Two easy ways to protect your online identity

Today’s guest post comes from Dan Q, Web & CMS Developer for the Bodleian Libraries as well as Technical Director of Three Rings

Love locks of the Brooklyn Bridge

Practicing good Internet security is like having a burglar alarm. Burglar alarms, contrary to popular belief, don’t prevent burglary. They don’t even prevent burglary against your property. What they do, though, is they stop you from being an easy target, so the criminals go elsewhere. A particularly determined burglar could learn how to override or break the alarm and could watch your house for weeks on end to learn the perfect time to strike. But unless you’re storing priceless diamonds in your living room, they won’t bother: they’ll just leave you alone and find an easier target.

Burglar alarms, multipoint locks, and motion-sensing lights are popular ways to make your home safer because they’re easy to use and easy to understand. So what two things we can all do to easily improve the safety of our online accounts?

Use two-factor authentication

Many websites require you to log in using a password. That’s what we call the ‘first factor’ of authentication – something you know. The problem with passwords is that if somebody else finds out what you know (for example by guessing, by breaking into a database, by using spyware to record what you type or even just by standing over your shoulder), then they can take over your account. You might not even know about it until it’s too late – for example, when they delete all your emails or use your social network accounts to try to con money out of your friends.

The ‘second factor’ of authentication is something you have. If you use online banking, your bank might require you to use not only your password but also a dongle (perhaps one that you put your bank card into) to doubly prove your identity. It’s an incredibly effective way to protect an account, and you can do it in more places than you’d think, using nothing more than your mobile phone. Learn how to set it up on:

Use different passwords everywhere

These days, people are getting pretty good at coming up with passwords that are long and complex, so that they can’t be guessed by hackers. But we’re all still pretty bad at not reusing passwords, and that’s dangerous. If you use the same password for any two of your accounts, then an attacker might only need to break into one of those two systems in order to break into the other. And because the bad guys can rely upon the majority of the people with accounts on the first system using the same passwords for their accounts on the second, this kind of attack is very popular.

Remembering hundreds of different passwords is just-about impossible, though. But the good news is, you don’t have to! There are a plethora of password managers: programs which will remember your passwords for you. Some keep your passwords securely on a pendrive, others store them encrypted on the web, others still represent a ‘formula’ by which passwords can be generated (and re-generated) on demand. Not only do these tools make you more secure online, but – once you get used to them – they actually make your online life faster and easier, too. Try one of these:

  • LastPass and DashLane are both easy-to-use, free, web-based password managers, with optional low-priced top-ups for extra features like smartphone editions and advanced two-factor authentication options
  • KeePass is free and open source, and runs on your computer or pendrive, which some people consider more convenient or secure, but can take a little more work to get started
  • SuperGenPass generates unique passwords for each site you use, based on a master password (that you don’t use anywhere else); instead of remembering passwords, you just re-generate them; and it’s free
  • Mac users might also consider 1Password, and Unix geeks might like pass

Thing 20 2013: Blog, tweet or post a link

Task
Thing 20 is mostly task-based, and it’s pretty simple. We want you to blog, tweet or otherwise share a link to something you’ve produced. If you’re a published researcher, try an article. If not, how about a presentation, or a blog post on another blog? If you really can’t think of anything, you can share a link to an article you think is particularly interesting.

The task will be more useful if you can measure visits to the link you share, so if you don’t have the ability to do that on the actual website you’re sharing, you may want to consider using a tool like bit.ly to shorten the link. Make sure you’ve set up an account and logged in before you create the link, otherwise you won’t be able to get back in a track it.

Keep an eye on your link and the clicks or readers it produces. Do you see any increase over time? If not, are there ways you could target certain audiences (perhaps a guest post on a high-traffic blog with a link to your article)?

Exploring further and some things to think about: Bibliometrics and altmetrics
Bibliometrics offer a set of methods to quantitatively analyse scientific and technological literature (see Wikipedia). This often consists of analysing citations to determine impact. Although not without flaws, bibliometrics are often considered an important part of determining the value and impact of a particular article, and they may be taken into consideration when making hiring or tenure decisions. The altmetrics manifesto argues that new forms of scholarly and popular communication (e.g. social media) require a rethink of how we measure impact; we need to take into account links, conversations and other ‘non-traditional’ ways of citing a paper. It is harder to measure and easier to manipulate these results, but they represent an important aspect of reading and research. Some major databases/publishers are embracing new models; Public Library of Science, for instance, has expanded their take on article metrics to include online usage data, citations, social networks, blog and media coverage and discussion activity.

