Tech Round-Up

It’s time for another technology update, as a follow-up to the two previous posts on the tools I’ve been using for research and for connecting with others. Since I’ve been checking out a number of new and nifty tools recently, I thought I’d share the goods.

Diigo: an important change I’ve made is a switch from Del.icio.us to Diigo. When Yahoo! announced that they would cease to develop Del.icio.us, there was a sort of general uproar from committed users (myself included—I’d come to rely on it for bookmarking articles for media analyses) since we were afraid of losing such a great tool. Even though it became apparent that Yahoo! would not shut down Del.icio.us, I decided to switch to another bookmarking tool for the sake of stability. I admit I’d also been tempted by the many options available. As it turns out other sites, like Diigo, have been developed more than Del.icio.us and so they provide helpful features such as highlighting on web pages, caching pages for later reference, and the option to add notes to a page (which others can view). Most of these features are only fully available with Premium service, but I’m considering buying in (it’s only about $5 per month).

Scrivener: Thanks to Dr Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer) for continual praise of Scrivener that prodded me into giving it a try. I think I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of its capabilities, but already I love the way I can create a “project” in Scrivener and include not only Word files but also .pdfs, images, web pages (html files) and even sound files—all relevant research materials in one layout. Scrivener’s handy “splits” feature allows you to view two files at once in the same visual space, invaluable when you’re looking at information on web pages or copying notes into a draft of a paper (for example). For those of us who need to organise things visually, Scrivener has an iTunes-like format that allows you to places files and folders in easy-to-access order, to easily add/create new files and folders and add documents, and to write different sections with the full structure in view. Another great thing about Scrivener is that you can download a 30-day trial, which I did, and that helped convince me that it was worth purchasing a copy. Bonus: if you pay for Scrivener you can install it on multiple computers without paying any additional fees. The bad news: it's only for Mac, as is another suggested tool, DevonThink.

Below: an example (screen-shot) of a Scrivener project layout, showing the outline for a paper in sections and also a series of .pdf files of articles I've used in the research.



Prezi: I first saw a demonstration of Prezi at the Georgetown University Round Table back in March of this year. As an alternative presentation format (alternative to Powerpoint, that is), I immediately liked the look of Prezi and was eager to find it online and try it out. Once I got going with the site (Prezi is not downloadable software, rather it’s an online tool) I enjoyed the way in which it facilitated my thinking as well as the creation of my presentation; whereas Powerpoint always makes me feel boxed in, with Prezi I can move objects around to see how they might “look” in another order, or indeed how ideas might make more sense in a different sequence. The one complaint I’ve heard from those who aren’t keen on Prezi is that it makes them feel “seasick” or nauseated because of the “zooming” motion that happens as the program moves from one “slide” to the next. So far I haven’t given any presentations using Prezi, but I’m attending a conference at the end of the month and will give it a try for at least one of the two presentations I’m planning. I’ll be keeping the zooming to a minimum, given the complaints about it.

Scribd: Though I haven’t used it much, I realised the potential usefulness of Scribd when I came across a cache of letters and other documents relating to my dissertation research. In order to download from Scribd, you have to upload documents of your own; this wasn’t a problem since I was able to connect through Facebook and complete an upload easily (taking into account the relevant copyright restrictions). I think as a document sharing site Scribd actually has a lot of potential and I’m gradually starting to upload more items (generally reports from Statistics Canada and from think tanks, relating to post-secondary education).

Zotero: Zotero is a citation manager that works both as an add-on to Firefox and as a web site through which users can sync their account across multiple computers (great for me, since I use a desktop and a laptop); it’s similar to sites like Del.icio.us and Diigo in that way. Zotero was suggested to me by a number of people, but after an initial try I found it clunky and didn’t see how it would be of any use to me. Recently I was prompted by Dr Lee Skallerup (@readywriting) to give Zotero a second chance, and thankfully this time I’ve figured out where it fits in to my personal media/technology ecology. I use Zotero now for the search process, so that as I browse online I can create citations without having to go back and document everything later. (If you’re not keen on Zotero, recommended alternatives include Mendeley and Endnote).

