Working with Zotero Standalone (Alpha)

Looking over the Zotero forums just now, I see that other people have had problems with Chrome as well. This is why it’s alpha, though. When it comes to tips and guides, do you want tips on Zotero Standalone, or on Zotero more generally?

I see that other people have had problems with Chrome as well. I teach a continuing education class
for teachers. It is an Independent Travel Study-Actual or Virtual Via the Computer and it works better with Firefox.

Zotero for FireFox is incredible. I have taught workshops on it to faculty at my institution, and the response is nearly universal – “Wow, I wish I’d known about this sooner”. Let’s hear if for Free/Open-Source folks, EndNote is dead.

Read the AAUP’s letter I have. What would happen if the University, i.e. SUNY Albany, simply replied “No.”? Or are they bound by some clause in their collective bargaining agreement with the AAUP to allow and cooperate with this “investigating” committee?

While actions such as those being taken at SUNY-Albany are often necessary, it is still important that the decision process involves all of the stakeholders affected. As the president of a university union I often hear responses such as the one offered by rightwingprofessor until one of them is caught up in the problem. Then they want help and they want someone to step in for them One key to avoiding that situation is to ensure that meaningful input is revceived from all sectors prior to the decision being made. Not all unions are involved in “soaking” their institutions and many work collaborately with the administration and Boards of Directors to do what is best for the institution.

I’ve tried the alpha version and am still not really happy with Zotero. I’m willing to hack a lot of things, but when it comes to an asset such as a source database, I don’t have the time or patience to deal with something that doesn’t work immediately.

That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate the work that’s going into the program – I admire it very much. But I just need something that works and doesn’t leave me waiting for additional features.

Why do you think RefWorks is declining? It’s very popular at my site (we have a campus-wide license) even with undergraduates. I have tried Zotero in FF on my Mac several times but I find whenever I have it on, I start to have lots of odd stability problems that go away when I disable it. It has never been anything I could troubleshoot methodically enough to report properly but a definite pattern. I’m looking forward to a standalone Zotero if that means I can use it with my non-primary web browser (e.g. Chrome) and leave my all-important FF instance alone, since only a very tiny portion of my FF use ever has anything to do with collecting citations – I can always just do that stuff in Chrome.

What I said about RefWorks is just an impression – with Zotero and Mendeley becoming increasingly sophisticated and able to deal with more sites, RefWorks is just looking weaker and weaker. I rarely see people say enthusiastic things about RefWorks – and it seems incredibly vulnerable to Universities canceling their subscriptions. Endnote seems to have more of a loyal following, is able to deal with some more elaborate things (journal abbreviations, multiple bibliographies etc.) and at least people without an institutional subscription don’t have to pay a recurring fee – I still think it’s bad software, but I wouldn’t want to predict its demise. With RefWorks I’d be surprised if it’s still around as a major player in 10 years.

kosbot – that’s an odd comment to add to a post about a version of Zotero that’s not tied to Firefox… the whole point of the standalone and the “Everywhere” idea is to broaden the appeal. And yes, the alpha version isn’t completely there yet, but there is no reason to think that it won’t get there.

There were many good reasons to tie Zotero to Firefox initially – Chrome didn’t exist, Safari didn’t have extensions, neither did IE etc… and now that that situation has changed – and the mozilla based technical tools like xulrunner have made the standalone possible without a prohibitive amount of development time – the project has reacted.

And there are also good reasons _not_ to be entirely agnostic about software and platform. There is a trade-off involved. The more generic a piece of software is, the less tightly it integrates with any given piece of software: The only way to get high-quality citations into documents, for example, is to interface directly with the respective word processors.

I don’t know of any publisher that would be worried if snippets were used in this HathiTrust project, but I understand the caution that the group is taking in light of the uncertainty surrounding the now-in-limbo Google Settlement.—Sandy Thatcher

It is my understanding of the agreements ( October 12, 2006 and July 9, 2009) between Google and their fully participating libraries that the libraries (in my case the University of Wisconsin) receive only one digital copy of the work from Google. The University of Wisconsin gave their copy to the HathiTrust. I feel that all the unauthorized copies (the one kept by Google and the one given to the university) of my book created by Google were pirated works.

 Simple Question: I’ve downloaded the stand alone and the Chrome plug-in but see nothing on my Chrome browser that I can click to save a web page in Zotero. In Firefox you’ve got the work “Zotero” in the bottom right-hand corner, you click on it, Zotero opens and you save the page. How do you do this from Chrome???

12018010 – Agreed and as soon as our nation, and the Supreme Court, insure equal protection under the law to those students who are denied equal access to educational opportunity beginning at the kindergarten level all the way through to the senior year of high school, then the need for affirmative action will be decreased substantially.  How can our nation, with a good conscience as it proclaims equality under the law, allow for concentrated poverty in so many of our major urban areas as well as the extreme poverty experienced by so many rural areas?  These conditions dictate substandard educational opportunity to the children who live in those communities.  These communities are created under the laws of our land.  Surely, if we are sincere in our desire to treat all as equal, then we should be committed to insuring that African-American, Latino, Native American and other children are not denied access the educational programs whose quality “levels the playing field” for all because of economic injustice.  Anything short of that is continued hypocrisy and a failure to honor our national commitment to equality.

