Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) deserves a much longer pean than I am going to give it here. A web-native application, it knocks the spots off EndNote. It is developed by researchers for researchers at the Center for History and New Media (http://chnm.gmu.edu/) at George Mason University and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It is a free, open source Firefox plug-in. Exporting your EndNote databases to Zotero is easy as pie. (Just do it!) A thousand references was a matter of seconds. They have just introduced a group feature which enables collaboration on collections. You can combine it with a web-based directory (I use JungleDisk) and have access to all your – and your group’s – full text articles from anywhere you have Firefox and an Internet connection. Zotero has scripts that allow “Cite while you write” (CWW) in MS Word *and* Open Office. And, unlike the EndNote CWW tool, Zotero’s actually works.

Zotero is one of the things that makes the Internet a good thing and is going in at the top of my favourite web apps.

The only quibble is that I find myself wishing sometimes it was not quite so closely coupled with the browser. It would be nice to be able to “break it out”. I wonder if anyone is writing a Flex version to run on Air?

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Next week I am on leave to try to crack my analytical framework and to structure what ever it is I may have found. Last week was discouraging. It has been really hard doing this part-time. Picking it up and putting it down: three steps forward two steps back. I have to reinvent myself as a researcher each time I return to the task.

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Sarah Chesney discusses the aims, ethos, key activities and the PS portfolio developed under the Flourish project. Evaluating the use of an eportfolio for CPD for admin and academic staff. Used to ease the admin burden and provide personal learning system (PLE?), within which is an eportfolio.

Academic model practice before students.

Over reliance on email and MSWord.

Duplicating information at:
- PDR
- REA
- VLE

Usability was key. Should I be using PPad for this report? Or consuming my Posterous in my PPad “blog”. PPad allows tagging of artefacts.

Eportfolios were not an instrument of monitoring and control.

PCTHE at Cumbria is done using PPad.

Posted via email from George’s posterous