Monday, May 7, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Zotero Project Presentation and Progress
Zotero Presentation
Below is a copy of my presentation to the F/OSS course on my project involving contributing to the Zotero Community and introducing Zotero to teachers (and students) in the high school setting.This week in the Zotero Project
I've been delving farther into the public documentation for Zotero. There are a number of links that are no longer valid and lead to "404"s. I decided that I would contact each of the institutions involved, explain the situation and ask them if they have new valid links or if they wish the links to be removed.In a couple of situations, the institutions were not aware that there were still links to their sites. For example, the reference librarian at the University of Baltimore, Langsdale Library had put up a tutorial page in 2010 but the page is no longer live.
In addition, I am working on a "quick start" guide for the K12 community that will allow teachers to get up and running with Zotero accounts that are specifically intended for use with K12 students and classes without have to work their way through the mass of existing documentation and the frustration of dead academic links.
Zotero Project in the School
I am continuing to work on the Rapid Prototyping of my instructional design for the summer pilot I will be offering. One of the things I have found out is that the digital skill level of many of the teachers has progressed in the past two years. The last major implementation I did was to introduce a Google Apps subdomain. At that time, the level of comfort with learning online applications was very inconsistent. Some teachers were able to use many of the tools with very little introduction but many others were bewildered by the idea of online collaboration and knowledge production. The teachers with whom I have been working during the past few weeks have been able to apprehend the basic features of Zotero very quickly. They are also very excited about the possibilities for collaborative activities that Zotero provides.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Zotero Project - Piloting to Teachers & Students
Piloting with teachers & Students - "rapid prototyping" of instruction
Because of the time constraints imposed by both the K12 and the University academic calendars, I decided to spend a fair amount of time "rapidly prototyping" my instructional design for introducing the Zotero tool to the high school faculty and students.
Rapid Prototyping
Rapid Prototyping is an alternate approach to the traditional instructional design. A prototype is an early phase of a system that has the same key feature components of the "real" thing. In ID technology,allows greater flexibility in defining the goals and form of instruction at early stages.(Wilson & Cole, 1993) Designers may opt to use Rapid Instructional Design (or Rapid Prototyping) when the following are factors:• Time• Budget• Environmental restraintsWhen instructional designers are confronted with these demands, the use of rapid prototyping methodologies "should reduce production time because: (a)using working models of the final product early in a project tends to eliminate time-consuming revisions later on, and (b)design tasks are completed concurrently, rather than sequentially throughout the project." (Jones and Richey, 2000) With RP, the steps are crunched together to reduce the amount of time needed to develop training or a product. The design and development phases are done simultaneously and the formative evaluation is done throughout the process. (from Wikibooks )
My goal with the first part of this process was to identify a teacher and a few students with a clear and specific need for the types of tools provided by the Zotero application and introduce them to an introduction and overview that will enable them to 1-understand the nature of what Zotero does; 2-introduce the teacher to the process of creating an account and a group library; and 3-provide them with a working knowledge that will enable them to get started using the tool.
The other part of this process was for me to gain understanding of how I need to modify and present instruction that is clear and efficacious when working with larger groups of teachers. What I'm trying to do is to sequence and simplify the instructional steps in learning to use this rather complex tool for referencing, citation, and collaborative research into steps that are within the grasp of both teachers and students who may not have extensive prior knowledge with working with online/cloud-based tools.
I was very fortunate this week in having a teacher in my school who is just beginning to work with a cohort of students who will be researching topics to present as science fair projects. They will be meeting all summer to plan and share and to prepare to produce their projects. Fortuitously, this teacher had been looking for a tool that would allow her students to both find research references and to share those references. When I sketched out to her some of the uses for Zotero, her eyes lit up and she invited me to give her some of the basics of its use that she could then use with her students and their research.I first demonstrated for her some of the ways in which I have used Zotero. I then had her create a free account, showed her how to use both the Zotero plug-in for Firefox and the standalone for Safari, and then had her create a shared group library. The teacher was very excited and went home to try to work through some of the online documentation on her own.
