Research projects or papers that involve some use, design, or evaluation of technology. Typically, this means computer or computational technology, but others may apply in the future. Usually, the specific technology is included as a separate tag.
If you click around my site you will notice that many of the articles, presentations, and projects are “tagged”. These tags are also listed on the right side of the site to help people navigate quickly to all of the entries that relate to a particular topic. Tags are common in blogs, wikis, and other websites. Hashtags play a similar role on Twitter (e.g., I use #p544 to identify tweets related to p544, a class that I teach). These tags all serve a similar role to the keywords that are often presented in an academic journal or conference submission website–they help to quickly and easily identify the broad categories that a work relates to.
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At the simplest level, Twitter is a tool that let’s you publish short notes (140 characters maximum) that can include images and pictures. People who choose to “follow” your twitter feed can read your “tweets” whenever you post them, and you can of course follow other people’s twitter feeds. For the rest of the details, I suggest you check out their web-page.
There are many other tools that also let you post information and / or follow the information that your friends and colleagues are posting, including blogs and facebook. I currently use all 3 (you can see the twitter feed I use to discuss my courses: here ). Furthermore, the importance of all of these social networking tools are discussed widely by many knowledgeable people, so I won’t reproduce that here. I will however offer three suggestions that I believe bear repeating:
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Most people who use video for analysis think of QuickTime only as an option for playing back their video. However, QuickTime also has a host of built in features that can be quite helpful and avoid the need to use a high-end video editing tool, particularly if you have QuickTime Pro. I still use other tools, but for quick edits and the like, it is far easier to take care of them right inside of QuickTime. Specifically, QuickTime let’s you trim a movie or combine movies (sequentially or on different layers), export the entire movie or just the audio track, save the movie or audio in a number of different formats, watch only a selected section (this is particularly useful when you are reviewing a small section in the middle of the video), jump directly to a specific point, add bookmarks, and more. If you want to edit subtitles by hand, that is also an option, though I find Inqscribe to be much easier for that.
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I am currently in the process of selecting an interactive whiteboard for an upcoming research project. In my last few projects I have used both of the major interactive whiteboard brands (Smart and Mimio), each with a number of different configurations. There are several issues that may influence one’s purchasing decision such as cost, space or existing room configurations, projector availability, etc. However, I have realized that my criteria for an interactive whiteboard are, out of necessity, quite different from those of a typical classroom teacher, so I figured I would mention some of them.
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Academic Tools | Joshua November 14, 2009 | 
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