Surviving Google Reader

Posted on September 25, 2011 Written by

I don’t know about you, but I had long found keeping track of RSS feeds overwhelming. I managed to get a couple of dozen into Google Reader, and it soon became very difficult to manage. I tried a variety of tools, such as incorporating it into my Thunderbird email client, but that only made it worse — MORE email? No thanks.

I recently came across a great tool, if you happen to be an iPad user. It is an app called the “Early Edition“. Essentially, it takes all of the posts from your Google Reader account, and creates an easy to read daily newspaper for you. I now have about a hundred sites in my Google Reader account, and that serves up about 12 – 15 pages a day of reading. Most you can just scan over, but you can quickly find ones worth delving into. Better yet, the app allows you to post directly to Twitter, send it to Delicious, or add it to Read It Later to well, read later :-)

Here’s a sample screenshot of what it looks like:

I don’t want to sound like an ad for this company (full disclosure, I could only wish to have been smart enough to get financially involved with these guys), but it has really made my personal information management significantly easier. Any one else here have a favourite tool for keeping the info deluge at bay?

Filed Under: Technology, Thoughts Tagged:

Transitioning Journals to Open

Posted on September 25, 2011 Written by

I spent last week at the Conference of Open Access Scholarly Publishers in Tallinn, Estonia, and giving a presentation at the pre-conference Knowledge Exchange workshop. The workshop and conference brought together people from around the world to discuss the sustainability of scholarly journals that publish their content without any subscription fees (aka “open access“). And, of course, open access content is a key component of open educational resources and openness in general.

The workshop was of particular interest to me, as it concerned helping journals transition from the subscription model to the open access model. I work with these kinds of journals regularly, and this workshop was a great opportunity to share experiences. Participants came from a variety of perspectives, including libraries, journals, publishers, and software developers. We explored a number of ways to assist these transitioning journals and provided some possible next steps, such as creating a transition toolkit and developing a set of measurements from a selected group of transitional journals to demonstrate the significantly increased readership that openness can bring. I’m looking forward to participating in this ongoing work with the Knowledge Exchange group.

As we are all currently students at the U of R, we have access to a wide variety of electronic journal subscriptions. Once we graduate, however, those are all ended. Is anyone concerned that we are being trained to be “master-level” researchers, but once we graduate, we will no longer have access to the main tools of doing expert research (i.e., most scholarly journal articles)? Because I work for SFU, I will continue to have access, but I couldn’t imagine being an effect practitioner once those resources dry up. Are any of you concerned about this issue? Have you run into problems in the past of trying to gather reliable evidence to solve a problem at work, and been unable to access the necessary research (without paying a bundle)?

Filed Under: Thoughts Tagged: , ,

EC&I831: First Impressions, Online Presence

Posted on September 16, 2011 Written by

We had our first EC&I 831 class on Tuesday night, and I have to say that I was thoroughly impressed. Everyone seems super enthusiastic, so I’m confident its going to be a good experience.

In this post I wanted to briefly comment on the technology that we are using. I’ve done many, many “distance education” classes in my 25 plus years of post-secondary education, but this is the first time I’ve ever had a class using synchronous tools. In EC&I 831, we are using Blackboard Collaborate, which is essentially video conferencing software with screensharing tools, and have a weekly class meeting time. This is such a huge improvement over my past experiences, which involved getting a reading package in the mail and working independently (with telephone access to a tutor). I have found these experiences quite isolating and not much value beyond what I already do to education myself independently.

One of the most influential concepts in remote learning is Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s (2000) Community of Inquiry Model, which uncovered the critical importance of “presence” — cognitive presence (critical ideas), student presence (our interactions as participants), and teacher presence (the visibility and participation of the instructor). I understood this theoretically, but this class, I think, is really demonstrating this in practice. Have others used these kinds of tools for post-secondary education before? Did you find that “presence” was an important factor in your learning?

Filed Under: Thoughts

Starting with EC&I 831: Social Media and Open Education

Posted on September 14, 2011 Written by

I’ve just started taking EC&I831: Social Media and Open Education with Dr. Alec Couros at the University of Regina. Take a look at the outline, and you’ll get a sense of what a great course this is going to be. In fact, its a MOOC, so why not join us! One of the requirements for the course is for all of us to blog, so I thought I’d use this emerging space as my venue. Our first assignment is to introduce ourselves, so here goes…

My name is Kevin, and I live in Regina with my partner Barbara and our two sons, Calum and James. We have a two cats and one poorly-trained but very sweet labrador. You can see some pictures of us if you click on the Photos link at the top of this page.

This is my seventh course in the Adult Education program at the U of R, and my interests are in the areas of social learning, knowledge management, staff development & training, and openness (open source, open access, open learning, open education, open leadership, etc., etc.). I’m also a professional librarian by trade, so I’m always applying this stuff to libraries, whether public, academic, or special.

I am currently working for the Simon Fraser University Library as the Coordinator for Community Services and Learning for its two major open source software projects, the Public Knowledge Project and reSearcher. I’ve been working on these projects since 2003, and doing it remotely since 2006. As part of my job, I have the good fortune to be presenting at some great conferences this semester (see Presentations), which will be taking me to Tallinn (Estonia), Berlin (Germany), Vancouver (BC), and Park City (Utah). I’ll post my presentation slides here once I’ve given the talks. Having this course online means that I can continue my studies while still getting to participate in these great events (despite the timezone changes in Europe, which will put me online at about 4 in the morning).

I’ve been working with educational technologies of one kind or another for about 15 years. My first tech job was in the Systems department of the Vancouver Public Library, where I helped to build their first intranet — which consisted of transforming a ton of Wordperfect documents (policy manuals, etc.) into HTML and posting them online. I shudder at the memory of how ugly of an interface I built :-P

My first job after completing my master of library and information studies was as the distance education librarian at the University of Saskatchewan. In that position I was able to learn a lot about the needs of remote students and the amazing possibilities of what technology can do — and a deep appreciation for what innovators had already been experimenting with for years (e.g., satellite tv broadcasts, etc.).

I am really looking forward to learning more about all of the topics covered in this course, and having the opportunity to learn from everyone involved. As my understanding of adult learning theory develops, I’m increasingly frustrated by the out-dated methods so commonly used in Canadian universities for distance education, and I’m pleased to be in a class that is really doing things differently! I think all of us will come away with some concepts, tools, and ideas to help us shake things up.

Filed Under: Thoughts