I’m liking Citeulike

I signed up for citeulike some time ago, dumped my refworks library into it and didn’t do much more with it. I struggled to find similar users and was just starting out with delicious at the time and felt it more appropriate to bookmark articles that way than in a separate citation manager.

However, I came back to it recently when I was looking for a solution to a problem of how a group of us could keep a collected set of citations of our own work for re-use on grant applications, reports and so on. I remembered citeulike and set up a tag for us to use. I’m not sure how successful that will be as I’m not sure anyone else in the group is joining in (!) but it reminded me that you could subscribed to RSS generated by tags, and so I randomly decided to pull a feed from ‘plagiarism’ and have been delighted with the results.

There is a fair bit of duplication (not sure why) but over the last week I’ve found a rich mine of previously undisovered papers in journals I would never have looked in. I’ve always found searching for articles in pedagogic research problematic. Coming from a science background I get very frustrated when a nicely constructed pubmed search won’t find everything I need. Papers on education research seem to be spread far and wide and indexed in a highly distributed way (any advice on other’s search strategies gratefully received!). Looking at what other people in citeulike have tagged has been really eye-opening.

The other big advantage of using an RSS feed from citeulike has been the ease of transferring citations to refworks. Every bibliographic database seems to use a different system for providing citations and I can never remember which ones work and which ones just fall over. From google reader, one click to citeulike, click to copy reference into my library, then download the RIS file and upload to refworks, off to pick up the paper, print off and bob’s your uncle (as long as I actually get round to reading it!).

Testing testing

Testing blog app for wordpress from itouch. Photo added from library on the itouch.

Electronic voting special interest group

I’ve joined a group of staff from institutions around the country interested in the use of voting and other technologies that promote interaction with students in lectures and other teaching situations. We are hoping to set up a Special Interest Group (SIG) around this topic and have just had an online meeting about getting started.

Having wrangled a name for the group: ESTICT : Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (yes, I know it’s a mouthful, but we didn’t want to limit it to just PRS/EVS voting technology) and next we want to promote it and hold our first event before the end of this calendar year. We will be looking to promote the use of any technologies used in HE to encourage interaction and engagement with an audience, including electronic voting systems. The focus will be practitioner-based and we aim to share and promote best practice.

We are looking for places to find funding for our events, so if anyone has an suggestions, please get in touch!