Dipity: Suggested to me by John Dupuis (@dupuisjohn) of York University’s Steacie Library, Dipity is a site for constructing timelines. This became important for me because of the nature of the research I’m doing for my dissertation—i.e. I am mapping institutional developments onto provincial and federal policy and political trends, so for me it really helped to be able to see those things in a kind of linear, comparative way. My “Post-Secondary Education in Canada” timeline is still very much under construction, but I think it will eventually be a time-saving tool for others looking at the same topic.

Moo: A final nod goes to Moo, not technically a “tool” but rather a site through which you can design your own business cards, post-cards, and so on. I wrote a bit about Moo in a post in my other blog, where you can also see the images I chose to use. I love this idea of having my photos in this miniature form that I can hand out to new acquaintances. The cards arrived the other day in the mail, and they look lovely; I can’t wait to start dishing them out.

"Myths & Mismatches": Where from here?

The last series of blog posts left me all blogged out for a couple of weeks, but I thought I'd offer a follow-up post regarding my thoughts on the e-course by Jo and Julie, on career planning and professional development, and a few other things.

What I found helpful about the course was that it provided me something to respond to, and in the process I found myself thinking harder about my current decisions. And because I'm feeling "stuck" and unfocussed at the moment, this was a valuable exercise. I tried to imagine my self in a particular role, and asked: what would I look like doing this job? How is that going to happen? Where do my current actions take me in terms of that kind of goal? Fairly basic stuff, but I find writing it all down tends to help me with coherence and direction. And when I'm feeling lost, I like to focus on the tangible aims that make it easier to make decisions in the present--since they build towards something in the future.

Some of the things I'm doing at the moment in order to provide myself direction--in a few different aspects of (academic) career development:

Making a decision about an academic "subject area" in which I could work comfortably, i.e. as a member of a department or program or team. This sounds like a no-brainer, and for most people in a PhD program it hasn't been an issue since at least the MA level. But because of the way my interests have developed, choosing an "area" has been a less than straightforward process (my degrees are in Communication Studies, Linguistics, and Education).

A related task is to work towards drawing my various projects into a well-articulated and coherent research "map" that works within that subject area. I have diverse interests, but diversity is only a strength if it's grounded in something stable like a good knowledge base, along with a plan regarding how the various pieces fit together and reinforce each other. I know well enough how everything is related, but I need to work actively to make those connections clear to others. This is important no matter what line of work I end up following.

...Alongside the usual academic channels, I've been experimenting with using social media to meet new colleagues and develop professional relationships, to "network" and to share/publicise my own work, to develop opportunities for contributing to ongoing debates (such as writing articles for other blogs and web sites), and to keep up with news/issues in my fields. As a result, I'm thinking about blogging and other "public communication" as part of academics being "public intellectuals", not just professors or employees of the university. I'd like my blog to be a way to share my ideas even as I'm developing them in other ways (e.g. through research).

While I won't swap social media for more traditional fora such academic conferences, participation in the latter is restricted for me because of the expense (travel, accommodation, registration fees) and timing. Sources like Twitter are an ongoing means of conversing with others whose interests I share, engaging in long-term exchanges that keep me thinking and that open up the discussion to anyone who can use a hashtag.

I'm working on teaching through practice (even just with my small tutorial group this year) and through development of approaches and philosophies; and I'm thinking about pedagogy rather than "teaching", about theory and overall strategy as well as classroom tactics and practices. I'm looking for ways to examples that "stick".

And in the context of our wired classroom, where students can use laptops and Blackberries to "tune out" from course discussions, I'm trying to understand and take into account the issues involved--"student engagement" and technology in the classroom; consumerism and credentialism; cognitive development in learning; differences in learning "styles"--and translate that back into an approach that gets students interested enough to abandon Facebook in the middle of class (high hopes, I know).

