Category: General

McIntosh (2019) describes the basic skills of personal information curation as Clip, Tag, Annotate and proposes that educators teach this sequence of skills first focused on a single information resource and then on multiple resources that would serve as material learning how to do something (e.g., pickle cucumbers) or create something (e.g., an original blog post). Secondary students might not do these things,  but these happened to be the last two curation tasks I completed so they were fresh in my mind as examples.  

Clipping

Clipping describes the process of finding something useful on the Internet and saving all or a portion of this content for later use. Tagging is the process of adding one or more useful labels to this saved content that should be useful in organizing multiple sources and locating these sources when needed. Annotation is the process of adding longer notes to the content created by someone else for the purpose of summarization or inclusion of personal insights related to the stored material. 

I have tried implementing this sequence of activities with OneNote, Google Keep, and Evernote which I think of as the main competitors in the low cost clipping and annotation services. My preference is Evernote. McIntosh wrote his article for educators based on his classroom use of Microsoft OneNote. To be fair, I pay for a fairly expensive version of Evernote, but there is a free version that should allow users to apply the techniques I describe here. 

Clipping is accomplished using an extension added to your favorite browser. I use Chrome, but the Evernote extension can be added to other browsers. While the process works a little differently, content can be added to Evernote from a phone, tablet, or computer. You have the greatest control when using a computer with the main advantage being the opportunity to store parts of a web source rather than the entire document. 

Understanding how Evernote works requires some additional comments. The following is the display as it appears on a computer. I will refer to this image at several points in this description. I think describing this as four columns works best. Actually, the software is flexible and offers the opportunity for different arrangements depending on personal taste. 

I will describe the columns from left to right. The first column offers the most general controls. I will concentrate on the note-taking capabilities and ignore other tools (e.g., tasks). Focusing on notes, the basic structure is that of notebooks as repositories of clipped content suited to a given purpose, notes, and additions to notes such as highlights, annotations, and tags. The areas contained in green squares involve notebooks. In the first column, you have the notebooks I have created. In the far right green box, you have an item from the drop down three dots (…) that allows the active clipped content (the third column) to be moved to a specific notebook. The red box in the first column identifies the existing tags. You create your own tags. These tags are listed in this box. The tagging of content will be described in the next section. The second column contains thumbnails representing stored content. Click on a thumbprint and the full document appears in the third column. Selecting a tag reveals the thumbprints for all content associated with this tag displayed within this column. So tags serve a filtering function for search.

Tags

A tag is a word or phrase used to classify content. Words such as topics or descriptors have similar meanings. In a system like Evernote, a user creates tags to categorize content as an organizational system that can make future retrieval easier. Hence, it is important when assigning tags to consider both descriptive accuracy and likely future application. Evernote offers a way to nest hashtags allowing a hierarchical classification system – e.g., computers – Apple, Windows, Chrome. In the image above, you see what happens when you select a hashtag. All existing content assigned that tag will be identified. Tags become a powerful organizational tool that becomes more valuable as the amount of stored content grows and as time passes making retrieval efforts more productive.

The creation and assignment of tags are distinct processes in Evernote. If a tag comes to mind perhaps in response to a newly clipped item, it must first be added to the collection of tags and then attached to that content item. When you first clip content, you will be asked to assign that clip to a notebook and to add desired tags. This is easy to see in the second image. New notebooks and tags can be declared at this time. Or, at a later point in time, clipped content can be moved to the desired notebook and new or additional tags can be added. With the desktop version of Evernote, this is a simple matter of dragging a tag or tags from the display of tags to the active document. 

Annotation

Annotation is used here to mean making additions to the stored material. Highlighting would be one example. With Evernote you add personal notations as part of the stored document. Think of this as being given a word processing document written by someone to which you can not insert text, links, or images. To make this what I consider a useful practice, I want to differentiate my additions from the original content so I change the text color to differentiate my summaries, comments, and questions. (See example in previous post)

Summary

McIntosh proposed clipping, tagging, and annotating as active reading practices students should learn to apply to digital texts. These are skills most students have not practiced and may not be allowed to apply to paper-based content. McIntosh proposed that students start with individual online content learning to add this content to a storage system, tagging the stored content, and then adding annotations that might be based on personal insights or based on a purpose assigned by the teacher. Using a common assigned online resource, the teacher can then comment on the choices made by individual students and perhaps then share student work to allow students to see how others have reacted to the same content. Once the basic skills are mastered, McIntosh proposes the system be applied to a research project requiring students to locate sources relevant to a goal, create a notebook, tag resources, embed annotations relevant to an integrative task, and finally generate this integrative project. Students should find this collection of skills relevant to many tasks they will be expected to complete for academic purposes and hopefully generalize the skills to the accumulation of resources they can apply more generally. 

McIntosh, J. (2019). Clip, Tag, Annotate: Active Reading Practices for Digital Texts. In Digital Reading and Writing in Composition Studies (pp. 176-188). Routledge.

Functional computers (Macs, Windows, and Chromebooks) age of support by manufacturers. Companies have decided they cannot maintain safe OSs over several different hardware updates. Google has generated a Chrome OS that allows users of these older computers a way to continue to use their machines as Chromebooks.