Metrics are useful, but they can only tell part of the story. It’s important to keep in mind that metrics are not necessarily an appropriate way to measure quality (see this REF2014 study on Bibliometrics); simply being cited doesn’t mean that your paper is good (what if all the citations say that you’re horrifically wrong?).

Metrics can be a useful personal and professional measure of your data online.There are things you can do to keep track of your research impact online. Google Scholar lets you set up a profile and track publications that cite you. ResearcherID lets you assign yourself a unique identifier (much like a DOI) that ensures other people of your name don’t get linked to your articles. Web of Science lets you map citations. If you’re interested in exploring these tools further, we recommend the DH23 post on bibliometrics, which will guide you through them.

Blog post
What did you share, and how? What would you hope to get from sharing a link? More visits? More conversation? What do you think you can do in future to help that happen?

You can combine this post with Thing 19, if you prefer. Don’t forget to tag the post Thing 20.

Further reading

Thing 19 2013: Explore reference management tools online

Although you may or may not consider them ‘social media’, reference management tools are one of the single most useful digital tools for a researcher today. Gone are the days of painstakingly changing each of your in text citations to a footnote, or changing each full stop in a reference to a comma because a journal required it. Online reference management tools allow you to:

  • import references from different sources (e.g. websites, library catalogues, bibliographic databases)
  • manage and/or edit the references once they’re in the system, and add manually any references that you cannot find online
  • export references into a document, either as a single bibliography, or individually (often called ‘cite while you write’) which generates a list of references.
  • format the bibliography according the referencing style of your choice, and re-format if/when necessary

There are a number of commercial products out there, some of which you may have heard of or be familiar with. Endnote and RefWorks are two of the most common here in Oxford; the Libraries have a subscription that allows University members to create a RefWorks account, and IT Services also supports Endnote.

There are also free reference management tools, and we’ll focus on those today. If you’re interested in a comparison of reference tools before you choose, there’s a VERY useful table on the Libraries’ reference management LibGuide.

If you’re interested in using any of these two tools but want a bit more help in getting started, the Bodleian’s WISER sessions are great. Unfortunately this term’s reference management session is booked, but the handouts are available and are a great place to start. Handy guides and cheat sheets are available for RefWorks, Endnote X4 and Endnote Web, Zotero and Mendeley on the Libraries Reference Management LibGuide.

Task
There are lots and free tools, but for Thing 19 we’ll look at a few of the free ones: Zotero, Mendeley and Colwiz. If you’re not already using a reference management tool for your writing, we encourage you to try out one of these tools (or give RefWorks or Endnote a go). If you don’t feel that you need to store or manage references at the moment, we still encourage you to read about the tools and explore their sites to get an idea of when they might be useful.

Zotero
Zotero is an open source tool that started as a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox but is now available as a standalone application compatible with the Firefox, Chrome and Safari. It’s free to use, although there are premium options available for a subscription fee. You will need to install Zotero Standalone if you wish to use Zotero to add citations to documents in Microsoft Word.

Zotero provides a great quick start guide on its documentation page, and the Bodleian Libraries WISER programme has a handy cheat sheet to walk you through the main processes. In addition to the standard import/export tools, you can also attach files or notes to references, sync multiple computers with your account, add items by ISBN or DOI, and assign collections or tags to your items to help you organise them. Zotero also offers mobile apps.

Zotero takes advantage of its syncing and online capabilities to offer social networking; you can create groups and share your reference lists with others.

Mendeley
Mendeley also requires you to create an account and download the programme, but it’s a desktop feature that avoid the issue of browser compatibility. Like Zotero, Mendeley offers a free version as well as the option to pay for premium features.

Mendeley offers some getting started videos, and the Libraries WISER programme also offers a cheat sheet.

Mendeley offers some great tools beyond the basics. If you are starting with a great deal of files you want to organise (rather than researching from scratch), you can pull data from your computer into Mendeley. You can also use Mendeley’s PDF editor to annotate your PDF articles. Like Zotero, you can sync your account across various computers and the cloud. There’s also an iPad/iPhone app.

Like Zotero, you can share your references with others. Mendeley takes this one step further, however, by allowing you to set up a closed group and share full-text articles.

Colwiz
Colwiz focuses on collaborative work as well as reference management. Although not exclusively for scientists, it takes a scientific focus and offers support for referencing in LaTex as well as Word and Open Office.

