Online collaboration and registration
April 30, 2008
As I’ve posted about before, there are a number of online office applications that give almost all the functionality you could need. However, Zoho and Google Docs both require you to register to edit the document. For one-off or irregular use, this is a hassle. So I’m currently in a quest for collaboration without registration. Read the rest of this entry »
Open access, Peer review (2) and pre-publication drafts
April 28, 2008
The last post has prompted some more, unformed but interesting thoughts about the ways in which the pressures of open-access publishing are re-shaping academic publications. UCL have recently introduced an ‘e-prints’ scheme, which aims to provide free, pre-publication copies of papers by UCL academics. Similarly, a number of researchers have taken to circumventing the firewalls of closed academic journal publishing by making pre-publication copies available online. Given that many of these papers turn up on Google Scholar, increasingly the main way of searching for papers, it is not inconceivable that they will achieve a much greater circulation than the actual published paper. While I’m in favour of open-access publishing, the ‘halfway house’ provided by publishing research articles in less than finished form seems to raise as many questions as it solves. If these papers are suitable for dissemination by the university, what then is the purpose of the journal review process? Who is to have the final say in what is worth publishing? University administrators or journal editors?
Preceedings and Peer Review
April 28, 2008
It has been a long time since I’ve added anything here, caused by moving house and the usual panic about not having written enough thesis. The thesis is still underwritten (although not in an insurable sense), however I came across this website, which I couldn’t resist posting about.
Remixing social science
March 20, 2008
Through a series of blogs, and videos like the one by Mike Wesch which I introduced elsewhere, anthropology appears to be setting the pace in terms of social science engagement with the internet and the possibilities for collaboration and group work.
De-teching
March 17, 2008
About a year ago, caught in a seemingly endless spiral of finding more and more references, reading about more and more sports matches and generally being increasingly unproductive, I spent some time on ebay (obviously) considering buying a typewriter. An old one. With no electronics.
h2o teaching lists
March 14, 2008
From Harvard, H20 is an initiative to bring together teaching, course syllabi and students from around the world.
Podcasts and online learning
March 5, 2008
I’m a big fan of podcasts, not least for trying to learn something new while I’m on my bike or the bus. There are an increasing number of great resources available in and around science studies.
Developing Locating Technoscience
February 28, 2008
I am designing the web page for a new reader on the geographies of technoscience, Locating Technoscience, a draft of which can be found here. The reader will be, initially, entirely web-based, and I’m keen to try and include the ability for readers to comment and build on the papers involved. One of the key features of traditional readers is that they introduce people to key papers, concepts and researchers in the field. The vast majority of these are now available in some form on the internet, particularly to those in academic institutions with Athens access. This raises the question of competitive advantage – the success of the reader has to be based not simply on its research content, which can already be accessed through journals in the most part, or the websites of researchers like Bruno Latour or Maarten Hajer. Instead, it will need to incorporate links to new research, lucid introductory passages and the availability of commentary through which discussions can develop.
Microsoft Dreamspark - free software for students
February 22, 2008
Somewhat unbelievably, but extremely usefully for students interested in developing web resources (or lecturers interested in persuading students to do so for them…), Microsoft has started giving away some of its fancier software to ‘validated’ students in the UK, US and Europe. Read the rest of this entry »
Googling
February 18, 2008
Somehow, this post got lost somewhere between typing and publishing, which would seem to imply I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.
There is a nice guide (and accompanying lecture) from Princeton which describes how to avoid having to trawl through Google results and instead get searches to work, including how to search only academic or government websites. Perhaps equally impressively (for the easily impressed), it describes how to use Google’s calculator, conversion tools and weather forecasts. I’m not sure how many universities provide this kind of information, but it must be among the most useful to give to todays students and researchers.
And more help and guidance can be found here (pdf)
