India and the Internet

Almost the first thing shared as I arrived home this evening was that some 60% of the Internet connections in India were out of commission due to a cut cable. This news item, confirmed by a quick check of the story on the Reuters site, prompted a more general exchange about what percent of the population of that country might be deprived by this problem. In my brash manner, I suggested that but as handful of Delhi residents would be affected, and then acknowledged that all those tele- and call center workers in Bombay would probably also be on coffee break, but still no more than 10 percent of the population.

All this led to a quick search for basic penetration figures, and Google helped me find a half dozen sources more reliable than my evening conversation guesses.
In all respects, it seems, India is the mushrooming economy we imagined, but Internet penetration remains limited to a very small percentage of the population. One of the studies below, Internet World Stats, notes 3.7% households online during 2007. With this in mind, the connection crisis can be seen as serious for something like two percent of the ca. 1.3 billion people living in that country…all meant to place world connectivity into some kind of perspective….

• Internet growth –key learnings from India
  
• India & the Internet
  
• Internet World Stats
  
• India's Internet Users in 2005
  
• The Internet in India and China

MyExperiment

Yuwei Lin at the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) posted the following note to the AIR-list today, which includes the URL for a very interesting initiative called MyExperiment. The initiative promises much:

myExperiment makes it really easy for the next generation of scientists to contribute to a pool of scientific workflows, build communities and form relationships. It enables scientists to share, reuse and repurpose workflows and reduce time-to-experiment, share expertise and avoid reinvention.

The above is reason enough for all of us involved in the Ljubljana seminar to examine the documentation and software available from the site. I will be doing so in the next few days and encourage all involved in the seminar to do so in order that we may discuss it during our Adobe Connect meeting this coming Thursday.

Folks might also be interested in these UK JISC-funded VRE projects:

MyExperiment

http://www.myexperiment.org/

CREW

http://www.crew-vre.net/

SKUA

http://www.myskua.org/

Best wishes,

yuwei

--

Yuwei Lin yuwei at ylin dot org

http://www.ylin.org

Blogging away…at conferences

The conference circuit is so extensive these days there is no human way to attend more than a smattering of the events scheduled. One vicarious alternative is through the trailings attendees leave for the rest of us…I remember well how I relished the snapshots participants at the last AoIR conference in Vancouver shared. Another way, of course, is through the blogs some participants prepare of the events.

This last alternative, conference blogging, has become so prevalent that a growing number of suggestions and tips have appeared, and many of these have now been bundled into a small online brochure, Tips for Conference Bloggers, prepared by Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman. This little gem contains valuable advice for all of us who take notes during seminars and conferences with our laptops; for that reason alone it's worth reading.

For another reason directly related to this seminar is the two upcoming events some of us will be attending: CIVICWEB and Etmaal. Saso and I will be attending the first event, scheduled for 4-5 February in London; I'll be at the second, 7-8 February in Amsterdam. Maja Turnsek will also be 'representing' Ljubljana at the CIVICWEB event. I propose that Sasa and I – and Maja if she wishes – blog these events on our seminar 'outlets' in order to share the events with those 'back home' in Ljubljana.

Saso: are you game? Maja?

Below is the first block of text from Giussani's blog, called LunchoverIP, where the publication was released last October. Note the remarkable number of comments posted to the initial item.

 

Tips for conference bloggers

As I travel around attending conferences, more often than not I've found myself liveblogging part or all of them. Several times, I've done so in the very engaging and friendly company of Ethan Zuckerman, one of the most interesting and insightful global bloggers -- at TED2007 last March, where we took over the "Bloggers Avenue", we even started, jokingly, identifying ourselves as "twinbloggers".

So when two months ago Ethan posted some thoughts on how to blog a conference in detail, I responded adding a few of my own. An e-mail correspondence ensued, and we ended up putting together a small 6-pages document, "Tips for conference bloggers", that anyone can freely download and use (it's under a Creative Commons license). It's available in two versions, full-page and booklet format, within a layout created by our friends at Bread-and-Butter using pictures taken at conferences. Feel free to download it, redistribute it, re-post it. Or to add your comments at the bottom of this post: as you will notice, the document is labeled "version 1.0", so we may amend/augment it in the future, including your suggestions. We hope you find it useful.