The following tutorial explains how I have used this OS (Chrome Flex) with a couple of my older machines.

Chrome Flex has been available for a couple of months now, but I had to wait until I returned home from my winter break and had access to a couple of old computers and a flash drive. One of the few challenges to spending the winter months in Kauaii is not having access to all of my stuff.

As I understand the history, Google purchased Cloud Ready and now offers a related product, Chrome Flex, at no cost. Chrome Flex is intended to offer a solution to two problems: 1) old Macintosh and Windows computers unable to run the current operating system intended for their brand and 2) Chromebooks that have passed the date at which they are still supported. I guess this is kind of the same problem. Often these machines are still functional and the older Macs and Windows machines may have the power and storage equal to or exceeding the less expensive Chromebooks. Schools and others interested in inexpensive alternatives might repurpose older machines with an operating system that allows them to function as Chromebooks and extend the useful life of these machines before sending them to the technology dump.

I have both an old Macbook Air and an old Dell that I have not used in years, but still keep around for experiments – usually a Linux install of some type. These machines are ideal for conversion to a Chromebook.

The process is easier than you might expect. All you need is a flash drive and an existing Chrome browser to which you add the Chromebook Recovery Utility (it is a Chrome extension). This extension allows you to create a recovery disk on the Flash Drive. Follow the instructions in creating the recovery drive and then use it with the computer you want to convert. I didn’t actually convert either of the old computers to a Chromebook – running the Chrome OS from the flash drive was good enough for me. I already have a perfectly good Chromebook, but maybe you don’t.

Two resources that will take you through the process – Android Police, HowtoGeek.

Chrome Flex worked great. This has to be one of the most successful repurposing ventures I have tried.

What I learned

1) Don’t be cheap with the flash drive. I originally tried the install with a 32GB flash drive I found in a drawer. I had trouble with crashes and getting anything beyond very basic web browsing to work and nearly gave up on the entire adventure. They don’t offer this caution in the articles I read. I purchased a 512 GB flash drive (not cheap) and everything worked without any hiccups

2) When you access the flash drive from your older computer, you can try Chrome Flex from the drive or go ahead with the installation. I have learned from experience to try an experimental OS from the install drive first. I would get Flex to work on both the Mac and Windows machine, but I encountered problems with specific drivers on the Windows machine. It would not produce audio. I have encountered exactly this same problem when attempting linux OSs – the basic apps would work, but I would have trouble with drivers. Individuals with more experience or more patience may be to get my Dell to function without limitations, but I have never had a complete success with the Dell. Try running from the Flash Drive to identify such issues,

Cindy and I are driving from Minnesota to the west coast. We haven’t been able to take road trips in the past couple of years, but we love to travel by car and thought we would give it a try. So far, so good.

I maintain a blog of all of our trips during the last five years or so. If you are interested, you can find my travel blog at GrabeTravels.

I was by trade a research-focused academic in the fields of educational psychology and educational technology. I conducted research and generated publications based on the data my studies generated. I also wrote and continue to write instructional materials (books, blog posts) for educators based mostly on the research of others. Scientific research builds on itself and you fashion the explanation of your findings from your data, your methodology, and the positions and findings of other researchers. Writing to educate relies heavily on the analysis of existing research and you make your case by summarizing and referencing multiple articles authored by others. There is a tremendous amount of reading that is involved in both types of activity.

Aside from the reading, this type of work requires the storage, organization, and retrieval of information. There is also the challenge of searching the nearly limitless trove of existing work for publications that are relevant to your specific interests. You have to do the work of reading and understanding content, but you can use technology to make the related tasks (storage, search, organization, retrieval) easier. Many of us who do this work are constantly searching for such tools and this quest also ends up being an area of investigation. I have written multiple posts on this blog about tools for taking and organizing notes.

This post is focused on a tool for locating relevant content I should read. There are lots of ways to search (e.g., Google Scholar) for relevant content, but Research Rabbit goes further and builds on the web of citations that exists among published research. Rather than being limited to the citations included as part of a given source, Research Rabbit reveals the web of sources that spread among individual papers – the citations in one paper point to other papers and the citations in these papers point to other papers, etc.

This web is interesting to explore. As is often the case with search, I started by searching myself. Quite a few years ago, I was conducting research on the consequences of distributing lecture notes in large lecture classes. There are interesting related questions. Do students skip class if notes are available? Do students who use these notes perform better than students who use only their own notes? These topics have received more attention lately as educators consider what online resources to make available to students. I began my search with a paper on this topic I published in 2007. From this paper, I can locate papers that cited my work. I can collect the information I need to locate and read papers that offer abstracts that interest me. I can see what papers these authors cited and who now cites them. I can build topical collections of papers and I can offload these collections to another tool better suited to generating and organizing my personal notes after having read some of these papers (see second image showing a collection of papers on Mastery Learning brought into Zotero).

Here is a link to a YouTube video on the use of Research Rabbit.

These tools are free and available online. You don’t have to be a researcher to use such tools (see the YouTube video). Find the title of a paper that interests you and you can then locate related content by entering the title of this paper in Research Rabbit.