Ref Tech Rob

I have spent a lot of time over the past month developing my Personal Learning Environment (PLE). I would say it's a Personal Learning Network (PLN), but I'm trying to expand the scope of what I do, so that I have something I can bring to the table. I have a focused Twitter list for people who are involved in Education Technology, Education, or the study of Creativity . The top tweets from that list are sent to a special issue of the Tweeted Times . The feed from that paper is added to my eLearning feeds in Google Reader . I select promising articles from this list and send them to Pocket for reading on a kindle throughout the day. As I check items off, they are sent to Diigo for curation. Finally, each day's eLearning links are automatically published as a list on my blog. I feel very informed, but I have yet to do much with the information I gather. I admit that, although I am a librarian, I am approaching this from more of a hobbyist's perspective. I'm dev...

Image by Matrixizationized via Flickr As readers of my blog may have noticed, I'm a heavy Google user. I use Google as my primary search engine, I use GoogleDocs , Blogger , Gmail, GoogleVoice, etc., and I eagerly await an invitation to try out Wave. When Google Chrome was released, I immediately downloaded it and started using it exclusively for awhile. I have noticed that I'm using it less every day, though, so I thought I'd take a look at my usage patterns to see if I could identify the source of my discontent. The first, and probably most important, thing I noticed was that I rely on a large number of Firefox extensions: Delicious, FireShot, Zotero , ScribeFire , WebNotes , Zemanta , Twitter Bar....My Firefox browser has become my Personal Learning Environment (PLE). At this point, Chrome offers very little of this functionality, although that may change. Secondly, although Chrome loads much faster than Firefox, and renders pages faster, there are pages that ...

My wife has asked me to help her in the creation of a research skills class for the homeschool co-op we participate in. I accepted, but the challenge has reminded me of how much I do is on the spur of the moment or off the top of my head. I decided it would be in my best interests to create a formal Personal Learning Environment (PLE). I will try to document my efforts over the next few weeks. I have a few articles and documents I have collected over the last two years and I will try to make those available here, either through links or references. The first thing I have done, however, is to make sure that my Firefox browser is equipped with the latest versions of Zotero , Scribefire , FireShot , and Delicious plugins. Zotero allows me to capture web pages and journal articles, as well as the accompanying bibliographic information. Scribefire allows me to create blog entries on the fly without actually signing into my blog account. FireShot is an excellent screen capture utility. I can...