"Tips for conference bloggers":
6 pages (PDF 485 KB)
3 pages booklet format  (PDF 370 KB)

New tools…new knowledge?

EduTechie recently posted an announcement regarding a seminar by Google Tutor about tools for collaboration, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and in the post Jeff Van Drimmelen (EduTechie) provided illustration of a product to which he contributed during a seminar some time ago: a collectively prepared and written seminar paper.

This illustration is particularly interesting as a source of inspiration in suggesting / showing how scholarship utilizing tools within a networked space can facilitate something as classic and conventional as a seminar paper. The post at the same time makes one wonder how the process went and what problems were encountered (e.g., was the process more efficient, were there some things that couldn't be done online and had to be arranged face-to-face, what was the blend between online and face-to-face meetings). Nor do we know how use of these tools by Google measures up to other collaborative tools and procedures; nor do we know what organizational prerequisites were required to 'make this work'. Finally, we really don't know whether such a mode of conducting scholarship results in anything more or better than would have been achieved using the age-old procedures and tools of scholarship.

I would not expect such a post to consider matters like the above, and I continue to intuitively feel that the **potential** for new knowledge and insight to be enhanced through the availability of these tools (e.g., a word process provides more possibility than a typewriter, which provides more than pen and pencil, which provides more than quilt and parchment). Still, in all of our excitement for newness we probably should remember the critical ingredient necessary for any quality scholarship: individual insight. What seems to happen with such tools is that such insight can be multiplied many fold….

Here is the EduTechie post:

Real Time Collaboration

January 24th, 2008 by Jeff VanDrimmelen

GoogleTutor posted a nice reminder tutorial online today about the power of real-time collaboration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.  This past semester a class I was taking wrote a nice paper as a whole class and used Google Docs for gathering everything together between us all.  Nice. 

 

 

Wikipedia as object of study 2

A recent contribution to a booming business, the study of Wikipedia, is announced in the following item, taken from News.com and shared by VKS colleague Charles van den Heuvel:

 

Wikipedia planning to survey its members to figure out why they post

Posted by Josh Lowensohn
In the next several months Wikipedians, or the authors of the content found on Wikipedia will be the subject of a worldwide survey to find out about people's posting habits on the immensely popular online encyclopedia.
The Wikimedia foundation, which operates Wikipedia is employing Netherlands-based UNU-MERIT
to conduct the research that aims to figure out not only who Wikipedians are, but how much they're contributing to the site. The survey is also designed to find out why people are coming to Wikipedia, and the identify the types of users who go from casual browsers to site contributors.
[more here]

Earlier today Katie Borner, speaking at the
Virtual Knowledge Studio, discussed several visualizations extracted from other Wikipedia-oriented studies, all of which reflect the kind of imagery possible in studies of an object as dynamic as Wikipedia. Many of these slides and references to the studies can be found at the project site
Places & Spaces, which is rich in the use of visualization in a scholarly setting. Three Wikipedia-related studies are:

• A blog, entitled
  A Beautiful WWW and maintained by a Todd Holloway, describes the report Visualizing the power struggle in Wikipedia, summarized here; the work is also briefly reported in a May 2007 issue of
  New Scientist;
  
  
• History Flow Visualization of the Wikipedia Entry on 'Evolution' by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas (2006), reflelcting the edit history of a term in the encyclopedia;
  
• Emergent Mosaic of Wikipedian Activity by Herr, Holloway and Borner (2007), illustrating the flow of Wikipedia activity across time.
  

The Tyranny of Powerpoint

At the end of a fascinating presentation by Katy Borner on the visualization of science, she mentioned one of the core persons who has contributed to visualization across the social sciences, Edward Tufte, known especially for his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Data. On his site I came across one of his pet peeves, Powerpoint, about which he wrote a biting analysis in September 2005 of the Powerpoint presentations prepared by engineers responsible for determining whether the NASA spaceflight shuttle Columbia should have been allowed to reenter the earth's atmosphere – which it did and which ended, back in 1983, as one of the greatest tragedies of manned spaceflight.