I still see teaching and learning as being about relationships, communication, partnership, mutual responsibility, motivation, feedback, confidence, hard work, listening, and changing your approach when something doesn't work. Most important to me is to create an environment wherein questions and discussion can happen. With all that in mind I'm considering things like course design (in the abstract) and how this relates to pedagogy, particularly in terms of how different aspects of the course (curriculum/readings, assignments, tutorials and TAs, lectures) all have to work together in a way that makes sense to students.

I think that's all for today. I hope you enjoyed the series of "Myths & Mismatches" posts, and if you're following my blog--thanks for joining me!

Technology and Research, Part 2: Tweeting and Blogging

Continuing my little discussion of the ways in which I've most recently been using online technologies in my daily research and writing habits, today I'm moving on to the complementary combo of Twitter and Blogger.

Since one of my goals over the past six to eight months has been to interact more with people who share my research/academic interests (outside of my graduate program), I've been doing more social media exploration than usual. A relatively recent major change to my online habits has been my increasing use of Twitter as a way of connecting with strangers and keeping up with news.

I operate with a kind of minimalism when it comes to technological tools--as I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to want only the tools I need, and only the tools that work. It's for that reason that I (and others) didn't start using Twitter until quite a while after I first looked at the site and logged on to create an account. I simply couldn't see any point; like so many people, at first I thought of Twitter as a useless stream of trivial chatter that would only further clutter my already-limited field of attention.

In spite of my own skepticism, at some point earlier this year I decided to try "tweeting" a bit more in earnest. Since that time I've decided that there are "two Twitters": the banal barrage of idiotic celebrity gossip and predictably dreary/melodramatic personal updates, yes, that Twitter does exist (of course!). But the flip side of it is a fascinating and wide-reaching series of exchanges, often with people I'd never have encountered otherwise; it's a stream of useful news and links that I couldn't possibly have rounded up on my own; and it's a means of responding to those things, and sharing my own, in such a way that the conversation continues and expands.

But it does take time to learn how to use Twitter effectively as a tool--assuming you know what you want to accomplish with it. At first, without a list of "followers" and with no sense of who else was using this tool and what they might be doing, I felt as if I was sending messages into the aether with little idea of "audience", tone, or purpose. Fortunately I had a few friends already tweeting busily, who helped set an example for me in terms of Twitterquette.

Among the more important things I learned was that while it's more or less true that the more accounts you add to your own list, the more "followers" you're likely to gain, the best way to get the most out of Twitter is by participating actively. For example, a means of navigating Twitter is through using "hashtags", or words/terms attached to a tweet with a # sign: e.g. #CdnPSE for "Canadian post-secondary education". You can "meet" other followers by using tags, and interact with them by "replying" to their tweets or by "re-tweeting" them (passing their content around). A system of crediting others is integral to all this; another aspect is that of suggesting users to other users (often with the tag "FollowFriday or #FF). I found that one of the biggest challenges here was feeling confident to interact with strangers, but once I was over that hurdle things became much more rewarding.

To sum up: I like using Twitter because it affords a form of participation in an ongoing conversation, but it's one that isn't limited to--for example--my Facebook contacts, who are an entirely different group. While on Facebook I keep things generally quite private, on Twitter I'm happy to see strangers adding me to their lists--unless they're bots or marketers. (Now the only thing I can't find, or haven't found yet, is the perfect Twitter client. But that's a whole different blog post...)

Tweeting got just a little bit easier a couple of months ago when del.icio.us (as mentioned in the previous post) also linked to the site, so now you can bookmark, tag, and send a link to Twitter--with a comment--all in the same pop-up window within your web browser (for Firefox, anyway). The other way I access the daily news is through Google Reader, so now I have a Reader-->del.icio.us-->Twitter process that works pretty well for finding and reading relevant news, saving articles for later, and sharing them with people who are likely to want to read them.

And lastly, there's the blog. Even as an ex-zinester I've never felt comfortable writing blogs; the required regularity felt somehow journal-like, and I'm terrible at keeping journals. So I began, in fact, with a photo-blog that was at first a daily affair but eventually became weekly as the posts grew longer and often incorporated multiple pictures. A year later, after I'd managed to maintain Panoptikal and even pick up a few "viewers", I decided to incorporate my academic interests and my new Twitter habit by starting an education-oriented blog (the one you're currently reading), with the goal of practicing writing outside a formal academic context.

