The End
We are now at the end of '23 Things for the Digital Professional' and I have really enjoyed doing each task. That isn't to say that everything was easy - well not difficult either just an attitude adjustment to try each 'Thing' before I passed judgement on it. It forced me to look at things that I had dismissed in the past (such as podcasts and Twitter) and showed me new ways of doing things with applications that I had never heard of (e.g. Prezi and Mendeley).
Dropbox was particularly useful as it was a solution to a problem that I was experiencing with Files.Warwick on file sharing outside the university.
I loved Prezi - it is such a simple thing to use to layout your data in any configuration then zoom and pan to the relevant information for your presentation. It blew 'PowerPoint' out of the metaphorical water so I'm now a convert to Prezi as well as Dropbox.
Other than Prezi and Dropbox, I will continue to use GoogleDocs and Mendeley:
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The most useful function (for me) in GoogleDocs, is sharing the document for review. It seems like the simplest way to get comments on and annotate a document, especially if you are sending it to more than one person for review.
- After my initial failure of using Mendeley, I have managed to download the desktop application and sort through some of my pdf documents. I really like it - I've never used anything like this before so I'm still getting used to it.
I think this programme has been of great benefit to me. I don't use everything included in the course, and I don't intend to, but I have found some really useful tools and I have been made aware of some important issues surrounding my online presence and that of my work.
I rely on email as a communication tool and I could be classed as a 'technophobe' in many respects and with the growth of social media and digital communications I think that you miss out if you don't join in. Global companies can't afford to ignore digital communication; to get yourself, your product or your company 'seen' you have to play the Twitter and Facebook game and some companies have dedicated media personnel who keep their social media pages up to date.
No matter what website or television channel you view you will see companies and products promoting themselves through social media; researchers and research establishments should be doing the same to raise the profile of their research. I think in the most part this is being done, but the importance of this will only grow as popularity of this media grows in the future.
Claire White
03 Jan 2012 15:05
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Tags: Rex23 Thing23
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Jenny Delasalle
Hi Claire,
Have you seen Salma Patel’s forthcoming workshop on Mendeley?
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/2641477731
Jenny
27 Jan 2012, 10:59
Claire White
Hi Jenny,
I am signed up to attend because I have had more trouble with Mendeley. When I finally got all of my references correct I thought that I should sync them to my online account but the desktop application crashed and it doesn’t stay open long enough for me to do anything.
IT should be along to help me with that today.
It’s such a shame because I really like it and I think it will be really useful – I don’t want to manually write up my references!
Claire
30 Jan 2012, 09:39
Claire White
It turns out that Mendeley is not compatible with DropBox.
As soon as I turned DropBox off, Mendeley started working again.
Unfortunately to come to this conclusion we deleted my local library and reinstalled Mendeley a couple of times; so now I have to repopulate my document library.
Never mind.
30 Jan 2012, 14:37
Jenny Delasalle
Hi Claire,
Did you find Salma’s workshop of any use? I think you were there! My own perspective since then is that EndNote is better at getting you quality metadata from the Library’s subscription resources, so it’s going to create better references for you that way. But you can export from EndNote into Mendeley, and I do like the way Mendeley organises folders of references, etc, and it is more “social”, I think. I’ll probably keep using them both a little, for now…
Jenny
20 Feb 2012, 10:15
Claire White
Hi Jenny,
Yes I was there – I was the pregnant girl at the front concerned that Mendeley was going to get me into trouble with copyright laws.
I do find Mendeley useful – I like the citation feature in MSWord and the fact that I have a pdf library that I can search much easier than a folder of pdf documents on my hard drive. I have also been manually inputting citations for hardcopy documents and books that I am referencing to keep an up to date list.
I’ve not used endnote before and Mendeley is my first reference management software. I don’t really use the search feature in the library as it doesn’t keep publications or journals relevant to my research area but I use document supply a lot!
I don’t think that I will be using the ‘social’ aspect of Mendeley though. I’m terrible at Facebook and I haven’t really got into Academia.edu and I’ve been told off by Twitter for not logging in – I guess that even though I know social media is important, I can’t bring myself to be too bothered about it.
It’s good that even though you have a preference you still try out new things or even manage to incorporate your favourite features of both systems – that’s what I liked most about the 23 Things.
I hope I can come to PhD Network event – see you soon,
Claire
20 Feb 2012, 11:32
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