Colwiz also offers desktop and web-based services, although some features are only available on the desktop version. Colwiz’s real strengths come in its collaborative tools. It has features to help manage team schedules and tasks, including slightly more sophisticated groups, personal and shared calendars, team task management and more. Users can also set up research profiles (much like a Facebook or similar profile) and add contacts.

Exploring further
Try using one of these tools to add citations and build a reference list for a short paper. Can you import your references? Try changing the reference style after you’ve started.

Blog post
Now that you’ve read about and ideally played with one or more of these tools, tell us how you think you  might use them in your own work. If you already use these tools or similar ones, let us know how they work for you. If you don’t feel the need to gather references at the moment, do you think you might use the tools in the future? Tag your post Thing 19.

Thing 18 2013: Using Creative Commons and other copyright ‘need-to-know’ issues

Image by Opensourceway on Flickr

Now that we’re looking at images, it’s important to understand the basics of what you can and can’t use online. This post won’t/can’t cover it all (governments are grappling with the complexities of online copyright as we speak!), but we’ll look at Creative Commons and how it frees us to share and reuse online.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that offers a simple, standardised way to give public permission to share and/or use your creative work. CC licenses offer various levels of permissions, from ‘all rights reserved’ to ‘some rights reserved’. CC licenses are now commonly found on photos, blogs (including this blog), published material, teaching resources, music and more.

Creative Commons License
An example of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Tasks

  1. Take a look at the types of licenses available on the CC license page. Think about whether any of these might be appropriate for any of your work.
  2. You can search media sources, particularly Flickr, for CC-licensed images. On Flickr, you can go directly via the Creative Commons Flickr page. If you’re interested in looking beyond Flickr, try the Creative Commons Search Page, which allows you to search for CC-licensed content on Wikimedia, Google Images, Europeana, YouTube, SoundCloud and more.
  3. Explore Open Spires to see types of Open Educational Rerouces (OERs) are available online.
  4. If you’ve uploaded images on Flickr, go through the steps of adding a Creative Commons license (you don’t have to retain it or go to the final step if you don’t want to).
  5. Consider adding a Creative Commons license to your blog or another piece of online work by using the ‘Choose a license’ page.

Exploring further
If you’re interested in copyright online beyond the basic CC licenses, you can explore endlessly. You might be interested in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, which helps control access to online works. The UK Government recently commissioned the Hargreaves Report, which looks at streamlining copyright in a digital age.  You might also explore issues related to open access, particularly in scholarly communication. For some interesting places to start, take a look at the presentations from last month’s Open Access Week in Oxford.

Blog post (Things 17 and 18)
We wanted to talk about CC license before you wrote a blog post, because we’d like you to find an appropriately licensed image from Flickr (or another media site) that you can include in your post. Make sure it allows sharing! If you’re logged into Flickr, you can use the ‘Share’ button to grab the photo for your blog directly. Otherwise, you can either download and then upload to your blog, or grab the html or link for embedding.

Once you’ve uploaded a photo to your post (with the proper attribution if necessary), write about your experiences with images sharing tools and copyright online. Would you upload your own photos? Would you use photo sharing sites professionally? Would you consider Creative Commons licenses for any work you have created? Tag your post Thing 17 and Thing 18.

Thing 17 2013: Exploring images online

Social media and digital tools are great for both finding and sharing images online. We’ll cover two types of image tools; online photo storing and sharing sites such as Flickr that allow you to upload lots of your own photos, and sites like Instagram that are designed for sharing rather than storing.

Flickr and other photo storage sites
Online photo sharing sites have numerous advantages over keeping photos on your hard drive (although they are not without disadvantages and shouldn’t be considered foolproof storage). They make it easy to share pictures and give you additional features for organization such as tags and search. This has benefits for both the photo owner and those of us who want to view or use images. Access controls let you control who can see or download which photos, and licence controls let the owner feel more secure about sharing images while users can feel comfortable downloading them.

One of the biggest photo sharing websites is Flickr, and that’s where we’ll focus our attention today. Flickr was started in 2004; it was later purchased by Yahoo!. Flickr states that it wants to:

‘get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven’t thought of yet.’

Task
To use upload photos on Flickr, you’ll need a Yahoo!, Facebook or Google account. If you don’t have any of the above and don’t want to set one up, you can still use Flickr as a fantastic image discovery tool.