I've found that the blog is a great place to say something shorter and less formal than I would in an academic paper or presentation. It's a place to brainstorm without pressure, a venue for painting a small picture of my own views and for developing them further, and conversing with others about the issues raised. It's also something expressly public, so it's accessible for those who can't view journal articles or even private web sites where such conversations might happen in a more regulated environment (for example, Facebook). For anyone considering becoming an academic, the public nature of blogs can be a means of reaching a broader audience, of "engaging" multiple publics in the conversation about your research--and seeing immediate commentary. To keep building on that conversation, I embedded my Twitter feed and a list of links from del.icio.us into the blog's format.

At this stage you may be thinking--this sounds like a lot of effort; what's the point of all this reading and commenting and tweeting? The interesting thing is that I wasn't sure myself, for quite some time, why I was "doing all this". But I got more of an idea this past Friday when I got to sit in on a workshop run by Alex Sévigny, a friend who also happens to be a successful professor, a professional communicator, and a prolific blogger and social media buff.

The overall event, organised by Hamilton's Cossart Exchange, was ostensibly for graduate students who are interested in developing non-academic careers. But I think Alex's message was valid beyond its immediate context. His point was that for those people operating outside of existing/rigid employment structures, the process of "self-branding" (as unpleasant as it may sound) has become an integral part of professional success. Before social media, this was more difficult; but now that so many of us have access to social media tools, the opportunities have expanded dramatically. Development of an online "identity" or "face" helps you to make yourself known to potential employers and collaborators, and helps you connect better with those you've already met.

So it turns out that maybe there has been a use for all my blogging and tweeting, one beyond the immediate gratification of chatting with strangers about the things that interest me most. And here's the lesson for grad students: so many of us are spending too much time online anyway, we should really learn how to channel those efforts and make them count towards career-building (!).

Technology and Research, Part 1: My Obsession.

Perhaps it's my background in visual art that makes me more prone to this, but for much of my life I've been suffering from pack-rat-itis. For example, I still maintain (though adding less to it now) my large collection of clipped images and texts from magazines and other paper publications. I keep a stash of various art supplies and a stocked "toolbox" with everything from string to copper wire to paintbrushes and tape measures. I've acquired a collection of notebooks and sketchbooks over the years and I keep these as well, as records and notes about ideas and projects both finished and unfinished.

And yet there's a sort of competing tendency that keeps things in check: I'm also one of those people who loves the storage and organization section of IKEA, because I like the thought of keeping practical items handy in such a way that I can easily reach them and use them. I hate having mounds of stuff and no way to do anything with it; I dislike even receiving gifts if they have no useful purpose and simply require "storage" (sitting on a shelf). I don't even see the point of having two of the same kind of screwdriver. Periodically I "purge" my supplies (usually when I move house) to make sure I'm not holding on to anything completely useless. My need for workable space may occasionally collide with the squirrelly tendency, but usually the one cancels out the other.

These habits have been transferred, now, to the work I do researching for my dissertation and other projects. Not only do I stash books and papers; my computer "desktop" itself has become a version of the way I'd probably organise my apartment if it were possible--everything is kept filed away, labelled clearly and in embedded folders, but everything is kept. And I'm finally at the stage where this habit is starting to pay off: I have a searchable library of notes and PDF files to which I can refer while working on the next phase of my dissertation. It looks slightly over-done to the casual observer, but then what is academic work if not retentive?

The latest manifestation of all this, and one that has become like a third arm to me when it comes to online research, is the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. This little slice of magic won me over when I realised that all my current, browser based bookmarks--which couldn't be accessed from multiple computers--could be a) uploaded with minimal effort and b) tagged (categorised and labelled with key words), by me, in such a way that they would become useful.