Much could be said about this attack on Powerpoint and its influence on ways of thinking and presenting, but an unrelated topic is the mode of publication of Tufte's scholarly essay: at the end of the online document there is a running blog of commentary about the original essay, spanning some more than three years and including scores of postings – the most recent dating to January of this year. This mode of presentation reflects a form of scholarly discourse largely absent from the main venue scholarship, academic journals. The number of innovations extending beyond the conventional and conservative mode of presentation of published article in a quarterly print-only journal is strikingly small (I'll save documentation of this claim for later). All I am trying to say in this short post is that the place of Powerpoint in scholarly presentations merits re-examination, and I say that as a rather committed user of the software….

Web Conferencing with Adobe

Yesterday, 24 January, 2008, I attended a web conferencing workshop related to using Adobe Connect. The workshop, hosted by SurfNet, was very well organized and facilitated by Roel Martens and Frank Niesten, both affiliated with Fontys PTH in Eindhoven. Thanks to this event some earlier snags I had experienced in using the software were solved and I got a good idea of what is possible – and not possible – with Adobe connect. A large number of documents (in Dutch) from Fontys PTH on aspects of video conferencing are available here.

To begin on the positive side, Connect provides valuable possibilities for distant meetings, one-on-one or small group, in research and educational settings. I will be using it as supplement to face-to-face meetings I have with PhD candidates, seminar students, and members of various research projects in which I am involved. On the negative side, the software, accompanying hardware and conventional Internet connection do not always provide optimal synchronization between voice and image; further, some time investment is required before minor technical hurdles are overcome.

After the workshop I immediately put the experience to the test with students participating in a seminar in Ljubljana (I was in Amsterdam). It took us about half an hour to figure out solutions to basic matters like achieving sound and image reproduction. These problems were eventually solved and, in the process, one of the 'lessons' from the workshop became vividly clear: arrange a face-to-face training session **before** beginning to use Connect (which we didn't do). Four of the students in Ljubljana did eventually figure out the basics; three others, however, assumed computers in the university library would be equipped with microphones and speakers (which they are not). The most basic of all lessons was learned the hard way: ensure that the computer to be used with Connect is equipped to run the software, is connected to the Internet, and is able to provide sound and images.

During the workshop a short demonstration was given of a more advanced web conferencing system, called Polycom. The difference with Adobe Connect was immediate and striking: Polycom provides high-quality video, and the wide-angle lens of the camera enables all participants around a meeting table to be simultaneously included in the video image (Connect allows small, passport-size images). Further, a remote control devise similar to a television remote allows the camera position to be changed, both at the host meeting place as well as at a distant meeting place. The demonstration involved logging into a unit in Australia and demonstrating this control facility, all projected with striking clarity on a large wall screen. There are similar products on the market; this one by Polycom costs around 4000-5000 Euros. Such a system would be ideal for educational and research institutions separated by some distance that need to conduct frequent meetings among members.

Nancy’s Blog: who’s Nancy?

While going through my blog administration, I noticed that Google had highlighted a new blog, Nancy's Blog, and decided to look at it. Initially I thought it was maintained by Nancy Baym, who has a blog about online fandom, because of the various common interests noted, but later realized that Nancyvh must be someone else and is, it turns out, a professor at Berkeley. Whoever is much less important than what she is contributing, which is quite related to my own interests and, in many cases, to the Ljubljana seminar. See her latest posting for a sampler:

Berkeley Center for New Media Gets Chair Endowed by Craigslist

Posted January 17, 2008 Comments(0)

The University of California, Berkeley, today (Thursday, Jan. 17) announced plans to establish the first endowed faculty chair at the Berkeley Center for New Media with a donation of $1.6 million from craigslist, one of the most popular Web sites in the world. The donation, which will support research, symposia and lectures, will be matched with $1.5 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a total of $3.1 million. The matching funds come from the foundation's landmark challenge grant, announced last September, that it gave to UC Berkeley to create 100 new endowed chairs. The new chairs are designed to help the public research university compete with private institutions.

