Ref Tech Rob

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...

My little experiment with the portable apps on a stick didn't work so well in the end. Not only does the network interfere with my ScribeFire application, it also resets the bookmarks, toolbars, and extensions in Firefox when I switch computers. I will need to use a laptop if I want access to my favorite applications, and I want to keep my data with me.

I think that I have ScribeFire working-but it only works at home. Apparently, I can't get it through the network at work. Bummer.

As many of you know, MPOW has a very active filtering system. They haven't blocked sites totally, but trying to use services like IM, Google services and anything else that's AJAXy can be a real pain in the butt. I find myself instructing patrons and saying things like, "on a regular computer this would work," or, "what you should have seen at this point is...." Needless to say, that gets old. I cannot teach classes where I just show the patrons how to do something--they have to use their imaginations. Anyway, I'm trying to build a collection of portable apps on a thumb drive that will allow me to show our patrons how to do things without some of the network restrictions on downloads. So far, I have Portable Firefox with The following add-ons: ScribeFire , Zotero , Meebo , del.icio.us , FireShot , a MindMeister shortcut, and the Google Toolbar. I have made my iGoogle page the homepage for this experiment and added gadgets for todo lists, Gmail, Google...