Not only is del.icio.us a powerful tool for sharing things with others and seeing what others are reading; it is--more important to me--a means of creating a personal database of web-based content, accessible from any computer I happen to be using. Why is this desirable? Because I view the web as a major part of my research process, not only in terms of finding the materials I need (books, journal articles, etc.) and connecting with new people (including academics, writers, politicians and policy-makers) but also as a one-stop supersource for media content and information/commentary on current events--crucial to my interest in universities, post-secondary education, politics and policy, and the ways in which ideas about these things circulate discursively.

del.icio.us also has some pretty desirable features that make it easy to incorporate into my daily news-reading habits. As I mentioned above, existing browser-based bookmarks can be imported, saving a lot of duplicated effort (I was able to use about 4 years' worth of saved links). There is also an extension integrating del.icio.us into your (Firefox) browser, so that clicking on a single button allows you to tag and comment on something before saving it to your account; the same extension allows you to search existing tags in a side-bar. The list of PSE links at the left-hand side of this blog page is channelled to Blogger from del.icio.us as well, showing only those recent links tagged as relating to PSE. As you can tell, the tagging system is key to the usefulness of del.icio.us, and I soon developed my own strategy for maximising the usefulness of tagging.

And while all this seems like a lot of work, it really isn't--compared to the ways in which it's paying off. During the York University strike over 2008-2009, I tagged/bookmarked over 300 news items--press releases, articles and blog posts--which I was able to use later for a media analysis that became a conference presentation. I've saved clusters of articles on a series of specific themes that will work as media case studies in the future (possibly for publications); one of these I've already used in a class lecture on Critical Discourse Analysis. And then there's the usefulness of simply being able to access "that article" that you read two months ago, the one about gender and accessibility and women's pay (for example), and bring it in to class or into a paper or blog post or--you name it. I see this not only as a way of keeping up to date with current developments in the "field", but also as a means of enriching what I'm writing by referencing a more diverse array of sources.

del.icio.us is one of those Web 2.0 tools that makes me feel blessed to be researching in the Internet Era. And, I admit, it's also just a teeny bit enjoyable to be able to justify my storage and organization "habit" (hobby? Obsession?) as a means of actually advancing/enhancing my own research work.

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Coming up soon, in Part 2: Why I like "Tweeting" and "Googling"...a few comments on the Internet, connectivity and interdisciplinarity.

Decisions, decisions, Part 1: What's in store?

Almost every day I take time to read the higher education (PSE) news from Canada and around the world. And every day a cluster of common (and inter-related) themes tends to dominate the articles and blogs.

One of those themes is: How many (or how few) tenure-track jobs are there available for new PhDs in various fields? Can we give tenure to "adjunct" (contract) faculty whose working conditions are insecure? Given the lack of tenure-track hiring, should we be encouraging and preparing grad students for careers outside academe? And inevitably the questions arise--should we retain the tenure system in universities? Can we keep it, and if so, how and why? What purpose does it serve, and for whom?

I'm going to try not to repeat too much what others have already said, since the discussion has been a regular one over some time and many of you have been following it with interest. What I write here is profoundly influenced not only by what I "study" (post-secondary education) but also by who I am, since the question of tenured academic employment is more than merely theoretical for me--it's about actual life choices I need to make in the immediate future. My personal perspective is that of a PhD student who will need to decide, within the next couple of years, about either focussing on an academic track or looking for work outside the PSE system (and possibly returning to it later in my "career"--if I'm lucky).

I feel deeply conflicted about this issue. On the one hand, I love the "ideal" of the academic life: I love teaching and would like to be able to do research of my own (and even write the book I have planned). I was drawn into grad school because I loved the conversation, the learning, the sharing and development of knowledge and ideas that occurs when academe is at its best. And I like participating in the continuance of the university itself, in decision-making within the institution.

But then again, close observation of the academic environment over the course of about 7 years has led me to doubt the reality of the "life of the mind", to question its continued existence in its (past and) current form, and to think through the privilege that is necessary merely to have access to such a life, let alone to live it through the university. I feel more trepidation and doubt now that I did at the end of my BA. What kind of career might be possible for someone like me in the increasingly competitive environment of the university--and would I want it?

