Zotero: an easy-to-use digital research tool
"Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote) - the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references - and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and - on many major research and library sites - find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi)."
(Dan Cohen & Sean Takats)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pearltrees: a place to store and collect you stuff
"Pearltrees lets you keep at hand the web pages you like, discover some new ones in your areas of interest and share them easily with your friends."
(Pearltrees)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Cross-platform project scheduling software: Gantt Project
"GanttProject is a cross-platform desktop tool for project scheduling and management. It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX, it is free and its code is opensource."
(Dmitry Barashev)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
A Portfolio is a Theoretical Act
"a portfolio is a theoretical act. By this I mean that every time you design, organise, or create in your teacher education program a template, a framework, or a model for a teaching portfolio, you are engaged in an act of theory. Your theory of teaching will determine a reasonable portfolio entry. What is declared worth documenting, worth reflecting on, what is deemed to be portfolio-worthy, is a theoretical act.""...it is important to keep in mind that the portfolio is a broad metaphor that comes alive as you begin to formulate the theoretical orientation to teaching that is most valuable to you."
(Lee Shulman pp.24-25)
Shulman, Lee (1998). 'Teacher Portfolios: A Theoretical Activity' in Lyons, Nona (1998) 'With Portfolio in Hand: Validating the New Teacher Professionalism', New York, USA: Teachers College Press.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
VUE: making sense of electronic content through integration
"As the availability of digital information continues to increase, there is a need for flexible tools that help faculty and students integrate electronic content into their teaching and learning. While numerous applications are available for locating digital information, few tools exist for selecting, organising and making sense of the information available to us. The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an information management application that provides an interactive, concept mapping interface to digital resources accessed via the web, from FEDORA-based digital repositories, ftp servers or local file systems. Using a simple set of tools and a basic visual grammar consisting of nodes and links, faculty and students may map relationships between digital content to capture and communicate concepts and ideas. The resulting content maps can then be shared with others. VUE leverages the cognitive benefits of concept mapping as an interface and information visualisation techniques to support the creation of rich resource-based, instructional or research-oriented presentations."
(Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