Some of the information I found was what I had expected. When I worked with the teacher the next day, she mentioned that she felt the documentation online was rather confusing and she had difficulty in doing some of the tasks that she had tried. Specifically, she wanted to try citing references from within Microsoft Word. One of the things I found was that I will be able to break up the instruction in ways that should be easy to apprehend or teachers. I'm continuing to work with this teacher and she has begun to introduce Zotero to her science fair students.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Zotero Project - Introducing to teachers
Zotero Project - piloting with individual teachers... first steps
I've also been trying to provide the taxpayers of the State of Hawaii with a reasonable return on their investment in me.
As far as my Zotero Project is concerned, I've been spending time working with a few teachers on an individual basis. One of the keys to school change (or social change, or even revolution) is the thousand individual conversations that share ideas and visions.
Specifically, I worked with one Science teacher and a Curriculum Coordinator on how to set up Zotero on their computers and establish a free account. I have met with each about four times during the past week. We are now working on setting up shared libraries and developing collaborative projects for students involving group research and presentation. I've been working with the individual teachers as a kind of a pilot in order to better address the specific needs of high school teachers when I design the instructional module for larger groups. The Science teacher particularly wanted to learn how to use Zotero as she will be teaching AP Environmental Science for the first time next year and has already gotten her students together to begin their research on specific topics and to begin work on environmental projects.
Software Review - the ChronoZoom Project
A Timeline of Everything - Really, Everything
Project Overview
ChronoZoom is an intuitive on-line tool used to visualize all of time, from the Big Bang to today, using the concept of zooming along the timeline to express distance to highlight the scope of time.
ChronoZoom is an intuitive on-line tool used to visualize all of time, from the Big Bang to today, using the concept of zooming along the timeline to express distance to highlight the scope of time.
When you see ChronoZoom zoom from the Industrial Revolution all the way back to the Big Bang, you can visualize time in a new way. You can browse through history on ChronoZoom to find data in the form of articles, images, video, sound, and other multimedia. ChronoZoom links a wealth of information from five major regimes that unifies all historical knowledge collectively known as Big History.
The regimes of Big History are:
- Cosmos
- Earth
- Life
- Human Pre-History
- Human History.
By drawing upon the latest discoveries from many different disciplines, you can visualize the temporal relationships between events, trends, and themes. Some of the disciplines that contribute information to ChronoZoom include biology, astronomy, geology, climatology, prehistory, archeology, anthropology, economics, cosmology, natural history, and population and environmental studies.
ChronoZoom is a collaborative effort of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research, and originally Microsoft Live Labs.
Detailed Project Description
The last 20 years has seen the emergence of a new discipline invented by the Australian historian, David Christian, called Big History. The aim of Big History is to unify all knowledge of the past into a single field of study. Big History invites humanistic scholars and historical scientists from fields like geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and cosmology to work together in developing the broadest possible view of the past.
The last 20 years has seen the emergence of a new discipline invented by the Australian historian, David Christian, called Big History. The aim of Big History is to unify all knowledge of the past into a single field of study. Big History invites humanistic scholars and historical scientists from fields like geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and cosmology to work together in developing the broadest possible view of the past.
Big History is proving to be an excellent framework for designing undergraduate synthesis courses that attract outstanding students. A serious problem in teaching such courses is conveying the vast stretches of time from the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago to the present, and clarifying the wildly different time scales of cosmic history, Earth and life history, human prehistory, and human history.
Our first conception of ChronoZoom was that it should dramatically convey the scales of history, and the first version does in fact do that. To display the scales of history from a single day to the age of the Universe requires the ability to zoom smoothly by a factor of ~1013, and doing this with raster graphics was a remarkable achievement of the team at Live Labs. The immense zoom range also allows us to embed virtually limitless amounts of text and graphical information
ChronoZoom, by letting us move effortlessly through this enormous wilderness of time, getting used to the differences in scale, should help to break down the time-scale barriers to communication between scholars.
