Author Archives: Mark Sample
December 8, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
It’s the end of the fall semester and the beginning of December…That means it’s time for ProfHacker’s annual—and EPIC—holiday gift guide!
How EPIC?
EPIC enough for ALL CAPS. And more than a few exclamation points!!!
There’s sure to be something here for your loved ones, friends and neighbors, and just possibly yourself. We’ve got fun stuff, we’ve got work stuff. Gadgets, books, foodie favorites. And if you don’t see a gift idea here, take a look at our 2010 and even 2009 holiday gift guides. (more…)
December 1, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
I’ve previously highlighted a pedagogical framework for using Twitter in the classroom, as well as shared more practical advice for teaching with Twitter. Both of these posts came out of my early integration of Twitter in my classroom, way back in 2009. After taking a two-semester break from using Twitter in any of my courses, I’m back at it again this semester. Unlike previous semesters, when I had been using Twitter in an open-ended fashion, I have been much more focused this time around. Rather than trying to encourage the free-form dialogue I myself enjoy on Twitter, I’ve been giving my students very structured Twitter “assignments.”
For example, in October we watched Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic Blade Runner. Since I wasn’t screening the film in class, students would be watching it in all sorts of contexts: instant streaming from Netflix in the residence hall, on a…
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November 15, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
If it seems like we’ve been on a Zotero kick here on ProfHacker lately, it’s because, well, we have. Now that Zotero has an open API that developers can tap into, the Zotero ecosystem is growing in exciting ways. Today I want to introduce a small app that doesn’t require API access yet can really speed up how you use this Zotero: the free and open-source Qnotero.
Developed by Sebastiaan Mathôt, Qnotero runs in your Mac, Windows, or Linux system tray and provides lightning fast access to your Zotero references. Search by either title, name, or date, and a list of choices pops up faster than you can blink. The best part is, if there is a PDF attached to the reference, you can open that PDF in your default reader simply by clicking the PDF icon to the left of the reference. These two features—looking up references and then opening PDFs—are the only features of Qnotero, but the…
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November 8, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
Last week Ian MacInnes weighed the pros and cons of various note-taking and PDF-annotating apps for the iPad. One of the apps Ian mentioned was iAnnotate, which Jason had previously praised on ProfHacker. Since Jason’s post covered a much earlier version of iAnnotate, I thought it’d be worthwhile to revisit this powerful PDF tool, available for just under ten bucks in the Apple App Store.
One of the features that Jason had wanted for iAnnotate back in 2010—the ability to insert images into PDFs—is now included in iAnnotate. This means, for example, if you have a JPG of your signature in your photo library, you can insert it into PDFs on the iPad, thereby “signing” the documents. You do this by adding the image to your stamp library (accessed by the big rubber stamp icon in your toolbox).
Another feature of iAnnotate that I’ve found useful is the Mail Summary option (found by…
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October 25, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
I’ve written frequently on ProfHacker about ways to archive Twitter posts. For your personal Twitter stream, I heartily recommended the open-source ThinkUp. But for archiving hashtags—for example, a conference backchannel or a class Twitter stream—the answer is not so clear. Former ProfHacker favorite TwapperKeeper no longer supports exporting archives, meaning it’s difficult to make use of the TwapperKeeper archives in any analytically rigorous way. Other hashtag archiving services have disappeared too, as Twitter’s API’s terms of service has grown more restrictive.
A few weeks ago I suggested that using Twitter’s hidden RSS feed was perhaps the best way to continuously grab search results, and I showed how to hack a hashtag RSS feed. Now, I want to highlight the TwitterPad plugin for WordPress, which can import a Twitter RSS feed directly into WordPress.
Developed by…
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October 18, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
We’ve been on a Zotero streak at ProfHacker lately, writing about the Android apps Zandy and Scanner for Zotero, as well as ideas for taking better notes in Zotero. If you regularly attach PDFs or other document file types (TXT, RTF, DOC, etc.) to your Zotero items, then here is one more Zotero tool you ought to be aware of: ZotFile.
Developed by Joscha Legewie, a Columbia graduate student, ZotFile is a Firefox (or Standalone Zotero) extension that enhances—or awesomifies, as I’ve discovered—Zotero’s native attachment handling. ZotFile makes it easy to add, rename, and move attachments (for example, ZotFile will automatically add your most recently downloaded PDF as an attachment, and you can set up all sorts of automatic renaming conventions). ZotFile Reader is a complementary extension that—and this is so cool—can quickly send PDFs from Zotero to your iPad or other tablet…
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October 11, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
More and more of us are reading e-books on our Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and various other e-reader devices. Usually these are books we purchase from the big players in the e-book market or download from public domain collections such as Project Gutenberg.
But have you ever wanted to create your own e-book? Maybe it’s a Creative Commons book that only exists in HTML format. Or perhaps it’s a set of blog posts. Or maybe it’s a student’s dissertation. Or even your own research notes. How do you convert these into an e-book?
One answer is Sigil, a WYSIWYG open-source XML-based ePub editor.
Or, in plain English: Sigil makes making e-books a breeze.
Sigil runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s free. It looks a lot like a word processor. Simply by copying-and-pasting text from other sources or importing HTML, you can make an e-book in the open-standards ePub format. All of the major…
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October 4, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
It’s been years since I last used EndNote as my reference manager, but when I did, one of the features I appreciated most was its companion Palm app, allowing me to search, add to, and sync my EndNote library from my Palm Tungsten PDA (something else I haven’t used for years). Having all the sources in my citation library at my fingertips was incredibly useful, especially as I tracked down new sources at libraries and bookstores. Remember, this was in the days before ubiquitous wifi or smartphones.
Even now, there are many times when I need to look up a citation—or add a new one to my Zotero collection—and I don’t have ready access to a computer. What I needed was a Zotero app for my phone. I’m not the only one who wanted such a thing. Avram Lyon spent months “exhorting others to write clients for Zotero for platforms like Android and iOS” and when no one did, he wrote his own. …
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September 20, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
Last month senior Chronicle reporter Jennifer Howard wondered on Twitter about the best way to share a link from within the built-in iPad web browser. ProfHacker‘s own Jason Jones responded that an upcoming version of iOS would include a “tweet this link” function. Then I joined the conversation by noting that the free Diigo Browser app already has this feature. And, it turns out, many others that are worth sharing on ProfHacker.
First of all, let’s talk about the sharing. From the share button on the top Diigo Browser toolbar, you can instantly send a link to your Diigo bookmarks (of course), but also to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Evernote, Instapaper, and Read It Later—in short, to just about any social network you want. Try doing that with the current version of the Safari iPad browser (you can, actually, but it requires Javascript bookmarklets, which are a pain to set up).
In…
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September 12, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
Twitter has made it increasingly difficult to use RSS as a way to read individual user streams, and more crucially, hashtag streams. Perhaps this is not entirely Twitter’s fault, as RSS (Real Simple Syndication) has become more marginalized as a web tool (witness Firefox’s removal of the RSS icon from the location bar). These moves are a mystery to me, however, for RSS remains the unheralded workhorse of the web.
Why would you want to use RSS and Twitter together?
I can imagine several answers to this question, but I’ll highlight only one here (hoping that ProfHacker readers will supply more in the comments). Quite simply, RSS is a fantastic way to follow—and archive—Twitter search results, for say, a course hashtag.
This is exactly what I do. Whenever I use Twitter in a course, I follow the RSS feed of that hashtag with my desktop email client, which has a built-in RSS reader. …
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