    • Go to Flickr. Use the search box or the explore option to find an image that you’d like to blog about. Experiment with different search terms, and see how they change what results you get.

Screen shot 2013-11-17 at 16.52.32

  • Note the features of a Flickr image. You’ll see the image right away. Below that on the right-hand side you’ll see the username of the photo’s owner. Sometimes the owner will have added additional information such as date or type of camera/lens. If the photo is in any groups or sets, they’ll be displayed on bottom too. Below this, you’ll find the photo’s tags. Depending on the photo settings, these may have been added by the photo owner or by other Flickr. Finally, you’ll see information about usage and licensing as well as privacy settings. You can download or share the image via the options at the bottom right of the image section (the share button looks like an arrow, and the download options are on the far right and look like three round dots).
  • If you don’t want to create an account, spend some more time browsing images. Check out the Oxford Flickr Group, the Pitt Rivers Group (not officially run by the Museum, but the group works with museum staff), the Great War Archive Flickr Group and the Flickr Commons. Note the different purposes of these groups. The first is for enthusiasts; the second is centred on a particular institution and its work. The final group is a great example of using Flickr for crowdsourcing; the images have been contributed by people all over the UK as a part of the The Great War Archive. The Commons has a similar crowdsourcing purpose. If you don’t have or don’t want to create an account, skip on to ‘Exploring further’.
  • If you have or want to create a Flickr account, do so now. Take some photos to upload, or upload one or two you already have – perhaps something that illustrates the work or research you do.
  • Upload these into your Flickr account and tag at least one of the images with ‘23 Things for Research’ (read more about Flickr tagging). Please make sure that the images you upload are your own, or that you have received proper permission to share them.

Instagram and other ‘sharing’ sites

In addition to sites that let you upload and organize your images, there are also apps and tools that are designed for ‘one off’ sharing. Instagram, for instance, lets you share photos and 15-second videos straight from your phone or tablet, edit them with filters and captions, and share immediately with your followers (Vine also lets you share short videos). Take a look at the way American universities are using Instagram for some inspiration, explore the great things museums like the Smithsonian are doing with Instagram or think about the ways students could use Instagram to show the work they’re doing.

If you’re interested curating images online rather than sharing your own, you might try using Pinterest, which allows you to ‘curate’ images – both those you upload and those you find online. It’s essentially an online bulletin board and can be great both as a personal tool for remembering images and bookmarks and as a tool for sharing links.

Exploring further

  • Flickr isn’t the only image sharing or image search tool out there. If you want to look at some others, try:
  • Flickr makes their data available so that others can build online applications using its images. Take a look at some of the tools in Flickr’s App Garden. Some to try:
    • Show where you have been on your travels by adding your holiday snaps to a map with Mappr
    • Be creative and gather photos into a mosaic using Montager

Blog post
We’ll be giving you guidance on a blog post in the next thing (Creative Commons and copyright), so sit tight for now!

Further reading

Learning via social

This guest post is from Helen Webster, an academic developer at Anglia Ruskin University. She’s particularly interested in digital literacy in Higher Education and has run several online programmes on social media for academics and students.

It’s long been recognised that digital technology has huge potential to enhance and even to revolutionise education, from the educational TV of the 1960s to the Virtual Learning Environments of the 1990s. Most recently, the Open Education movement promotes the use of Creative Commons licenses to allow learners and educators to use materials without falling foul of copyright legislation, and outside of traditional education contexts like universities. The latest innovation to capture the imagination of students, educators and the press are MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses, offered for free by universities and other providers to as many students across the world as want to take them, packaging high quality content into a wide variety of interesting courses. You already have some MOOC experience – 23Things for Research is itself a sort of MOOC! Although the University of Oxford doesn’t officially participate in MOOCs currently, it does provide a wide range of OERs – Open Educational Resources – via Open Spires

But what makes the latest digital innovations in online learning so exciting is that social media enables learners to create, participate and share online, instead of just passively consuming educational content. We know that people learn something best when they’re actively exploring new ideas or solving problems together, rather than just being told about it or reading about it. And social media platforms facilitate this interactive learning via social networking tools, blogs, wikis, video and audio creating platforms, cloud storage and content curation, social bookmarking – all the tools, in fact, that you’re exploring in this programme!