I do love teaching but I frequently feel frustrated by the context of teaching, wherein I've often felt stressed and compromised and have seen many others in the same state. Universities have continued to expand during the last 30 years in spite of relative declines in funding; the growth in undergraduate numbers has meant an increase to the amount of teaching work, and this task has been transferred to inexpensive contract faculty rather than to new tenure-track hires. Universities are now dependent on such faculty, and on inexperienced graduate students, to carry out undergraduate teaching at budget rates--in spite of the potential for negative effects on the learning environment.

Even as the need for teachers has increased, research and publishing are still the main means to reaching desirable tenure-track jobs. For those unable to score such a position immediately after the PhD or post-doc fellowship, the "hamster wheel" of contract teaching can take up all the time that might have been put towards writing. Gender also matters: not only is teaching itself feminised, but as a female entering my 30s I will face difficult choices about family and career--choices that often put women at a disadvantage in the university workplace, wherein we already earn less on average than male scholars. Contingent faculty also have much less input--if any at all--into the way the university is run, so they are shut out of decision-making processes that affect them.

The question of "tenure or no tenure, academic work or not" is not only about choice of jobs. Academic training involves 10 or more years of post-secondary education, which can mean stalling the supposed milestones of adult life (buying a house and/or car, having children, building a long-term retirement plan and so on) until your late 20s or early 30s--unless you had a healthy amount of economic privilege to begin with. This is a significant investment of time, money, and other resources. If you've managed to accumulate a mound of student debt during your time in university, then you'll also be trying to find ways to juggle that with your regular living costs. In other words, you'll want a steady, reasonable income, not the tenuousness of contract-to-contract teaching work.

The lack-of-tenured-employment problem is not just a short term one, a "dip in the market". On the contrary, it is bound up with the structural changes associated with massification that have occurred in universities over the course of the last 60 years or so. For a while, the potential problems were allayed simply by injecting more public funding into the system (from the 1960s to 1970s), and hiring more full-time professors, as a means of increasing accessibility for previously excluded groups. But the recessions of the 70s, followed by 1980s neo-conservatism and (here in Ontario) the Harris Conservatives in the 90s, have made fiscal instability the norm. Hence contract faculty also serve as conveniently expendable labour when budgets shrink.

The future of tenure as a system is shaky, primarily because of these structural issues. As our PSE systems are stretched to their limits, old ways of doing things have come under attack not only by those marginalised by the existing, unequal tenure system but also by increasingly influential "stakeholders" outside the university. Tenure was a system that functioned reasonably well when universities were elite institutions with few undergraduates and even fewer graduate students, but in Canada at least, the beginning of the end of that arrangement came in the 1960s. And it's somewhat ironic that while universities have become more "accessible", tenure is now becoming much less so.

Even as contract faculty form associations to lobby for their rights, we see regular stories from the United States and elsewhere about PSE institutions making it easier for themselves to dismiss tenured faculty as well. So changes to tenure are already becoming an issue that affects everyone, one that needs to be resolved fairly and sustainably and in the near future. If we don't come up with a more equitable solution by design, then the situation is likely to degenerate along the current well-beaten track--with persistent inequalities between a small, elite group of well-paid research professors (and increasingly, administrators), and the non-permanent faculty who pick up the expanding teaching duties necessitated by mass post-secondary education.

None of this looks to me like the kind of situation on which I want to stake my own career and livelihood. And I think the "rational" decision would be to choose some other field. But my love of learning--and of helping others learn--is not necessarily rational, though I do have a healthy desire to see things change for the better and to put my own energy toward that goal. As always I'm walking a line between intuition and "reason", frustration and elation, helplessness and empowerment, and looking for some happy middle ground on which to build a launching pad, a castle, a jungle gym, whatever seems necessary. Of course that must be done whilst successfully navigating the way through the PhD process, but I'll get to that in my next blog post.

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Coming up soon, in Part 2: Why do so many of us want to be professors? The culture of graduate school, changing needs of grad students, the uses of tenure and a few ideas about (positive) future prospects.