Category: General

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.

I try to come up with a useful post for educators as we approach earth day. Earth Day offers a great day to highlight the challenge of climate change which is so easy to forget in the midst of other concerns. In the long run, the urgency of addressing climate change at this time is possibly greater than other concerns that preoccupy our political processes and our attention.

There are plenty of only Earth Day resources for educators, but I will offer a few for those who have not had the opportunity to search.

Project Learning Tree Page

Earth Day Official Site

Clean Energy

Free Tech 4 Teachers Suggestions

By chance, I can offer something a little more personal this year. I have been interested in solar panels for some time. We decided to move beyond my small-scale explorations and add solar panels to our home. The process has stretched over a couple of years. By chance, the process was completed this week. We now have our panels installed, know they work, but still must wait for our power company to approve the installation and make the connection. 

The delays or the past year or so involved 1) needing to replace our shingles which had some hail damage and were old (you don’t want to pay for panel installation if you will have to pay for their removal and reinstallation within a year or two) and 2) waiting for the solar panel subsidy to be renewed in a new year. We were told that our investment would not actually cover the cost because our electrical bills were low. We use natural gas for heating our home, cooking, and heating our water. These commitments are new and we won’t change for some years. I suppose air conditioning is our largest use of electricity. Maybe we will add an electric vehicle within a couple of years. We installed solar because we wanted to be involved in alternate energy production.

Here are a few photos I took of the process. 

I have decided to cross-post some of my blog content to Medium. Medium offers content creators the potential for revenue based on the amount of traffic you generate once you accumulate 100 followers. When you get to this level you are eligible to earn money based on views of your content that you are willing to put behind a paywall. Of course when you place content behind the paywall only Medium paid members can view this content. This is the point at which you may have to decide whether you are interested in reader attention or some small amount of income. At some point, I hope to have to make this decision.

You pay $50 a year for full access to Medium as a reader.

There are plenty of ways a writer can make content available on the Internet. I have had a blog since 2002 and I created other web content at an even earlier date. I have always either run or leased a server to post my content (see previous post about running a server). There are some technical challenges in controlling your own server, but purchased hosting can now rely on scripts that automatically update software and databases so you don’t have to keep your own software current. This blog and others I run make use of WordPress and use a MySQL database backend. It is great not to have to continually patch this software yourself. For the curious, I pay about $200 for server rental and domain registration per year through a company called Bluehost. This amount allows me the opportunity to host multiple blogs and other content.

I have never thought of my online content as a way to make money. If I have ever had a motive beyond that of an interesting hobby, the motive would have been to bring attention to the textbooks I have and continue to publish. 

There are some interesting issues some consider when deciding where and how to offer the content they create. Here is an example. You may spend some of your time making contributions to and reading the contributions of others on Facebook. As a content creator, you receive no compensation from Facebook for the content you create. You do benefit from a free service that allows others to read your content. The argument is that while this is a benefit, you are already compensating Facebook through your attention, the sharing of your personal information, and the view of the ads Facebook posts. Content creators may take their elsewhere for this and other reasons.

Other situations involve different considerations. For example, this blog does not require me to allow a service such as Facebook to use my content at no expense and I can show ads on the blog as a source of revenue. There is that $200 that the hosting site makes and the reality that the ads I show generate maybe $15 a year, but at least I own and control my own content. 

Here is the complicating issue. Revenue is one personal benefit, but so also is the attention of others. I may have benefit from this attention (e.g., interest in my books) or just the satisfaction of offering a service others find valuable. Whichever it might be, the reality seems to be that reader interest in personal blogs seems to be on the decline. Competition with information sites that offer all you can read or view content (Facebook, Instagram) and large commercial information sites (e.g., Google or Apple News) provide an easy one-stop shop that satisfies the needs of most readers. The decline of the use of RSS readers by which a reader could set up a feed providing them with any updates from multiple blogs they designate is associated with this change. It is hard to know if this decline is a cause or consequence. I do know that much of my blog traffic now comes from Twitter (a tweet is generated when I generate a new post) or searches. Much less comes from subscriptions to an RSS feed. Twitter works great as a referrer, but the impact is limiting to the number of Twitter followers I have.

Medium offers an interesting middle ground. It consolidates content from many writers providing the potential for the discovery of content from new writers. It does not show ads or collect data from readers and it is free to a point for readers. Medium supports itself by taking a cut of the $5 a month or $50 a year all you can read readers pay. Medium allows cross-posting and makes this process fairly easy so there is not a need to make the choice between a blog and Medium. I would not shut down my blogs under any circumstances. I have too many years (decades) of investment in the body of work I have built up. I have just decided to experiment to see if an expansion of outlets will expand my reader base. 

I intend to write a couple of posts that explore issues that are related to whether content creators should serve their content themselves or rely on a service to host the content. In exploring background material for these posts, I could not help considering my own history. Strange as it may sound, I ended up trying to establish how I did what I did. Trying to establish my own behavior was a bit of a challenge as some of these personal experiences happened long ago. 

If you have long been a Macintosh user, it may surprise you to learn that any Macintosh could quickly be turned into a server. So, think of a Mac on your office desk on which you did your daily work and imagine this computer had a folder that any HTML docs placed in this folder would be immediately available on the Internet.

This option was built into all versions of the Apple OS Lion and earlier. I used to do a lot of K12 staff development sessions and I enjoyed explaining to the educators that I could turn one of their Macs into a server in less than 5 minutes. Macs are built on Linux (BSD I think) and at the time came with the Apache server software built in. Most of the servers on the Web still run on more recent versions of Apache. Anyway, the issue with the demonstration for teachers was that most computers are connected to the internet with a dynamic and not a static IP. This translates as the IP with a dynamic connection may be different each time you connect. The IP is often called a dotted quad and looks like 75.168.107.115. You can locate your present IP using this link. You can use either the dotted quad or the site name to connect to the site. The familiar approach using the site name happens through a DNS server (domain name server) so when you use the Internet you enter a site name which ends up being converted to a dotted quad. However, even with a dynamic connection, as long as you are connected others can connect to your server by using the dotted quad.

As I was remembering the tests I did using the Mac as a server, I realized there could be a way to look back in time at this behavior. The Internet Archive project operates a system called the WayBack Machine that attempts to archive Internet content for historic use. I had static Internet connections at that time and was allowed several reliable IPs because of the research I did. I remembered the address for my office desktop machine was grabe.psych.und.nodak.edu (my name, department, university) and I entered this address in the Wayback Machine. Sure enough, the page served from this desktop had been stored for posterity.

I can tell looking at this page that it was not coded in HTML by hand. At that time Apple offered a web development tool called iWeb as part of its basic productivity suite of software tools. iWeb provided a graphic interface for laying out web pages and then generated the HTML automatically. This would have been the only way I could have included something like a guestbook on the site.

So, there was a time when any user who wanted to have their own website posted from their personal server was part of the vision (the date on the page above was 2003, but Wayback says it was first created in 2001). The idea of Web 2.0 was emerging and alternate terms for this trend were the read/write web and the participatory web. The read/write web probably is the most descriptive meaning the Internet was not just for the consumption of content, but also for the creation and sharing of content. How this is done now is through a site both creators and consumers visit (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), but there was a time a different approach was being explored and anyone who wanted to operate a server could.