e-books, coming and going

Electronic versions of books have been promised and launched at periodic points during the last decade. Some academic publishers (e.g., the Idea Group) have been offering narrow market titles for some time now, which can be purchased online and read as a pdf file that cannot be printed and only transferred to one other computer. An advantage of this variant is immediate access to the text rather than wait several days / weeks for a conventional order to be processed. I needed a copy of Christine Hine's New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science (Idea Group, 2006) immediately and the electronic version was very welcome. Still, reading a full book behind the screen is much less easy and convenient (for a variety of reasons) than the printed version. It seems, by the way, that the publisher of this volume has subcontracted the e-book version to eBooks.com and the price there is now more than the printed version (usually the electronic version is cheaper).

During the past Christmas shopping season a series of e-book readers came on the market, one of them released by Amazon and called Kindle. I haven't tried it (or the other readers, for that matter) out, but have a built-in reservation that is summed up well in the following LA Times article on the innovation. The first paragraphs are pasted below; to read the full article it will be necessary to register at the newspaper site (free), which is worth doing. For other reviews of this reading technology, see the 6 September 2007 NY Times review. One of the many blog reviews of Kindle can be found at TechCrunch; another contribution to this blog, prepared during a press conference of the technology on 19 November, is here.

 

Reading between the lines with Kindle

The e-book reader raises questions about the fundamentals of literature and its future.

By David Sarno
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 9, 2007

Something there is that doesn't love an e-book.

Take Amazon's new Kindle, this season's much-hyped new electronic reading device that allows you to instantly, wirelessly download any of 90,000 titles from the online retailer's database. Despite its $400 price tag, first-generation clunkiness and mid-80s design aesthetic, the Kindle actually provides a pretty darn good reading experience.

But try telling that to anyone who first read "Treasure Island" at age 11 and could still tell you whether the cover illustration on that copy had Long John Silver in a red pantaloon or a black one. Or to anyone who's ever discovered a first edition among the musky tomes of a used-book store. Or to anyone who, upon conquering Proust, has immediately promoted the whole set to the top of their bookshelf, alphabetization be damned.

Jason Epstein, a longtime editorial director of Random House, founder of its Anchor Books imprint, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, and first-ever recipient of the National Book Award's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, is himself a bibliophile of sorts.

Reached at home not long after he'd finished reading a new translation of "War and Peace" (the third time he'd read the novel), he had just begun the latest volume of John Richardson's multipart biography of Picasso. "There's no way you could read that book on a screen," he said, jazz humming in the background. "Even if you leave out the color illustrations, it's a very complicated book. You've got to be able to concentrate on it," he said. "To go back, and go ahead, and look at the footnotes.

"Try to read a serious book on that," he said of the Kindle. "You won't be able to, I don't think."

Research tools: Continued

Here is another thread about online tools for supporting research and scholarship, this one on the Second Life Research Listserv.

One of the tools mentioned below is Tinderbox and merits examination. I've already noted Zotero in an earlier post and, as the person in this thread says, it is very useful.

 

• Hi all, I'm curious if any Mac users are using specific software for their research; I'm thinking about both research/bibliography software and information managers. I've been casually looking at programs such as Sente and DevonThink. Any opinions?
  

 

• For grabbing and organizing research information and for generating bibliographies, the free Zotero extension for Firefox is quite nice. I disable it when I don't need it, though, as it seems to slow the browser down a bit at times.
  http://www.zotero.org/
  

  
   

• www.diigo.com is worth a try, contact doug mauger in vancouver to get all the good news about it
  

 

• I use devonthink pro-office more for archiving and searching than for  research current numbers are over 22000 live searchable documents and  1400 keywords and categories.  here are some screenshots of how i use  it http://pictures.tmttlt.com/main.php?g2_itemId=23248 .  I use  bookends for bibliographic data and notes.   in terms of information  managers that could do all of these, i'd say tinderbox, but i stopped  paying for annual subscriptions. jeremy hunsinger www.tmttlt.com
  

