Kathy Franz (Duke Chemistry) expects her students to gather resources from the chemistry literature, and share them in her course. She has tried some social bookmarking tools, but some have difficulty finding bibliographic data from her chemistry journals. She is now trying Zotero. Zotero is an extension on Firefox that helps you collect, manage and cite your research sources from your web browser. The latest version allows you to sync and back up Zotero libraries, and create public or private groups to share references.

Jonathan Mattingly (Duke Math) enthusiastically uses Zotero to collect bibliographic data, and format citations for his publications. He uses the group feature to share papers with his students, and to add to their reading lists as he finds references. He’s also experimenting with sharing a Zotero library with the Math department, to benefit students.

Features:

• Participants in a group can get an RSS feed to be notified when new documents are added to the library.
• For PDFs already stored on your computer, Zotero searches the internet for trusted bibliographic information, so you do not have type or copy-paste bibliographic information.
• Zotero learns how to resolve URLs to restricted sources.
• Zotero can output references in many different styles.
• Zotero can save searches across your saved references, so a saved search becomes like a continuously updating folder.
• Zotero is open-source, so it is continuously improving and anyone can add new features.

Want more?

• Watch the video to see how Zotero works, then download and try it.
• See some of Dr. Mattingly’s papers listed on Zotero to see the data Zotero saves for each source.
• Read more about it on the library hacks blog, and our blog (Zotero is a reason to use Firefox)

For keeping track of citations and managing your references, there are other options

CiteULike is also popular among researchers for managing and discovering scholarly references, and can provide sharing either publically or with devined groups. Unlike Zotero, CiteULike will work with any browser.

If you already have a computer full of PDFs, you might want to try Mendeley, It is both academic desktop software for managing & sharing research papers, and a website where you can back up and manage your research papers online, discover research trends, and connect to other researchers. Library Hacks explains the difference between Mendeley and Zotero.

Connotea is another online reference management system for researchers, put out by the Nature publishing group.

Duke has licensed EndNote and RefWorks, two commercial bilbliographic tools. Compare them with Zotero.

Because each tool handles references differently, evaluate them for your specific needs. Try each of them as you search for scholarly references in your field, to see how they handle your journals articles, and meet your needs for sharing.

Do you find it is tedious to read a large number of discussion threads, needing multiple clicks to read each one, reply, and read more?  Let us introduce you to an efficient way to save you from clicking, clicking, clicking…

The “Collect” feature within the discussion board places forum posts and replies into a single “flat” page view that only requires a little scrolling to read all.

To use “Collect” to view ALL posts and replies in a forum:

• Choose “Select All” from the drop-down control and then click the “Go” button.
• Click on the “Collect” button.

To use “Collect” to view selected set of threads in a forum:

• Place a check in the box next to each posting or a set of thread (using Expend or Collapse to see or hide all replies)
• Click on the “Collect” button

You can filter, and sort threads by author’s name (choosing to view only one or more author’s posts), date, subject, order, and overall rating.

Watch a video demo recorded by Neal Caidin using Jing

To learn more, see our help page for the Blackboard Discussion Board and visit the Blackboard support website. If you would like more help with Blackboard, request an office visit and we will come to you.

Meet with other  Duke faculty and talk about ideas for using cell phones (or any small, mobile devices) in teaching, both in and outside the classroom.

At a previous meeting, participants discussed using these devices in class to engage students and foster interaction.  Owen Astrachan demonstrated how he used Poll Everywhere with his class of 344 students.  Poll Everywhere allows students to use their own devices as personal response systems, to give answers electronically in class.

Other participants discussed using applications that provide information relevant to the course, like Epocrates for accessing drug information, Labs 360 as a medical laboratory guide, or other applications for medical students.  Other examples might be using the mobile version of the Wall Street Journal in a business class,  flash cards for organic chemistry reactions, or spreadsheet applications for laboratories.

We discussed how instructors could incorporate the social networking and connectedness of applications like Smule’s Ocarina to engage students, and how Twitter could be used to build a community of students in an educational program.