In the meantime, I think the class-based affirmative action Kahlenberg advocates is certainly an acceptable option given our social reality.  However, I have to wonder how long before opponents of equality begin crying “class warfare” in response to this reasonable and appropriate proposition.

I was under the impression that a college was there to provide higher education to those who choose to go, not to demonstrate diversity by themselves being racist.  :-/

I don’t really care how many time Richard brings up using socioeconomic status to create racial diversity, the plan will not work. I don’t like trying to downplay the anxieties of a white society who does not want to give up total power by dressing up the issue of race in another form–racial preferences came into play in order to open doors of opportunity for groups routinely excluded from the benefits of higher education. The point is that the door of opportunity will just not stay open; it keeps closing. I wish he would stop forcing this issue. Repeating the rationale over and over does not make it right.

So socioeconomic status doesn’t create racial diversity, so what? What’s better, to have an undergraduate student body composed of students from rich, well-off, middle-class, working-class and outrightly poverty-stricken backgrounds, regardless of race (in which there *will* be racial diversity), or an undergraduate student body cosmetically more varied in skin color, but essentially looking like a collection of racially diverse models from a Gap catalogue?

And for cjones, I reiterate from my previous comment:

Bottom line: In the zero-sum game of college admissions, it is simply
impossible to give an advantage (extra points, “holistic consideration,”
etc.) to applicants of certain races, without imposing a corresponding
disadvantage (subtraction of points, a negative “holistic”
consideration, etc.) to applicants of certain other races. Those applied
disadvantages on account of race constitute racial discrimination.
Proponents of racial AA may say that such racial discrimination is
justified by the need for reparations for past treament of certain
races, or by the alleged education benefit of “diversity,” or by the
existence of inequalities in K-12 education, but they can’t deny that
racially-based AA is, in undeniable fact, racial discrimination.

;-)

As divisive and sensitive an issue as AA has been, transparency has never been a frank ideal in the process. One way to move in that direction would be to acknowledge that AA requires ‘preferences’, but that preferences themselves must be concisely defined and categorized. They must, in this course, be hierarchal as well. That means that a middle-class female applicant (in any medium where AA is applied) with opportunities most persons might envy does not deserve equal status in terms of priority of preference as an equally intellectually promising Black youth (male or female) from a poor household in a depressed urban neighborhood led by a single mother. Indeed, the latter circumstances should instruct a rational hierarchy aimed at quantifying urgency of need wedded to salience of historical deprivation. The end of the Civil War merely began 100 years of oppression, and particularly in the deep South, terrorist suppression of Black humanity. However, this predicate logic of AA must combine actual individual circumstances with generic membership categories. It is now and always has been absurd to consider an applicant who is Black and has affluent parents and attended good suburban schools to hold the same status in AA calculus as such a Black applicant as described previously. The very logic of analytical categorization requires that we begin by identifying the individual attributes of greatest merit and need for action – and I submit that the latter applicant, and most closely allied, a Native American applicant living in abject poverty, either in rural America at large or on a Reservation without economic resources to have raised member families to upper-middle class status, would lead at the apex of this hierarchy. Nor do I propose that such priorities be propounded by law, either statute, regulation, or judicial fiat, but rather as a logical process, in this case, among fair-minded institutions. The biggest problem here, perhaps, is that the very rationality of such a logical approach is vulnerable to attack by AA ideologues and by the legal superstructure they and the courts have wrought over the past four decades.

I don’t understand why you keep referring to getting a PhD as about career advancement. It’s not advancement; it’s entree, the threshold requirement for a huge number of academic jobs. And in a lot of fields, almost the only way to get to research, write, or teach in your area is to get a job as a professor. (There are not a lot of non-academic positions for someone who wants to spend their life researching and teaching about, say, the Middle Ages.) The job isn’t the end; it’s the means to an end, which is getting to pursue your love of learning and the subject matter without starving to death.

I’m surprised no one’s thus far mentioned this gem by William James: http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/octopus.html

I think you’re both wrong and not-wrong: not-wrong morally, but wrong practically. Whether or not an M.D. “should” be a barrier to practicing medicine is somewhat immaterial; the world we live in has such gatekeepers. The professorial gate isn’t as scrupulously kept, so to speak, but it is a reality, and sadly the Ph.D. represents an expensive and necessary-but-not-sufficient prerequisite to it at many colleges.  I say sadly not because I think the degree is worthless (I don’t) but because I dislike expensive lottery tickets.

Wow. Thanks for this. I didn’t actually change my view on why one should get a PhD, but I was “wrong” to generalize and assume people would agree with me.