  
   

 

Text Collaboration in Cyberspace

One of the banes of distant collaboration when composing text is the mix-up of document versions. This problem seems to be solved with Adobe's new product Buzzword, which archives documents on the Web. During the beta version access to and use of Buzzword is free; I'll be trying it out on a couple of collaboratory writing projects now underway. Below is a brief overview of its features, taken from the Buzzword site:

Welcome to Buzzword, the breakthrough online word processor from Virtual Ubiquity. Buzzword is currently in Preview version and free to use.

Built on Adobe's Flash platform, Buzzword looks and behaves like a normal word processor but operates inside a web browser. A version for Adobe's AIR platform is in development.

With Buzzword you can:

• Access your documents from any Internet-connected computer.
  
• Work together with others to create, comment on, revise, and publish your documents, without the need to email documents back and forth.
  
• Avoid editing and reviewing conflicts, since everyone works with the same version of the document.
  
• View and edit your documents exactly as others will see them, and exactly as they will print.
  

Ideal Computer Configuration for Second Life

In a recent thread on the SLED (Second Life Educators discussion list) suggestions were given to someone interested in upgrading his computer system to make better use of virtual worlds like Second Life. Below is the 'dream list' of several respondents. SLED, by the way, is an excellent list for exchange about conducting research in Second Life and some other virtual worlds adapted for educational purposes.

 

I have been given the opportunity to upgrade my work computer.  My job entails website work, working on the ILS, keeping up with Second Life, and many other technology related tasks.  On a typical day I will have any where from 3 to 7 active windows, one of which is an internet browser with between 2 and 10 active webpages.  I tend to put a lot of strain on the computer.  I also have a lot of stuff on the computer (I tend to keep back ups of almost everything on my computer).  Lately I have found that this computer cannot keep up with the strain, especially while trying to use Second Life, and it slows to a crawl.  My supervisor is going to allow me to upgrade and I need to find out what to upgrade to.  This is where I want your help.  I know about programs and programming and other fun stuff like that but my knowledge of computer specs is limited.  If anyone has ideas about what type of computer I should get or what specs it should have I would really appreciate that input.  In short I need a computer that can handle Second Life and a lot of multitasking, and probably both at the same time.  What are my best options?  Thank you in advance for your input.

 

Max out your memory
Then your hard disk
Then your CPU
Then a graphics card
Then a sound card

In that order

 

I agree … in emphasizing the importance of an nVidia (or ATI Radeon) video card that matches SL system requirements. However, I disagree on the sound card. Given the excellent audio that is available on the net and through SL these days, a sound card that provides a stereo line in, as well as a stereo line out, and the usual speaker/headphone sockets, would be a real plus, and probably not too expensive.

 
 

My recommendations and suggested order are different.
1. Buy a video card that supports two monitors. I use an nVidia 7600 - cost about $100. If you can afford a better card, go for it.
2. Buy a second monitor (or two new monitors) I use 2 19" LCD monitors. Indispensable when running multiple apps. SL on one, web, mail, PS, Word, whatever on the second. SL with Windlight is a tad slow but not too bad.
3. Upgrade system RAM to 2 GB.
4. Maybe upgrade your CPU. I use a lower end Core2Duo. Works fine.
5. A fast dedicated HD will help some. I have one SATA 7200 rpm 100-something gig drive. Seems fine.
6. Skip the sound card. I use plain old on board audio - works great. I get spatial voice in SL, stereo for iTunes, and crappy sound from YouTube. What else do you need? .

 

Note-taking tool: Notely

I don't think this tool, Notely, matches the functionality of OneNote and Zotero, but might be worth considering….

Announcement below comes from the blog EduTechie, which is worth monitoring regularly….

