Archive for: November 2004
§ ¶Tapeless Camcorders
Finally! JVC is bringing a couple of hard drive-based camcorders to market, and David Pogue reviews them. It sounds like there are some issues to be resolved, but this is the beginning of the end for videotapes. For those of us who tend to digitize everything anyway, this is good news. The fact that MPEG2 capture happens when you’re filming eliminates a major time sink: having to do a real time capture of your tape once you get back to the lab. (If you have a MPEG2 card, that is. Otherwise you have to record and compress using something like iMovie, which takes much longer than real time.)
§ ¶Google Scholar in beta
Google’s scholarly research tool is in beta. Ars Technica has the scoop.
§ ¶Acrobat 7 Announced
I’ve been using Preview (on Mac OS X) to read .pdf files for a while, but Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 could get me to switch back; it will support adding comments to files and, presumably, allowing collating and reviewing of comments in Acrobat. Then again, supposedly OS X 10.4 — when it comes out — will provide access to similar functionality in Cocoa, so it may be the case that the next version of Preview keeps pace. In any event, better support for reviewing tasks will be very useful, particularly for those of us who share documents remotely.
§ ¶CSCL Submissions Due Nov 21
The CSCL 2005 submission deadline has been extended. Submissions are now due November 21. The conference itself runs May 30 to June 4 in Taipei.
§ ¶EdWeek on the Bush Education Agenda
EdWeek (free registration required) has collected a series of articles focusing on the Bush Education Agenda.
President Bush’s re-election, and Congress’ shift to the right, put the administration in a strong position to push forward its education initiatives. Read a selection of key stories from our archives on Mr. Bush’s record and plans in education policy.
§ ¶Papyrus News now a Weblog
Mark Warschauer’s excellent Papyrus News email list is now a weblog. Mark studies language, literacy, and technology. The weblog focuses on a broad range of educational issues.
§ ¶Sharing References
I used to post whenever one of the journals I follow released a new issue. I’ve fallen behind on that, and as I think about restarting that practice, it’s worth discussing the purpose. What I want is an easy way to be notified of and browse recently published articles in my field.
Notification is pretty good: most publishers let you sign up to receive email when a new issue comes out. It would be nice if some publishers also established RSS feeds (I know some publishers already do this, but I haven’t seen it in my field) but for basic notification, email is fine.
Browsing support is the problem. The reason I started blogging new journal table of contents was so that I would have a way to see, on a single web page, all recently published articles for the main journals I follow. But I’ve come to realize that while this is useful — for others as well as for me — it would be far more useful if there were an easy way to get those references into EndNote (substitute BibTex or ProCite or whatever you use here).
So I’m looking into ways to better share reference data, particularly ways that afford browsing and the serendipity that comes with browsing. Here’s the kinds of things I’m thinking about.
- What it would take for me to be able to post a link that you can click to automatically import a new issue’s contents into your reference manager. No sense both of us wasting time entering data by hand.
- Better than my doing this, I’d love to see publishers maintain importable reference libraries for every journal they publish. I should be able to grab the complete history for the Journal of the Learning Sciences, for example, and import it into my own reference library in one step.
- I want to figure out how to better use EndNote (or something else) for browsing references. For example, I can search for a specific journal title and sort by volume and issue, and then export the formatted records to a separate file. But can I automate this so it’s easy to do?
Once I figure out a solution to the first point, I’ll resume posting new issues. And yes, I’m aware of projects like bibliophile and bibster. These projects seem to be pushing on reference sharing and search, but not so much on browsing.
§ ¶James Comer on Tavis Smiley
James Comer discusses NCLB on today’s Tavis Smiley show. He discusses why, aside from underfunding, NCLB falls short. You can listen to the interview here.