Seminar for NUS Librarians
“Digital library, web2.0 and shareware contributions to LSM1103 Animal Behaviour lectures.”
By N. Sivasothi, Dept. Biological Sciences. Wed 23 Apr 2008: 3pm - 5pm.
Abstract - Slides
See also these notes from a workshop conducted in 2006 - Web2.0 for teachers
Links mentioned during the talk
(document preparation still in progress, 28 Apr 2008)
Part 0 - Preamble
Nature of Animal Behaviour science
Common sequence when researching a topic:
- Books still important!
- Looking up basic information about a species important, I have some favourites, e.g.
- Animal Diversity Web (University of Michigan Museum of Zoology).
- Wikipedia can be very helpful (evaluate based on sources cited);
- Understanding Evolution (University of California at Berkeley's Museum of Palaeontology - UCMP)
- Google, Google Scholar.
- Some research labs provide useful overviews.
- Then on to synthesising information from scientific papers.
Part I - Common shareware and web2.0 tools I use
Textpander - http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/ [Windows:
- Critical in adding that NUS digital library proxy URL to a journal page; during intense use this is priceless!
- textpander does more than what most abbreviation managers do.
- It allows you to build pre-defined snippets of text and graphics.
- I also use
-
http://del.icio.us/- I use this to bookmark the webpages I refer to in preparation of a lecture.
- To each webpage, I add keywords (tags) that let me and others find, e.g.
- I see what else people are looking at by viewing the "popular" and "all" ilnks. It's really good for IT but less so for other subjects until there is greater use.
- I fond a great link for my echolocation class using this method - the Extraordinary People series on Ben Underwood - the boy who echolocates. His webpage has more. It led to my reading of accounts of echolocation amongst hearing-impaired children. I was able to add this interesting topic to my echolocation lectures with the additional lesson of perseverance and his life theme, "I'm not blind, I just can't see!"
YEP (US$35) - touted as the iTunes for pdf. A tad bit expensive for shareware though!
- With pdfs mounting up, this is an elegant tool for recalling pdfs.
- You can annotate pdfs so I add notes to indicate why I use a specific paper.
- Alternatives; if you need bibliographic referencing software, see Wikipedia for a comparison.
Other software (go shopping!)Flickr -
http://flickr.com/- Photo sharing, searching for photos.
- Tagging, sharing, topical and popular links similar to del.icio.us.
- I am slowly replacing my old photos with very good, high quality photos which are free for educational use (or I write to ask).
- I try to always let image providers know (immediately) when I use their photos in a lecture.
- This small gesture of thanks encourage them. Wouldn't you like to be thanked?
- Pass it on - I also provide a lot of content under a Creative Commons License or to site like FishBase.org
- Must just remember to edit iicense settings - default is "All rights reserved"
Creative Commons -
http://creativecommons.org/- Sharing content used to be between Public Domain (completely free) and All Rights Reserved (completely restricted).
- This introduces "Some Rights Reserved".
- E.g. content on Habitatnews is released as "free to share and remix" under conditions of attribution-noncommercial-share alike
Getting the NewsPersonal (mannual) aggregations
Other blogs mentioned
Part II - Using Video- How I used to find video
- Lisa Rein's Radar
- The Daily Show hosts its own and better indexed
- YouTube - hornets from hell; correlation with publication "unusual thermal defense"
- Grabbing video - Tooble, Youtube MP4 download
Part II - Module Blog (not done)