Better projects, dissertations and writing...

At this time of year, the whole cycle of student research, projects and writing and dissertations come into sharp focus.
I am always on the look out for good tools and models of good practice to help students understand and engage with the whole process in both a constructive and holistic manner.
Today's example was a slide explaining the contribution of some research into the teaching of derivatives to students of Economics.

Since I am often teaching engineers (of one sort or another) I often use the metaphor of engineering the document.
The image above comes from a presentation by A L Alzira Jimenez presented at the IMA International Conference on Barriers and Enablers to Learning Maths: Enhancing Learning and Teaching for All Learners, 10 – 12 June 2015, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland (programme details)
The example uses a table, which removes some of the pressure to write prose and at the same time, clearly states the contributions of the work and links back to sources discussed in the literature review.
IIt demonstrates (to a small degree) visual literacy - a favourite theme of mine, and hopefully removes some of the stress of writing.
The use of tables in this way is not confined to the contributions, however this is an area often neglected by students in their write ups maybe because conclusions and future work are stuff written at the end if the activity.
Perhaps most importantly, it can function as a thinking tool, helping author review and enhance the quality of their work - engineering a clearer explanation.
Anything which makes this process more enjoyable AND improves final product has to be a good thing.

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 UK

Project Students - its that time of year again

this is the time of year that I get to meet a whole new batch of project students. Its interesting, but also reminds me that these folk may be new to academic conventions.

I place a big emphasis on developing writing, because so often folk are let down by their written communication of good work.

Today I chanced on a very excellent web site which provides concrete examples of good referencing style

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~pxc/refs/index.html

well worth a good look

Its been a while - visualisation stuff

Not sure why life has got the better of me, but hey ho!
occasional readers (for there can be none other given the paucity of posts) will understand I have an interest and passion for visualisations


The Importance of Visual Literacy
today, in an effort to express myself I found an update on the visual literacies website and also stumbled on this blog while trying to work out the right way to represent some tricky information

http://wilgengebroed.nl/visual-literacy-should-be-equally-important-as-textual-literacy-in-our-educational-systems/

on top of that The good folk at http://www.visual-literacy.org/ have got some tutorials online. I shall certainly be pointing all my project and phd students and the one on Business visualisations. The general principles outlined there are, I think, just right for an undergraduate student project and for first year post grad work too.

Tools and Tips: getting to grips with writing

A slightly more academic aspect of the sorting out your working life theme is my efforts to make a dent in the academic writing task.

I have always found writing an abstract a great way to kickstart the writing effort, but over the past few weeks I have been working on a rather more systematic approach.

The effort was triggered by good intentions; but the arrival of an email from the Tomorrow's Professor list titled " Want to Publish More? Then Train Like an Athlete". really caught my eye, and, I have to say, my imagination….

Perfectionism is a deadly enemy of good performance. It’s like being judged every time you write a sentence or paragraph. It’s far better to go ahead, make mistakes and learn from them. Rather than expecting great output from a burst of frenzied inspiration, the idea behind Boice’s brief regular sessions is to work with moderate daily expectations, knowing this will lead in time to better results.

to be continued...

More workplace tools: expenses and business cards

These are the sort of apps which are really useful when you are travelling….

 

 

 

 

This week I am continuing my new (academic) year's resolution, and getting systematic over using tools.

Latest hot app to join the ranks of workplace organisation is ExpenseMagic which does what is says. You take photos of your receipts (or upload them or mail them in) and once a month you get a spreadsheet with a summary of all your expenditure. You have to supply a small amount of metadata, but its a great way of systematising the records of what you spend, whether you are going to claim it back, or want to look at it for analysis.  You can pay for the service on a PAYG, monthly of quarterly fee, and for me, the peace of mind and delegated work is much appreciated!

 

As well as spending money and collecting receipts, travelling to conferences and workshops tends to lead to an accumulation of business cards. 

I already try to use evernote and take pics of people and places where possible; and I have a LinkedIn app to turn my business contacts into my online network. Now I also have a business card reader app (called BCReader!)which very nicely scans the card and lets me save the collected info into a contact in my address book.

Neat.

Tools and Tricks for a life online - the slow death of Twitter

I'm working hard at the moment juggling a whole load of different (but inter-related) papers which I am writing along with revising this semester's teaching and working on a radically different incarnation of some teaching which I have done in the past. When I have that many things on the go, I find Evernote invaluable, and Twitter is just part of the fabric.
When I wrote about workplace tools in a previous post, I neglected to mention twitter - probably because its use is just an intrinsic part of how I work. I use twitter to find stuff, to keep in touch with my (various and not necessarily inter-related communities of practice (web science; technology enhanced learning;  personal and educational development; workplace and remote friends and colleagues; running and cycling (think serious juggling plus work life balance here). I have Twitter tools on my various devices, and have been  using Twitter with IFTTT to help me build up an archive of useful stuff which I have spotted by saving it in Evernote.

