Not your Grandma’s Calendar: Lizibot
Posted: November 26, 2012 Filed under: hampshire-college, higher-education, librarianship, outreach, technology Leave a comment »Email is a burden we all share. Profhacker publishes frequently on quick productivity hacks to enhance management of the daily e-mail deluge, from productivity hacks to text expansion. In the Library with a Lead Pipe has also penned an excellent email management post.
Like many front line Research & Instruction librarians, I’m busy. I am always looking for ways to save time on all tasks from the mundane to the complicated. Scheduling meetings is an example of a mundane time suck. Last year I realized that I could cut down on my number of e-mail exchanges by implementing some way for students to schedule meetings with me without having to EMAIL me.
One evening, while doing some research on digital curation, I came across a link to tungle.me, a neat calendaring tool that allows people to make appointments over the internet. AWESOME. At first, I was worried this was a pipe dream in the land of unicorns, but tungle.me was the real deal. I signed up, added that neat site to a QR code on my door and began saving loads of time by sending links to tungle.me rather than enduring long electronic negations about Wednesday versus Friday meetings versus Monday meetings.
I was rolling along until I received a sad email from tungle.me announcing that they were sunsetting this service to turn their attention to other matters at Research in Motion. Dejected, I began investigating other options. I put out a few cries for help on Twitter, and vendors responded with helpful links to a variety of services. Today, I found my new calendar solution: Lizi.
Lizi is my new personal assistant. And below I will break down why I hired Lizi to manage my calendar.
1. I was able to import my tungle.me account right into Lizi and keep my user name, caropinto.
2. It jives with Google calendar, Twitter, G+, & Facebook to get to know my contacts.
3. It saves locations for possible meetings, including my office at Hampshire College and my favorite off-campus coffee shop.
4. It’s easy to set preferred times that fall outside of the normative 9-5 Monday through Friday window. I love being able to instruct Lizi to not schedule meetings on days when I need additional prep time to teach or do committee work off campus.
5. Lizi also provides users with the option to schedule a call as opposed to setting up a meeting. Often, with off campus collaborators, I won’t necessarily want to schedule an in person conversation, but instead a phone call or virtual meeting. I appreciate that those folks can just go ahead and schedule a call with me.
Using a service like Lizi is more than a timesaver; it’s also a wonderful outreach tool. I love being able to meet my users’ needs by providing them with a direct link to my calendar. It reinforces the message I send when I teach research education sessions that I am available to meet. Lizi provides my students and faculty with an easy and direct connection to my calendar, saving time for everyone involved. It’s a win-win!
Social Media: Inventory & Reflections (Updated)
Posted: November 21, 2012 Filed under: digital-literacy, hampshire-college, higher-education, librarianship, teaching, technology | Tags: facebook, instagram, social media, spotify, tumblr, Twitter, wordpress, zotero 1 Comment »Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching a research education section on social media for a Division I tutorial class. The class will contribute to a Tumblr that compiles theater reviews from around the Five College consortium. Collectively, the class will write critical reviews that demand the serious effort and rigorous analysis that one expects in scholarly communication in a venue where many of them write for ‘anyone who will read’ or ‘their friends and family.’ It was fun to interrogate ideas of audience in social media and think about norms for different regions of the internet. We did some concept mapping that was quite revealing:
Of course, thinking about social media, audience, and scholarly communication got me thinking about why I write what I write where I do on the internet. Do I write different in different places, do I share different things on different channels? Where am I on the internet?
Hence, I thought I’d offer a social media inventory loosely defined as the social places where I create and share content with people – friends, colleagues, students, family:
Facebook the social media platform we love to hate. This is for my friends, a good cross section of whom are also colleagues. I’ll share photos, wish friends a happy birthday, occasionally throw in an article I really liked from Instapaper. I keep my privacy settings pretty locked down so people not in my immediate network can’t see my activity. It’s strictly personal.
Twitter: the social network some people hate. I love Twitter. It’s professional with some personal stuff thrown in, too. Cat photos, beer reflections, New England sports agita. Again, many of my friends are also colleagues. I live-tweet relevant lectures and conferences I attend. I love participating in robust back channel conversations. I love the second screen experience during elections, sporting events, and cheesy award shows.
Tumblr: the social network of gif aficionados. I used to post there more regularly before I transitioned to this space on WordPress,but I still share photos, occasional musings, and reblogs from different voices I admire. I read my Tumblr stream religiously in Flipboard.
