Digital
Tools Blog Post for 7.10.13 – Class reflection
I really enjoyed class last night
and am looking forward to learning about and working with new technology and
new people. It was interesting to hear
people’s expertise and areas of need. I
was thinking that it might be helpful to work with people who are interested in
working with similar tools for the skill building.
Dr. Woods’ presentation was very
informative and covered much of the ground you did in our Advanced Qual Class
last semester. It is always good to hear
different voices with a similar message. This weekend, I plan to review her PowerPoint
and include some of the notes I took as she was speaking. I think she made a very good case for using
digital tools to enhance the transparency and therefore the trustworthiness of
the research process and the researcher.
I loved her example of the heckling crowd and the researcher’s ability
to shut them down with a simple search through her data.
I heard your class for ‘going
paperless’ and am considering the idea. I think I may try it out in this class,
and see how it goes. It has always been
very important for me to be able to interact with what I am working on. If I am reading, I need to highlight and
scribble in the margins and draw arrows etc. in order to comprehend. I worry that I will not be able to understand
what I read as well if I take away my ‘tools’ of interaction. I will try it out, and see how it goes. I would like to make the leap! For some reason, it is oddly satisfying to me
to see notebooks full of papers and articles and reflections. Perhaps I will grow just as fond of seeing
files on my computers that have the same material. I guess part of me just doesn’t trust
technology…what if my computer crashes and I lose ALL of what I have done? This is a big worry for me.
This
morning, I downloaded I annotate on my I pad.
I will play around with it through this course and see if I am able to
get what I need out of this tool – in terms of the scribbling and highlighting
etc. is this something I can explore for my skill builder?
I
also downloaded Ever note (which seems to have many of the same features as
Atlas ti) and Mendeley. I most
definitely need to have citation manager software set up. I am going to play with this one over the weekend
and see if it is a good fit for me. I
am also interested in what Ann said yesterday about the speech recognition
software that is available on most PCs.
I found what is loaded on this PC and plan to explore what it has to
offer. I have scheduled some time with
Ann next week, and plan to schedule each week to stay on top of assignments and
get some assistance with things I cannot figure out.
In
my previous post for Digital Tools, I reflected on the readings. On Friday, I will reflect on Thursday’s
class, the readings for Thursday, and some of the reflective practices in
Chapter 2.
'I was thinking that it might be helpful to work with people who are interested in working with similar tools for the skill building.' That is a great point and we will try to do some grouping along those lines as we lead up to the first skill builder.
ReplyDelete'I guess part of me just doesn’t trust technology…what if my computer crashes and I lose ALL of what I have done?' Well, there is that, but that's the beauty of cloud computing. By keeping stuff remotely on a UT server or Dropbox or Drive that danger is eliminated - but of course it does open security concerns because it is out of your direct control.
Yes, iAnnotate could be a skill builder. Evernote isn't a data analysis tool but there may be some overlap in functionality. I am not convinced that the Windows text to talk is the same as Dragon, but this is not a tool that I have used extensively myself.