Join us:

• Register for our next discussion at 10 am on October 13.
• E-mail Andrea Novicki to suggest topics.

Julie Reynolds, in Duke’s Biology Department, was recently showcased on the Techsmith’s education blog for her innovative use of Jing, a program that captures images and video of your computer screen.

Dr. Reynolds uses Jing to comment on her students’ writing, and to have students comment on each others’ writing projects.  Dr. Reynolds pointed out that when it’s impossible to schedule face-to-face conferences, she can talk about students’ writing rather than simply to write comments in the margins.  Jing allows her to record highlighted passages for students to see while she talks about them. Her students also use Jing to comment on each others papers.

Read a fuller description on Techsmith’s blog.

See examples of Dr. Reynolds’ review and student peer review.

A frequent question that comes up from faculty, particularly after the recent May CIT workshop series, is how to decide which tool to use for activities in a course – blogs, wikis, or discussion boards.  The tools are similar in some ways, allowing students to post text and other materials, but do operate in ways that make them more useful for some course activities than others.

Most everyone is familiar with discussion boards, which have been used widely on the Web and as a tool in Blackboard for several years.  Discussion boards are used to create a “thread” or “topic” where participants in the board can post replies or start threads on new topics.

Most commonly, discussion boards are used in courses as a supplement to in-class activities.  An instructor might ask the students to post comments on a reading and use those discussion board posts as a starting point for “in person” class debate.  Faculty might also use discussion boards for peer review – students post their work and peers in the course can “reply” to their thread, offering their suggestions and comments.

Blogs are relatively new when compared to discussion boards.  Blogs or “web logs” originally emerged as a way on the Web for individuals or groups to post a kind of ongoing journal.  So, blogs, unlike discussion boards, are more focused on a chronology of information, displaying the most current “posts” first.

Faculty typically use blogs to have students make a record of ongoing research in a course.  For example, an instructor might have students pulling original research materials and reporting on what they find in a blog.  The most current posts are displayed first, allowing the class to add comments to posts or discuss in class the latest material.  Faculty also use blogs as an ongoing course journal for themselves to follow up class discussions with summaries of material or to answer followup questions after class sessions.  In some courses, blogs are used by students for personal journals to reflect on assistantships or research work in the community.

Blackboard includes a blog tool or faculty can use non-Duke services such as WordPress or Blogger for public course blogs.

While discussion boards present material thematically and blogs show material chronologically, wikis show student work with any structure you choose.  A wiki is a collaborative web space where authors can write web pages together.  A wiki starts out with a blank “home” page and subpages can be created and linked to each other.

Wikis are typically used by faculty to have students assembling an online resource, such as a textbook or series of “white papers” on a topic.  Students can add comments to wiki pages, but wikis also include the ability to show a history of how and when pages were changed and by which author.

There is a wiki tool in Blackboard and faculty can use DukeWiki to create pages visible to the public that are edited by Duke authors.  If you are collaborating with non-Duke authors, you can sign up with services such as PBWorks and WikiSpaces to create your own wiki.

If you would like more information on options for using blogs and wikis in your course or if you would like to discuss approaches to using other tools in your courses, contact the CIT to speak with a consultant.

At Duke,  Blackboard will be upgraded from version 6.3 to version 8, to ensure support from Blackboard Inc. for our system.  While this upgrade is taking place, Blackboard will be unavailable for three days, from May 7, 2009 at 6 p.m. through May 10, 2009 at 6 p.m.

How will this upgrade affect students?  Depending on how an instructor uses Blackboard, students may not notice a difference. The major changes are in the grade center, which has been completely redesigned from the instructor view.  Other changes include additional features in the discussion board.

Students who tested the new version of Blackboard were unconcerned about the upgrade.  Here’s what they said:

The new display isn’t very different from the original user interface.  Other than the comments, everything else looks basically the same, so I didn’t have any trouble adjusting.

It’s not that complicated. Anyone who is familiar with version 6 will be fine with the new version.

