"I'm writing this on the plane back from Canberra," I was going to write, "where I've spent the last couple of days hobnobbing with the high and mighty." That was two weeks ago, but of course on the plane back I promptly fell asleep, not so much from hobnobbing but simply from a packed two-day programme which had started with a 5.15 a.m. flight out of Brisbane on Tuesday 28 March. So, here's a belated follow-up on my trip to the "Expanding Horizons" event which the Council for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences had organised...
At the beginning of this week I posted a question about alternatives to Endnote and other bibliographic tools on the Association of Internet Researchers list, as well as on my blog. There response from my peers has been very strong, with a number of options emerging. As a reminder, what I was especially keen on were tools which would allow me to store multiple quotations against a single source - something Endnote isn't very good at at all. Some people did suggest adding quotes into a customised notes field within Endnote, but I don't feel that this is a very effective solution; someone also suggested storing references and quotations simply in a Word document, which is in fact what I did with the research for my book [weblink:28], but that's probably not a sustainable option in the long term - good tag, search and filter functionality would be very welcome. Another generic alternative would be to use a blog for storing references, but this means that you have to be connected to add new items, and (unless there's a conversion script available) also doesn't offer functionality for formatting references in different bibliographic styles.
I've been invited to take part in a two-day event in Canberra this coming week, organised by the Council for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) - they're inviting early-career researchers (a definition which I'm slowly starting to slide out of) to talk to politicians about their research in order to better inform members of the legislative about current research agendas and the need for policies which address these aims and build on the findings.
As part of the 'Expanding Horizons' programme, we'll have breakfast with Julie Bishop, the Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, morning tea with the Lindsay Tanner, Shadow Minister for Finance, and will then pair off to meet selected parliamentarians for more private meetings - I've been selected to talk to Senator George Campbell, the Oppositiom Whip. Along the way, we'll also hear from a variety of other high-profile politicians, researchers, and other officeholders in the nexus between education, research, and politics. Should be an interesting (and exhausting) programme!
I made the move to Firefox over the last few days, and as a result I've been exploring the wealth of Firefox extensions which is also available. One of them is Performancing, which adds a basic WYSIWYG offline editor for blog posts to Firefox - and this in turn brought me to look more widely at the current state of blog clients: software which enables the offline writing and editing of blog posts for later submission to a blog, using a standard XML-RPC interface. Unfortunately - especially as far as real WYSIWYG editing is concerned (as opposed to editing plain text with a few HTML tags thrown in) -, there still isn't that much out there. I did find at least a couple of promising options, though.
I've just posted a question about useful alternatives to research citation manager tools such as Endnote or CiteULike to the AoIR mailing-list, and I thought I'd repeat it here as well. My approach to research is to store key quotations from a source alongside the bibliographic reference, but none of the standard tools I have come across seem to do this particularly effectively (e.g. in Endnote, the best available workaround appears to be to create an additional field for quotes in the bibliographic record, but this is clunky and doesn't work very well with multiple quotes stored against the same record).
I published the 'transmit' issue of M/C Journal last week, edited by my colleagues Henk Huijser and Brooke Collins-Gearing. Some very good articles there, and the issue will be a tough act to follow (with Donna Lee Brien, I'm currently editing the next issue 'collaborate').
When I say 'I published', incidentally, I don't mean this in any abstract sense - right now it's quite literally me who generates the issue pages from the articles and other materials edited by the issue editors, and uploads them to the server. We do have a rudimentary system in place for publishing the journal, but (built on the Textpattern engine) it remains very clunky and kludgy so far. Happily, that might soon change: QUT Communication Design student Gordon Grace is currently exploring options for moving M/C Journal to a more manageable online journal editing and publishing system. Personally, I can't wait... (Gordon also designed the cover for [weblink:28].)
One of the reasons I link to Suw Charman's blog is for posts like this: "An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Enterprise" - a clear and useful outline of the process and pitfalls of adopting social software tools like blogs and wikis in enterprise environments. In my case, recently this adoption process has taken place, more or less successfully, in the QUT Large Teaching & Learning Grant which I co-direct, and in which we are introducing blogs and wikis into the teaching environment of several undergraduate and postgraduate units across two faculties.
