campus and do a search, sometimes you get to an article that the library pays for, but you are told that you have to log in to get it or that you have to pay.
The library has a way that you can set up Google Scholar so that you can see in the search results whether the library has a subscription to something that you find. You can then click straight through to it.
Of course, you can’t search all the articles that the library pays for this way, and it’s still a very good idea to use the Library Portal and Databases.
It makes a tool that a lot of people use much more useful.
Add Murdoch Library to Google Scholar’s settings.