Whether you’re participating in a MOOC or using online resources as part of informal professional development or to supplement your formal education, here are some suggestions for making social media an effective part of your learning approach:

Build a Personal Learning Network: Use networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn to connect to people who are interested in the same things, and who will share resources which may be useful to you. If you manage your learning network well, your Twitter or Facebook feed can become a stream of interesting, relevant and useful resources which people have shared or sent your way.

Curate and manage: Make sure you have a robust system for finding interesting content again when you’ve discovered it, using curation apps like Pocket, Mendeley, Evernote or Delicious (editor’s note to participants:  most of these these aren’t an official ‘Thing’, but we’ll cover them a bit in Week 8). That way, you’ll be able to dig it out again for yourself or for others when you need to. Use tagging and metadata well, and you’ll not only be able to build up a personal library of resources, but you’ll be able to curate and share a collection which others will find useful too.

Create and share: You can learn quite a lot by lurking online and consuming content, but you will learn even more by making things yourself. Blogging, tweeting, creating and sharing Slideshares, infographics or videos will help you to process and articulate what you’ve learned at a deeper level, and well as developing your digital skills. What’s more, by sharing these artefacts, you’ll be helping others to learn from you, getting feedback from them on your own learning, evidencing your development and promoting your expertise. Many of these tools make it easy to create and share materials, meaning that it’s not just teachers and publishers these days who get to make learning materials; learner-generated materials are just as valuable a part of the process. It’s certainly more creative than just writing essays!

Interact and participate: Liking, sharing, retweeting and better still, responding, commenting and reblogging will help to build connections between you and others in your personal learning network. These social networks thrive on reciprocity, and your feedback, questions and encouragement will not only help others to learn, but will help you develop your own critical skills, start useful conversations and make new contacts to collaborate and share with. As well as making it more likely that others will do the same for you!

The internet has vast potential as a learning resource, but that is greatly increased when it’s not just a ‘broadcast’ medium through which you can passively consume content, but a social space where you participate, interact and contribute to the learning resources available.

Thing 16 2013: Sharing research online

Videos and podcasts might be a growing part of sharing information, but it’s a rare researcher or University staff member who doesn’t have to give at least the odd presentation – and many lecturers are using presentation tools on a daily basis. In Thing 16, we’ll explore some new tools for creating presentations, and you’ll take another look at sites like Slideshare that let you share your research and presentations online.

Presentation tools
Most of us are, by necessity, familiar with PowerPoint and/or its Apple counterpart Keynote. There are open source alternatives, although you may find they’re not always compatible in the ways you need (there’s a list at Alternative To).

Prezi is growing in popularity and offers an interesting alternative to the usual static slides you normally see. Prezi allows you to zoom, pan and layer levels of information, although these tools need to be used well in order to be effective. Instead of presenting a linear story, you can move around a storyboard, highlighting connections.

Prezi can take some getting used to, but it’s worth jumping in and giving it a try. Take some time to experiment with it and think about what it could offer to help you share your research, present a subject to students or colleagues, or create an informational or induction presentation. You can even use Prezi as a collaboration tool – it’s great for mind mapping with colleagues.

We particularly like this presentation by Ned Potter of the University of York on how to make good Prezis. As well as showing you what Prezi can do, it’s a great example of exactly that – a good Prezi: The how to make a great Prezi, Prezi on Prezi

The How to Make a Great Prezi Prezi

Presentation sharing tools
In Thing 13, you had a quick look using at tools like SlideShare for finding information and presentations. Now we’d like you to think about uploading your own research or presentations to them. As a recap, we suggested the following tools:

These tools give you the opportunity to store all your research presentations or teaching material in one place. Maybe you gave a presentation at a conference, and you’d like other people to have access to it (or you’d like other people to see that you’ve been providing expert comment on the topic). Perhaps you use presentations as teaching tools, and you want your students to have access to lectures after the class. These sites bring your presentations to a much wider audience than you can ever hope to reach with handouts or even an institutional website. They also let you embed your presentations in blogs and websites.

Have a look at each site (and feel free to look at others), and pick at least one to try. If you have a presentation floating around, upload it (extra credit: tweet a link to your presentation). Many of these sites let you upload PDFs as well as PowerPoints and other formats, so your ‘presentation’ could even be a simple handout. If you don’t have any presentations to upload, think about when or how you might or might not use these sites.

Exploring further: Some notes on presentations in general
Since we’re on the subject, let’s talk about what makes a good presentation in general. There are blog posts, courses and books galore on this, but we think it deserves addressing. Presentations should be engaging and interesting, and the standard bullet point format, while effective in the right context, can be the opposite of engaging.

