Papers is freaking awesome!

I have certainly never had as much success at staying academically organized as I am enjoying this moment. Yesterday I upgraded to the newest version of Papers which has an incredible number of new features. The most significant of which is the ability to search Google Scholar and link to the library's proxy server. This allows me to search for and import an article all within Papers. Plus if the article is missing metadata, Papers can use repositories to try and match the document. I've had decent success with that feature thus far. Anything that can prevent me having to type in a bunch of information is welcome, even if it doesn't work 100% of the time.

If you have a bunch of PDFs to sort through for research purposes, and you're using OS X, I would highly recommend purchasing a copy of Papers.

Papers is available from $42 (or roughly $25 with a student discount) from mekentosj
(A big thanks to Drs. Griekspoor and Groothuis for making this great software!)

Time to start looking for a new car

I'm going slightly off-topic this post... but the ole' Subaru just rolled past 150,000 miles last week, and the transmission is starting to get a bit worn. So now comes the decision whether to try and drive the Forester into the ground, or trade it in while it's still in good condition.

I drive quite a bit, about 1,200 miles a month. So I've decided that any new car should get pretty good gas mileage, especially since gas is so expensive and unlikely to ever go back down. Having all-wheel-drive has been quite handy living in New England, but I think I could get along without it.

I've narrowed my options down to: Honda Civic, Honda Fit, Toyota Corolla, and the Toyota Yaris. I've done some quick price comparisons and they're all affordable. I'm going to try and make it with the Forester until the summer when it hits the '10-year' mark in June. That should give me some time to save up towards some new wheels.

Most useless graphic ever

Having just read the ICT Competency Standards for Teachers by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for a class... I just have to share the most ridiculous graphic I've ever seen. The rest of the publication was a very high level overview of how they see technology fitting into schooling. I don't have any major issues with anything in there, but then again they didn't really say much of anything.

Without further ado, here's the graphic (which can be found on page 13 of the full report. I have not omitted anything such as a title or legend. The axes are not labeled, and there's no scale. So all I can gather from this is that they're planning more of everything... except maybe policies, on which apparently they've reached the maximum. So for whomever put this together, bravo!

If Edward Tufte ever needs an example of how not to use a spider chart, I nominate this one.

Where the heck are the RSS feeds?

Okay, so I'll be the first to admit that I would really like to keep up on a whole slew of journals... but I'm not exactly keen on figuring out all the gory details. Trying to coordinate when each journal is published and when it's available through whatever arcane legal pact the university library has made with electronic providers is enough to make my head explode.

Can't they make this easier for me? It sure seems like the tools are available. Some providers such as EBSCOhost offer the service of an e-mail alert when new issues are available. But then I still have to check the website. Shouldn't there be RSS feeds for journals? Just provide me with the basics (title, authors, keywords, abstract). That way I can subscribe with my feed reader and filter on keyword if I get overloaded with things to read. We've got RSS feeds for every other kind of publication, and it's about time journal publishers caught up with the times.

Nothing like that new blog smell

I've finally joined the blogging masses! Actually, just between you and me this is probably the fifth or sixth blog I've had over the years. I'm really going to make a conscious effort to keep this one up and fresh, despite my previous failures.

What's going to be here you might ask? I plan on using this space to talk about a number of different topics of interest to me. This involves metaverses such as Second Life, multi-player games, electronic collaboration tools, etc.

My goal is to try and find something of interest every couple of days for posting. Hopefully my posts will be a little better structured, as opposed to this rambling introduction. Please join me in thinking about and discussing the uses of these new media in education as this blog develops.