I find the interface pretty intuitive to use.

(more…)

At 4:05, when ENV 186S/PubPol 187 is scheduled to end, students enthusiastically continue their discussion, not noticing the time.  Students all contribute, and learn from each other’s experience.

Dr. Rafe Sagarin enthusiastically described how he designed his first undergraduate course at Duke, “From Water to Washington: Marine Science and Policy.” This capstone course serves students with a diversity of backgrounds and majors; this diversity has been transformed from a challenge to a benefit. Dr. Sagarin adapted a method used for professional meetings with diverse participants, called Open Space Technology, in which the participants direct the agenda.

How?  On the first day of class, he gave the students large sticky notes to answer the following three questions: 1) what are you excited about in this course?  2) what do you want to learn about? and 3) what can you teach the class about?  He organized the notes into themes on the board, and his course outline emerged.  The general plan is that students teach other students what they want to know.  In places where the answers to questions 2 and 3 did not overlap, he filled in gaps with lectures.

The course is organized on the wiki within Blackboard.  Each person in the class facilitates a class period.  This student creates a new wiki page, with a description and a link to a selected article.  All of the students are required to read the article, and to contribute a paper, website or YouTube video with a brief explanation that relates to the topic on the wiki page.  Then, for each class meeting, almost every student has something to say. Although students are only required to read the assigned article, they often read each other’s contributions and make connections in class.

Dr. Sagarin says the technology has allowed him to get all of the students involved in the course in a way that was not possible previously.  The wiki offers accountability – he can tell instantly who has contributed.  He finds there are not many technical difficulties; only one student can edit at a time, and sometimes the student-contributed links do not work as they should.

In this course, both students and the instructor are learning enthusiastically.  Dr. Sagarin observed that students are much better presenters than when he was a student.  His students are poised, clear, polished and skilled at leading discussions and soliciting contributions, and he has learned from them.  He points out that the student contributions bring a much wider scope of work into the discussion than he would ever be able to.  It’s a great example of successful use of “the wisdom of crowds,” also famously leveraged by Michael Wesch, who points out that collectively, students bring a tremendous amount of knowledge to the classroom and that it should be used.  Dr. Sagarin is proud of what his students bring to his classroom and what he has learned from them.

Resources

Using the wiki in Blackboard

Using blogs and wikis in the classroom

How to organize your course with a wiki

Grading student contributions (parts 1 and 2)

I’ve just returned from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Research in Information Technology retreat at which project leaders are sharing information about open source projects in higher education and in arts groups and museums (http://rit.mellon.org/2009-rit-sc-program-retreat).  Open source tools (i.e., no purchase or license fees) may be of increasing interest in the current economic environment. I wonder whether these specific tools might be of interest to faculty and students at Duke. Several products might be good extensions to the Duke Digital Initiative because of their emphasis on producing, managing and analyzing multimedia resources. Other projects or tools could be extensions of the library’s work, as the library becomes not only a source of content, but a source of consultation on working with that content in new ways to further research.

Sophie – http://www.sophieproject.org/

Sophie is a multimedia authoring tool: “software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment.” People who have used it, including high school students, describe Sophie as very easy to use. Sophie is currently being rewritten in Java, and with emphasis on collaboration tools. The project’s website provides illustrations of how Sophie is being used. For example, Sol Gaitan of the Dalton School in New York developed a multimedia book for her AP Spanish students so that they could explore the direct influence of particular flamenco music styles on Lorca’s poetry. Gaitan presents both the songs and the poems they inspired, and annotates the poems from pages 11 to 43; with the students expected to follow her lead by annotating the poems in the remainder of the book. Take a look: http://www.sophieproject.org/demobooks

VUE – http://vue.tufts.edu/

VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. VUE lets you look for relationships across images, define relationships, compare images, etc. As such, it is a research tool as well as a presentation tool. The VUE website has a short video (http://vue.tufts.edu/screencast/QT_hiRes.cfm) that gives an overview of its functions and how it can be used.