References
Chronozoom site
http://www.chronozoomproject.org/
Chronozoom information
http://www.chronozoomproject.org/BehindTheScenes.htm
Chronozoom CodePlex site
http://chronozoom.codeplex.com
Chronozoom latest source (5apr12)
http://chronozoom.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/13058#286111
Timelines of World HistoryChronozoom site
http://www.chronozoomproject.org/
Chronozoom information
http://www.chronozoomproject.org/BehindTheScenes.htm
Chronozoom CodePlex site
http://chronozoom.codeplex.com
Chronozoom latest source (5apr12)
http://chronozoom.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/13058#286111
http://timelines.ws/
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Finding information and fixing links
Finding information and fixing links
This week, I have been focusing my efforts primarily on the 2nd part of my project, the adoption of Zotero in the public high school as a tool for bibliographic research and as a tool for collaborative research.
One of the things that has become immediately apparent as I've been researching how different institutions have adopted Zotero is that I have been able to find very little information about the use of Zotero or similar proprietary applications such as and note in the K-12 setting. As I've been looking at some of the users guides both at the Zotero organization site and at other sites, one of my 1st impressions is that these guides really have limited utility for K-12 teachers and students. That is to say, that many of the instructional guides that are appropriate in the university setting seem to be somewhat confusing when transferred to the K-12 environment.
One of the steps that I took this week in preparation for my introduction to teachers and students was to let myself be interviewed by one of the editors of the school newspaper and news website. what I did was to provide her a brief demonstration of how Zotero can be used to find and organize bibliographic data as well is to provide a shared library for collaborative efforts. She was quite excited to see this as the school has traditionally required that students who are researching various topics 1st compile stacks of 3 x 5 index cards in order to organize their references. She's in the process now of writing an article about Zotero as a tool that can be of great value to high school students and this article should run in the next online edition of our school newspaper. I expect this will begin to generate more interest among students as well as among teachers.
As I was looking over the “ adopt Zotero documentation” page, I found several of the links to educational institutions were no longer valid. Since I have editor rights, one of the things that I will be doing later today is seeing it this information has moved or if it's been removed altogether in which case I'll either fix the link or delete the link.
One of the institutions that has fairly extensive documentation about the use of Zotero is the Georgia State University Library.
On this site is a fairly useful YouTube video that I may be able to incorporate into my own instructional materials for the high school.
Zotero Flyer (pdf)
Zotero Mini Users' Guide (pdf)
This week, I have been focusing my efforts primarily on the 2nd part of my project, the adoption of Zotero in the public high school as a tool for bibliographic research and as a tool for collaborative research.
One of the things that has become immediately apparent as I've been researching how different institutions have adopted Zotero is that I have been able to find very little information about the use of Zotero or similar proprietary applications such as and note in the K-12 setting. As I've been looking at some of the users guides both at the Zotero organization site and at other sites, one of my 1st impressions is that these guides really have limited utility for K-12 teachers and students. That is to say, that many of the instructional guides that are appropriate in the university setting seem to be somewhat confusing when transferred to the K-12 environment.
One of the steps that I took this week in preparation for my introduction to teachers and students was to let myself be interviewed by one of the editors of the school newspaper and news website. what I did was to provide her a brief demonstration of how Zotero can be used to find and organize bibliographic data as well is to provide a shared library for collaborative efforts. She was quite excited to see this as the school has traditionally required that students who are researching various topics 1st compile stacks of 3 x 5 index cards in order to organize their references. She's in the process now of writing an article about Zotero as a tool that can be of great value to high school students and this article should run in the next online edition of our school newspaper. I expect this will begin to generate more interest among students as well as among teachers.
As I was looking over the “ adopt Zotero documentation” page, I found several of the links to educational institutions were no longer valid. Since I have editor rights, one of the things that I will be doing later today is seeing it this information has moved or if it's been removed altogether in which case I'll either fix the link or delete the link.
One of the institutions that has fairly extensive documentation about the use of Zotero is the Georgia State University Library.
 |
| GSU Library |
On this site is a fairly useful YouTube video that I may be able to incorporate into my own instructional materials for the high school.
From the Zotero.org "Use Cases" page
"Let's say your audience is writing a five-page research paper with five works cited. Zotero's most basic features are likely all they'll need. “See it, Save it, Cite it”. The most obvious way for these students to go about conducting their research is to consult books from their school library. Zotero is compatible with most online catalogs, so you can show them how to use this capability to add items to their library. This can be done by saving selected items from a search or individual items.