Instagram: The emo, hipster social network. With photos. Sometimes with hastags. I favor individuals who post photos of CATS or other cute animals. But mostly CATS. Some of what I photograph for Instragram will end up on Twitter or Facebook. But nearly everything I photograph comes from my iPhone and Instagram. I really enjoy social photography with my friends. (Note: I deleted my Instagram account in Jan 2013)
Spotify: Music. All the time. I am strangely guarded about what I listen to at work, at the gym, at home when I’m writing or when I’m on the bus to work. Music has been a constant in my life whether it was performing classical music in high school, hosting my own radio show in College (holla 919.9 WOZQ!), or blasting in it in my car. Music is personal, so it’s not open for the world to see and discover. I social network with myself.
Zotero:See my research, comment on my research, share your research. I evangelize about Zotero on the regular. And the group element is powerful. What better, more expedient way to share information with collaborators than in the bibliographic management system I use to do research?
WordPress:The blogging place. I follow some sites on WordPress and I get pretty psyched when I see certain blogs’ freshly pressed content in my inbox. It’s where this site lives and where my professional voice feels strongest.
In all of these channels or contexts, I have an audience in mind. Audience pervades conversations around social media as our concept map in the above image conveys. Where and when you create/consume/comment on the internet matters. And we all have to evaluate what we are doing and what we are saying on the internet so we are not just howling at the moon.
It’s not JUST about GUARDING against our reputations as the conversation so often goes, but social media is also an opportunity to explore our voices, tell our stories, cultivate a room of our own, so others may find us.
On Zotero , Research & the LMS
Posted: November 13, 2012 Filed under: digital-humanities, hampshire-college, higher-education, librarianship, smith-college, teaching, technology | Tags: colleges, higher education, learning management systems, libraries, lms, moodle, students Leave a comment »I love doing research consultations with students. I take pleasure in helping them narrow broad topics that could sustain six dissertations into reasonable research morsels for 10 and 20 page papers or successful Division III independent projects.
How do students go from topics that can sustain six dissertations to topics appropriate for a senior project or 20 page research paper? Often, students can begin to narrow and refine their topics once they do some reading. However, one of the persistent roadblocks students encounter during this phase is how to find the first source they need to address their topic. I find that for many students, finding the first *relevant* source is always the hardest part.
To surmount that obstacle, one of my common recommendations is for students to pick a reading from their course syllabus and look it up in the library catalog – or in an article databases like JStor or Project Muse – to see what the subject headings and/or the keywords are. Then, the student can click on the most relevant word or heading and voila, instant sources!
But locating that interesting reading from the syllabus and remembering which saved pdf it was on the cluttered desktop can be a challenge for many students in the age of the learning management system. When I was in college ten years ago, I read from the trusty course pack, a giant set of readings that I kept in one place and could easily reference. These days, many students download readings to their desktops; some do so with an organizational scheme, others without one. Watching students deal with information overload these past few semesters, I started thinking about how their course readings, research, the LMS, and Zotero could intersect in powerful ways to empower students to successfully manage research over the course of semesters.
This year, I am very excited to be on a Kahn Liberal Arts Institute short project called “From HyperCities to Big Data and #ALT-AC: Debated in the Digital Humanities.” As part of the project, the organizers assigned participants reading that we could download from Smith College’s LMS. Great! I could download the pdfs to Dropbox, open them in iBooks and read. Then I realized that if I did that, these pdfs would just live in the pdf graveyard that is my iBooks library on my iPad. Many of the readings were excerpts, decontextualized for their full citations in the library. How could I connect the citations to the excerpt so I could easily keep track of both?
Answer: Zotero.
So, I saved the citations from Moodle into Zotero, downloaded the pdfs to Dropbox, attached them to the citations in Zotero, read and annotated PDFs on my iPad. Great!
Which got me thinking about students and research. I evangelize about Zotero in my research education classes about using it to collect and manage citations for research projects. But what about using it to manage their coursework, too? That way, when prompted for an example of a class reading that resonated, that could put them on the path towards successful source gathering, they could have it right there in the library?
I know for me, keeping professional reading I do in Zotero, always on the ready to generate bibliographies to share with colleagues has been a boon to productivity and my personal knowledge management. Now, to evangelize about this workflow for managing course assets!