Zotero – http://www.zotero.org/

Zotera is free, easy-to-use Firefox extensions to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Some of us are familiar with Zotero as a citation management tool. The developers as well as other project leaders at the RIT meeting see Zotero as having additional functionality through its connections with other tools. For example, the planned redesign of the Sakai course management system may have ways for instructors to upload lists of their publications, and then, via Zotero, find other scholars with whom they might want to connect.

eComma – http://ecomma.cwrl.utexas.edu/e392k/

The eCommentary Machine web application (“eComma”) will enable groups of students, scholars, or general readers to build collaborative commentaries on a text and to search, display, and share those commentaries online.

Sakai 3- http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/DOC/Sakai+3.0

A completely re-architected version of Sakai is planned for summer of 2010. This version will move away from the cookie-cutter view of course sites and instead connect with 3^rd party tools (such as WordPress) and utilize gadgets and widgets that allow a site to look more like a Google personal homepage. The idea is to reflect the look and feel of tools that are already popular. You can see a demo of creating a Sakai 3 site here: http://www.sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-home/page/89473b2c-31dd-4261-9823-c31a79e55532

Participants at the RIT meeting also talked about people “curating their own arts experiences,” a reflection of growing expectation for web 2.0 type functionality. As an example, someone mentioned Sonic Living, (http://sonicliving.com/) which is not an open source product, but is a relevant example. It scans your hard drive, looks at your iTunes and then suggests live music in your area that matches the interests it found. It also lets you know what concerts your friends are attending. The arts and museum community is looking for ways to get information about their organizations, performances, etc. into the workflows people already have rather than expecting them to come to a website to find information about upcoming events.

Some ideas for using blogs and wikis in teaching college science, from a session I moderated with Brian Switek (a science blogger and ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University) on Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond at ScienceOnline09.  These ideas were generated and discussed by the session participants:

• Use a blog to post notes from guest speakers, librarians, or add resources from your lecture
• Require students to post to a course blog and comment on each others posts
• Post supplemental material for the course (links to multimedia and more information)
• Use a wiki to organize course material
• Use a wiki for student to student communication (for collaborative projects)
• Connect class material to the world by connecting to relevant headlines and news stories
• Construct an assignment where students are required to find relevant headlines and post, connect to the course material and create a concept map within a course wiki
• Students can blog course notes, after they have edited and reviewed the material (example and discussion by Lou FCD, who participated in this discussion)
• Students can use their term papers as blog posts
• Students blog during a field trip, perhaps with video; this increases student focus on the trip as they know they must blog, and can see posts made by other students (example from Duke’s Marine Conservation Biology field trip).  The blog may be mined in the future for data on changes over time.
• Build up a resource for field trips that revisit sites by adding notes to a wiki
• Use blogs with relevant content as a resource for exploring a subject
• Use a blog to run course discussions as a supplement for in class discussions, to encourage all students to participate
• Use a blog for group project to keep track of what worked during the project
• Use a blog or wiki to share links, possibly making it competitive (who can find the best links)
• Create a space on the web to discuss controversial course topics
• Connect students from different universities
• Have students read and summarize papers in a blog, perhaps contribute to ResearchBlogging.org
• Keep a research notebook or field journal online
• Have students use a blog to create a website, like an online science fair project

One student who was homeschooled and found blogs useful for exploring topics of interest to him pointed out that it can be difficult to stay focused on the web.  He shared some tips:  monitor yourself to make sure you are on task, and take frequent breaks to refocus (take a walk, eat some fruit).

One of the participants who uses a blog to post his course notes, wrote about his own ideas from the session, in his blog, Crowded head, cozy bed.

If you are at Duke, call us at the Center for Instructional Technology for ideas and help incorporating any of these ideas in your course.

Update:

Kevin Zelnio participated in this session and wrote about it in his blog, Deep Sea News .

Mason Posner teaches anatomy and physiology and marine biology, and is experimenting with blogs in his senior capstone biology course.  You can follow his experiment at their central course blog.