15: Managing Research Data

Check out the Mantra course- are there any takeaway messages from this site?

I liked the Mantra course, found it quite helpful. I’m someone that’s all about good file management, naming conventions, etc. This course proves that it really is important (not just for neat freaks). You might need to justify your research years later so you need to have documentation that you can easily dig up. In an environment with a big focus on repositories and open access it’s also important to make your research make sense to others who download your data.

14: Reference Management Tools

Are you using a reference management program? If so, which one do you prefer and why? Any recommendations for other programs?

I’ve recently committed to EndNote. I’m studying through CSU and they have a subscription. I was hesitant at first because it seemed like too much work to set it up, but once you do it’s very good. It takes a lot of the pain out of referencing.

Part of my hesitancy was because I like to save my assignments to Dropbox and work on my iPad on the train etc. The Cite-while-you-write feature adds coding to your word document and I was worried that it would break if I opened it on an iPad or in the Dropbox editor. I was pleased to find out that it doesn’t.

I’ve also used RefME (a tool ACU academic skills have promoted) – it allows you build libraries of references and generate references according to a selected citation style. There’s a phone/tablet app which allows you to scan the barcode of a book and it will generate the citation information, which I think is a cool feature. No cite-while-you-write type integration though, which is the most helpful thing about Endnote.

13 : Presenting Your Research

Pick a presentation tool, preferably one you haven’t used before. Explore. Think about when or how you might or might not use these sites, and explain their use to a researcher.

Slideshare
I picked Slideshare because I often find slideshare presentations from Googling something, but I haven’t explored it as a tool before. Here are my thoughts:

• It makes your stuff findable. Audience doesn’t need to be “on” SlideShare to find it easily (many views come in through other means such as Google searches – e.g. me)
• It puts your contact details via LinkedIn in a prominent position which makes it easy people to contact you if they like your research/presentation
• Social media functionality – comments, sharing, “liking”, tagging, profile building
• It really is “YouTube for Slideshows” – easy to use, lots of content to explore. It even has that familiar column of related videosslideshares with thumbnails on the right hand side.
• You can put together “clipboards” of other people’s slides, which is an interesting way to collate interesting things that you find.

Prezi
Not really part of the activity, but I thought I should give my two cents on Prezi since I said I would in one of the previous “things” – I like it, but I have seen it done badly. Sometimes it seems like the presenter is using it because someone told them it’s “better than Powerpoint”. If they’ve got a linear presentation, i.e. one point after another, a slide-based presenting tool is more suitable. Prezi has this spatial style of moving around and zooming in and out, I agree with the material in the “thing” – unless it’s used to enhance the storyline of the presentation, it can confuse and create motion sickness! However, if the movement is used to match the argument, it can be awesome. e.g., moving up in steps, moving around a map, as shown below (these are standard templates)

12: Digital (Social media) Curation and Content Aggregation

Do you use an aggregator/curator? Which one and why?

I recently noticed a new IOS9 news app on my iPad which aggregates content. When I launched it, it asked me to select my favourite newspapers, websites, and topics, and it creates a curated news feed based on that. I thought it was cool, and it’s easy to use. Here’s a post about it. Unlike an RSS feed aggregator there’s not a great deal of control over what goes into the reader, which could be a positive (if you want to browse / be surprised) or a negative (if you want to follow specific stories).

I also add RSS feeds to Outlook, including 23 research things! I used to use Google Reader, I don’t follow as many blogs as I used to. But there are lots of RSS readers to chose from.