Once the items are part of the student's Zotero library, they'll need to cite them. Explain how to set Zotero's default citation style in the Preference window's Export tab. At this point, the easiest way for them to create bibliographies would be to use Zotero's drag-and-drop functionality. Instruct them to simply select the items they wish to cite and drag those items into their word processor. The bibliography should appear, properly formatted with the style they selected earlier. The same can be achieved by using the appropriate keyboard shortcut to cut and paste the bibliography or by right-clicking the items and choosing “Create Bibliography from Selected Item(s)…”.
It's worth encouraging faculty whose students will be using Zotero to employ Smart Bibliographies. This simply means that their online lists of references will be easily readable by Zotero. This is simple to do. The following link should get both you and them started:"
http://www.zotero.org/blog/bibliographies-and-syllabi-just-got-smarter/
Zotero Flyer (pdf)
Zotero Mini Users' Guide (pdf)
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Zotero Project - Preliminaries 1
beginning the journey...
This has been a pretty crazy week with demands on my time coming from all directions. I have however, been able to begin the preliminary part of my project which involves contributing to the Zotero Project by reviewing and editing discussion and documentation and by creating an instructional module that will introduce high school teachers at my work site to the uses of Zotero as a tool for research, citation, and collaboration.
Zotero Project 1
I have been familiarizing myself with the various forms of documentation to be found on the Zotero Project site. This week, I've looked at the Wiki, Forums, and some of the FAQ sections and have been learning the process for editing existing documents and creating new ones.
One of the things that jumps out at me as a K12 public school administrator is that there seems not to be user documentation that addresses some of the specific needs of high school teachers. Teachers will use a solution if they see it to be valuable to their craft and if they can access it and use its features without having to spend a great deal of time wading through arcane and abstruse documents dealing with features that they will not have occasion to utilize.
Zotero Project 2
The section titled "Adopt Zotero at your institution" has some specific suggestions and provides some exemplars for materials used by some institutions to introduce Zotero and encourage its adoption. I am working through these and pulling out sections that I feel may be useful to me. I am also researching to see if other secondary sites have documented their introduction and adoption of this tool
Most of the information available seems to involve post-secondary use of Zotero as a tool. My feeling is that high school students need exposure to and familiarity with tools like this before undertaking college-level studies. It's beginning to seem that helping to fill this void may have the potential to have an impact beyond my particular work site.
Recall: My areas of specific interest and contribution -
This has been a pretty crazy week with demands on my time coming from all directions. I have however, been able to begin the preliminary part of my project which involves contributing to the Zotero Project by reviewing and editing discussion and documentation and by creating an instructional module that will introduce high school teachers at my work site to the uses of Zotero as a tool for research, citation, and collaboration.
Zotero Project 1
I have been familiarizing myself with the various forms of documentation to be found on the Zotero Project site. This week, I've looked at the Wiki, Forums, and some of the FAQ sections and have been learning the process for editing existing documents and creating new ones.
One of the things that jumps out at me as a K12 public school administrator is that there seems not to be user documentation that addresses some of the specific needs of high school teachers. Teachers will use a solution if they see it to be valuable to their craft and if they can access it and use its features without having to spend a great deal of time wading through arcane and abstruse documents dealing with features that they will not have occasion to utilize.
Zotero Project 2
Most of the information available seems to involve post-secondary use of Zotero as a tool. My feeling is that high school students need exposure to and familiarity with tools like this before undertaking college-level studies. It's beginning to seem that helping to fill this void may have the potential to have an impact beyond my particular work site.
Recall: My areas of specific interest and contribution -
Document and Support
You don't need to be a programmer to help with documentation and support.
- Edit the wiki to make the documentation more useful and concise
- Work the forums to answer questions and support new users
- Test, test, test and tell us what doesn't work for you
- Adopt Zotero at your institution
additionally, I will be exposing a broader audience to this solution...
Spread the Word
If you love Zotero, tell the world about it. Here are some ideas to get you started.
- Pick up some FREE stickers and stick them wherever eyes gaze
- Add a Zotero button to your website
- Give a demo at your institution
- Review Zotero on your blog or on Zotero's Mozilla Add-ons page
- Sport some Zotero gear
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