If you’re looking to breathe life into your presentations, there are some basic things to keep in mind:

  • Cut text. Less is better.
  • Don’t read our your slides – they’re there to support what you are saying, not replace it.
  • Keep to one point per slide.
  • Use good images (studies even show that this improves retention!)

Blog post
Now that you’ve experimented with Prezi and various presentation-sharing tools, what do you think they could add to your work? Can you see yourself using them? Do you think they can help you find new audiences for your work?

Tag your post Thing 16.

Further reading

Thing 15 2013: Making and sharing podcasts and videos

By Popperipopp, via Wikimedia Commons

You will NOT need to make or upload a podcast or video to complete this thing, but this post should give you some idea of the tools available to do so; please take some time to explore these tools and think about how they might be useful to you. If you’re feeling brave, we do encourage you to try them out – even if it’s only for a brief screen capture or a video to introduce yourself. If you’d like to learn more about podcasting, there are still places available (at time of publishing) for the IT Learning Programme’s Podcasting at Oxford FAQs course on 26 November.

Making your own podcast or video can be fairly straightforward, and there are lots of free tools to make it easier and add bells and whistles. For now, we’ll deal separately with screencasts, which offer a video recording of action on a computer screen (with or without an audio track), and standard videos.

Screencasts
Screen capture tools allow you to make a video, often narrated, showing how to do something on a computer. They record your mouse as well as everything you click on and show on your screen. Screen capture is a great way for showing students, colleagues or a wider audience how to use an online tool.

There are a number of screencasting tools available, both free and for purchase. Many departments within the University use Adobe Captivate, which has some great features, but it isn’t free. It certainly isn’t necessary to spend lots of money to make a good screencast, however, and we’ll cover a couple free tools that do the job.

Some general tips:

  • Speak slowly and clearly
  • Write a script and run through what you’ll be demonstrating in advance

Screencast-o-matic
Screencast-o-matic is fairly intuitive, so you can get started right away. You may want to create an account (so that you can store and keep track of your videos), and you can also watch a short demo that walks you through the recording steps.

To begin, press ‘Start recording’ on the top right. A frame will appear (make sure Java is enabled – if this is an issue then you can download an app); you can drag and resize this frame to suit your needs, and you’ll also see some options for size, etc. Once you’re ready, simply press the red button and go. If you don’t want to record anything, make sure you mute your computer’s microphone (otherwise you’ll get a lot of white noise).

When you’ve finished, press the ‘done’ button and choose where to upload your video

Jing
You can download a free version of Jing. You will get a ‘Sun Launcher’ button on your screen.

Hover over the sun and choose ‘Capture’. Click and drag to select a portion of your screen, and then release the mouse when you are happy with the image you have selected.

From here, you can do two things: 1) take a still screenshot or 2) make a video. You can annotate your screenshots with text or arrows. When you’re happy with what you’ve done, click the ‘save’ button.

Other free screencast tools:

Video and audio recordings

If you want to make an audio podcast, you just need a relatively modern computer and a microphone. Many computers have built-in mics that will do the job, although you may find that investing in an external mic is worth it for the improved sound (use a USB mic designed for the job if you want to avoid extra purchases like an external sound card). You can use any standard tool on your computer to record your sound; Windows Sound Recorder on Windows is free, and many Macs come with Garageband. You can also download a free tool like Audacity, which will also give you tools to clean your recording up a bit (this can be useful if you’ve made any mistakes or want to piece together parts from different attempts). The JISC-funded Steeple project has a great tutorial on Audacity.

If you want to do a video podcast, you’ll need a video camera. This could be a simple USB webcam or something more expensive; you can even use your smartphone. Again, you can use Windows Movie Maker or iMovie if you want to stick to free tools.

Publishing your video or screencast
You can put your video up on a video hosting site such as YouTube or Vimeo, and these are often the best place to start. Once you’ve uploaded a video there, it’s easy to grab a code snippet that allows you to embed your file in a blog, on WebLearn or on another website.

If you’re in the University, you may want to take a look at IT Services’ guide to publishing your podcast. It gives guidance on using OXITEMS and RSS as well as what you need to keep in mind to be added to the University’s iTunes U page.