Imagine my disappointment therefore to discover that twitter has decided to self harm to a disastrous extent - of which I learnt courtesy of the IFTTT twitter feed, and the ensuing storm of twitter discussion.

Upcoming changes to Twitter Triggers

We recently sent an email to everyone with a Recipe that uses a Twitter Trigger outlining some upcoming changes to the Twitter Channel. Here’s the full email:

In recent weeks, Twitter has announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email,Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine. 

At IFTTT, first and foremost, we want to empower anyone to create connections between literally anything. We’ve still got a long way to go, and to get there we need to make sure that the types of connections that IFTTT enables are aligned with how the original creators want their tools and services to be used. 
We at IFTTT are big Twitter fans and, like yourself, we’ve gotten a lot of value out of the Recipes that use Twitter Triggers. We’re sad to see them go, but remain excited to build features that work within Twitter’s new policy. Thank you for your support and for understanding these upcoming changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@ifttt.com.
Linden Tibbets 
IFTTT CEO 
*These Twitter policy changes specifically disallow uploading Twitter Content to a “cloud based service” (Section 4A https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms) and include stricter enforcement of the Developer Display Requirements (https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements)

This enlightened action of self mutilation comes hot on the heels of twitter announcing that it was ending its tweet syndication partnership with LinkedIn! However a few folk have pointed out that the writing has been on the wall for some time when API guidelines were revised in the spring (see AllThingsD and TechCrunch )

What it means for me, is back to the drawing board and work out another way of hanging on and archiving useful information.  

Workplace tools

Workplace tools are important, here is a  post about the tools I use and a few new tools which I came across over the easter break when I managed to find some time  to do a bit more reading that usual...
Tools I could not exist without
Dropbox

• I can get at all my files on any of my computers and any web based computers wherever I am.
• I can use it to share docs which otherwise live on my personal computers
• I want to have a seamless backup system

Thank you Janet Carter for introducing me to it :-)
Evernote

• there are lots of things going on, and I want to keep note of them.
• bookmarks, tools etc are distributed and Evernote is in one place.
• keeping a diary/journal should be as easy as possible.
• keep pics of info taken on your phone for instant diary/journal notes
• most importantly work on lots of different devices, be accessible from the web in a synched manner

I use this to keep running notes of my supervision meetings and as a one place for info being collated as I research info - particularly when writing.

Mars Edit

• lets me write my blogs offline
• organises my tagging

Online/Cloud tools which I use

 Doodle

• Online service set up a poll and get people to decide when they will come and meet you - no more hopeless negotiating over dates and times 

EventBrite

• Online service manage admin for small meetings - free if meeting is free

GoogleDocs

• Online service use the forms feature to run quick surveys, or collate info on who want's what from a menu when you are organising a social event
• Use the docs for a quick turnaround on a collaboratively authored piece of writing, there is a great example of that in Mike Wesch's lovely (if a little old now… video 'The vision of students today' (2006))

iSurvey

• Is the University of Southampton survey tool 

Mendeley

• install a client on your  desktop
• use as a reference manager
• use to share references and establish public citation collections 
• tool for crowd sourcing related publications

I use this with my project students so i an see how their background research is proceeding

E.ggtimer.com 

Online service, sets up times on your machine

•  good idea when you are trying to work on a deadline etc and need to prevent yourself getting distracted...
• it also has special times - e.g. the 25 mins plus 5 is ideal for half hour meetings

FetchEveryone

• An online training tool you can use to log your runs, play games, analyse training
• Website tools which I don't use, but which I might tell you about

750 words

• use this to help yourself get into the writing habit. 

Some that look like a good idea
http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html ' selectively block web site access
Tools which are not online
Scrivener
from the good folk at the fabulously named literature and latté (although I strictly take my coffee black) I am finding this tool a real winner...

• the thing to use to help turn notes or blogs into coherent form
• it lets me organise my writing collecting lots of bits from lots of places
• it can output to electronic format as well as various others such as PDF and RTF
• it handles word count, tracking 
• it have a visual interface to the organiser 

1Password
This is a desktop app, there are others with similar functionality

• everyone needs one secure place to keep lots of info
• not least to share with their nearest and dearest to ensure that things can be sorted out on your behalf if you are incapacitated, or even after your death (ultimate incapacity)
• because there is so much info in life