Well, it may sound flaky, but I think you need both kinds of motivation — internal and external — to pursue and actually complete a terminal degree.  As much as I loved the field, the incredible learning experience with such inspiring classmates in my doctoral cohort, the promise of a career in higher education, one in which I could support my family,  justified the decision.

I have to agree with JoelCairo. I’m sorry you’ve backed down. Shame. Ignore the bullies and blowhards who sometimes dominate the conversation on this blog. Stick to your guns Mr. Sweeney.

Thanks! I didn’t really back down. See my response to JoelCairo.

In terms of accessing the jobs, you don’t need a PhD to teach at most community colleges, yet more and more PhDs are getting jobs at community colleges because the tenure track market is so tough.  And a PhD, despite what most administrators say about the focus on teaching, brings a bit more prestige to the school.  I teach at a very large, fairly influential community college, and there are just as many PhDs as Masters level teachers. 
I’m working on getting my doctorate because you need a terminal degree to achieve full professor rank, but I’m getting a DA in Community College Education instead of a PhD in my discipline.  I love my subject, but at the stage in my career where I am, the DA makes more sense than going back and entering a traditional PhD program. 

Whether you’ve backed down or not, your posts are very reflective and polite which is a nice change of pace :).

Regarding the question, “Can we overproduce a degree?”, forgive me if this point was made in the other eighty comments from the other posting, but I think it is apparent that we are overproducing many degrees.

You’re right that if no one went into degree programs with any expectations of wage increases, upward career mobility or stable wealth prospects, that is if everyone studied *just for the knowledge*, we really would not be in danger of overproducing degrees.  If knowledge were the only motive people considered legitimate for pursuing education, we’d also probably have a fraction of the amount of college students (at any level) that we do now.

The point is, prior to going to undergraduate, associate’s degree, etc., almost everyone has the expectation that they are going to have to be making a reasonable wage for most of their lives.  When these people also love knowledge, they have to justify their pursuit of knowledge within the reality that they will have to, at some point, stop being students and make some money.

The fact that a degree can no longer offer the justification of providing it’s eventual holder with the expectation of a living wage (whether or not the holder remains in the relevant field) means to me that we are overproducing that degree.

I thoroughly agree with the insights of the article.  And as a further clarification I would re-state the first sentence in paragraph five from “These students look like “dropouts” (and therefore failures) in institutional data, but in fact they accomplished their goals” to “These students look like “dropouts” (and therefore failures for the student AND the institution), but in fact they accomplished their goals and the college HAS achieved a true success.” 

But such statistics and maybe even the NCES national longitudinal studies (I really don’t know enough about these studies to hazard any more than a guess on them) rarely show these successes for the community college. If the one-year minimum of schooling that the President suggested as needed to ensure a higher emplyment rate were achieved and students “dropped out” to work full-time, isn’t that success?

It’s about time we started examining student achievement of their goals as success factors and not some arbitrary goals thought up by the educational establishment in Washington, although I’m sure they had plenty of ‘consultation’ with officials in higher education institutions.  Where did the f-t-, f-t, 3yrs. 6 yrs. come from?   

Perhaps once upon a time you could teach at a university without a Ph.D., and do so for the love of the subject, but because of the over-production of Ph.D.s (particularly in the humanities) there is just too much competition to do so now. If there are 100-200 applicants for a tenure-track job (which is increasingly the case in the humanities), it only makes sense that those with Ph.D.s would get preference over those with only masters or bachelors degrees, even for jobs at teaching (as opposed to research) institutions.

 Remediation is one issue for completion times, but so are adult learners, many of whom are part-time students.  I am chair for a program in which the majority of the students are part-time while working full-time jobs, and most of them take longer than three years to complete their degree.  Because of the way IPEDS measures completers, I am forced every year to justify my program’s “only 16% completion rate” – even though most of them eventually do complete their degrees.  The way much of all community colleges’ populations are not considered completers – even though they are, as the article states, achieving their goals – is a major ongoing source of frustration for me!

I hear you.  At my institution, if you test into the bottom level of our developmental education, you have at least 5 quarters of math before you get to college level – 6 if you take the “slow” series.  English only has four precollege classes, but that’s still an extra year.  

Students will only go Fall and Spring Semesters, and they often take only 12 hours (minimum full time). This will not allow for a 60 hour AAS/AA/AS in 2 years, even full time, and it will not allow for a BA/BS in 4 years. I think most institutions, whether they’d admit it or not, have established this as the norm. We don’t expect college students to go year round, we don’t even pay out PELL and other aid at many schools to encourage it, and we are so happy when a student commits to being full time that we don’t mind when it’s 12 hours.

Add in remediation and the reality that the economy has forced many students to attend part time, and normal is about 3-4 years for a 2 year degree and 5-6 for a 4. I seem to remember students taking Summers off and taking minimum to be full time credits when I was in school too, but the microscope wasn’t on higher ed then like it is now.