Other helpful notes
If you need copyright-appropriate images, clips or sounds/music to use in your podcasts, videos or presentations, there are some great search tools out there:

Blog post
This thing may require a lot of work, particularly if you haven’t used these tools before and want to give them a proper try. If you have used them, let us know what you thought and how they enhanced your research, teaching or other work. If you haven’t, explore them and let us know how you think you could use them. Please do upload sample of your videos, screen captures or podcasts – real examples are always welcome!

Tag your post Thing 15.

Further reading

 

Thing 14 2013: Exploring Wikipedia

Did you know?

  • There are over 4,300,000 articles on English Wikipedia
  • 7% of the planet reads Wikipedia
  • All content (including discussion and sandboxes) is public
  • 7% of edits are malicious and the median time for removal is <2 minutes
  • There is a special tag for dinosaur images that are anatomically inaccurate!

Wikipedia is the best example of what the ‘wisdom of crowds’ can achieve, although it is not without its detractors. To get an overview of the pros and cons, read the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia itself, and some of the pages linked to from it. Wikipedia is often criticized as inaccurate or unreliable, but it is in fact one of the biggest sources of factual information online, and studies have shown that in many cases its accuracy compares favourably to other established online encyclopedias (see Nature’s article ‘Internet encyclopedias go head to head’). Even controversial Wikipedia articles can offer an excellent picture of the controversy itself via an article’s discussion page. Like any encyclopedia, Wikipedia articles can be a great starting point for research.

Task
Many of you will already be familiar with Wikipedia itself and how to find information, but it pays to explore some of the article elements a bit further. Start by looking up some things that interest you; see what Wikipedia says. One of the most useful elements of Wikipedia is its strong citation policy. Look at the references linked at the bottom of the page – whatever the merits of the Wikipedia article itself, this can be a good starting point for research elsewhere on the web.

Many people are unaware of the ‘history’ tab (top right) and ‘talk’ tab (top left) for Wikipedia articles. These can make very interesting reading, particularly for controversial articles or subjects where there are strong opposing viewpoints, as you can see how the current version (and consensus) has been reached. Here, readers can suggest changes that they think should be made and argue their points; the discussion can get very in-depth and occasionally heated! Take a look at the discussion for a few articles.

Exploring further
Wikipedia is only as good as its authors, and we encourage you to give editing a Wikipedia page a try. It’s easier than you might think! Although you don’t have to have an account, we’d encourage you to set one up as it allows you to participate in discussions more easily and, though it may seem counterintuitive, allows you more anonymity (you can operate under a pseudonym with an account, but an anonymous edit records your IP address). Take a look at the Public Library of Science’s ‘Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia’ before you get started, and use Wikipedia’s markup cheat sheet as a guide.

Just one caveat: Do keep in mind that you’re not generally encouraged to edit information about your own company or organisation, as it may present a conflict of interest. If you’re worried about this, take a look at how the US National Archives have turned Wikipedia into a positive tool while avoiding these conflicts.

Blog post
What are your thoughts on Wikipedia as a source of information? Do you think it is reliable? Do you think that having the information on the history and talk pages available adds to your understanding of page topics? Tag your post Thing 14.

Further reading

Thing 13 2013: Finding presentations and podcasts

Broadcasts, lectures and other information formats such as slideshows are available online more than ever before, and they can be an important and useful source of information for your own current awareness as well as for your teaching and research.

YouTube isn’t all music videos: Clay Shirky’s TED talk – How social social media can make history

Podcasts are a great way to make available things like a series of talks, course lectures or training update videos. Podcasts are audio – or increasingly video – files broadcasted online (for example, recordings of radio programmes, lectures, readings, drama, interviews or music). You can usually listen to or view a podcast online, but they can also be downloaded, and you can usually subscribe to a series of podcasts via RSS so that it automatically downloads to your computer or mobile device (iTunes makes this easy).

Podcasts

Podcasts aren’t the only way to put presentations online, however; sites like Slideshare allow users to post presentations of all sorts. YouTube can also be a treasure trove of quality information.

Task
1. Find some podcasts, and pick one or two to subscribe to. Some places to start

2. Browse for presentations in your area of interest on Slideshare (or alternatives such as Note & Point and Speaker Deck.

3. Investigate research and presentation material on YouTube. Try the TEDTalks channel, course highlights from MIT, or the University’s channel.

Blog post
Blog about your experiences. Did you find podcasts or presentations you found useful? Why or why not? What podcast/slidedeck/lecture/video did you choose in step 4? Please include a link to it (extra credit: if you’re allowed to embed it, please do so!)

Tag your post Thing 13.