 

Jan 8, 2008 (3 days ago)

Notely - Getting Organized for School!

from EduTechie.com by Jeff VanDrimmelen

With school starting back up again, and a new year, it is a great time to commit yourself to actually getting your schoolwork organized.  Notely.net looks like a likely candidate!  Here is a list of their features:

• Calendar
  
• To-Do List
  
• Homework organiser
  
• Manage Courses
  
• Write and Save Notes
  
• Organise Links, Contacts and Files
  
• Keep a Notebook or Lab Book
  

danah boyd’s blog: Apophenia

Below are the first two paragraphs of a posting from danah boyd on her blog Apophenia, related to how young people use online and offline venues for everyday activities like shopping. It is a striking anecdotal story and I recommend reading it in its entirety. Also interesting from a research perspective is that this blog entry is part of a research project in which boyd is involved: Digital Youth Research. This particular form of collective observation and reflection seems most suitable for those of us involved in this seminar and the research papers each of you will be writing. This PhD candidate is, by the way, one of the leading authorities on youth and social media; see the JCMC theme issue (October 2007) she co-edited and her list of scholarly publications.

 

Technology and the World of Consumption

I had just finished giving a talk about youth culture to a room full of professionals who worked in the retail industry when a woman raised her hand to tell me a story. It was homecoming season and her daughter Mary was going to go to homecoming for the first time. What fascinated this mother was that her daughter's approach to shopping was completely different than her own.

Using Google and a variety of online shopping sites, Mary researched dresses online, getting a sense for what styles she liked and reading information about what was considered stylish that year. Next, Mary and her friends went to the local department store as a small group, toting along their digital cameras (even though they're banned). They tried on the dresses, taking pictures of each other in the ones that fit. Upon returning home, Mary uploaded the photos to her Facebook and asked her broader group of friends to comment on which they liked the best. Based on this feedback, she decided which dress to purchase, but didn't tell anyone because she wanted her choice to be a surprise. Rather than returning to the store, Mary purchased the same dress online at a cheaper price based on the information on the tag that she had written down when she initially saw the dress. She went for the cheaper option because her mother had given her a set budget for homecoming shopping; this allowed her to spend the rest on accessories.

Edublog

Most students in this seminar are using the Google-owned Blogger software product. There are many other alternatives and one that I have just started looking at is Edublog. This is a variant of WordPress and is especially designed for educational users. I have been going through the Edublog site which is quite extensive and came across a series of videos that describe many of the features of the blogging software. Many of these features are similar / identical to those on Blogger and other blogging software, but there seem to be some differences. The videos are worth watching even if one uses other blogging software.

I still have to complete my 'assessment', but at the moment I think I will be creating a second blog to the one with Blogger, and will be using the Edublog to publish material exclusive to the seminar and directly related to the book project on which I am working. In that case, I'll let all students in the seminar know how to subscribe to the new blog and limit accessibility to those persons.

Wealth of Networks

Yochai
Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2006) was – and remains – a major tract about the ongoing societal transformations related to the proliferation of communication via electronic networks, particularly the Internet. Much public debate has already taken place about the ideas in this book; many of the reviews, videos and audio recordings have been compiled on a specially constructed wiki.

Lawarence Lessig was ecstatic about the book in a post on his blog in April 2006:

Yochai Benkler's book, The Weath of Networks, is out. This is -- by far -- the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. The book has a wiki; it can be downloaded as a pdf for free under a Creative Commons license; or it can be bought at places like Amazon.

Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues -- on either side of these debates -- unless you have read this book.

Here are a couple of additional resources mentioned by Techbowl:

A quick Yochai Benkler blog search, provided me with the following conclusions: 1. Yochai Benkler does not have a blog. 2. The search led to this nice blog summary of a talk Mr. Benkler gave not too long ago, you can find it at "Joho theBlog" and a more recent account here.

From a publishing perspective, the book is interesting in that it is both available as a conventional bound volume from booksellers as well as an online document that can be downloaded free of charge. To facilitate different formats and preferences, it is possible to download the entire book or individual chapters, and these are available in pdf and print-friendly versions. I haven't seen any other publication available in such diversity with such accessibility.

For the purposes of this seminar, we will be reading a couple of the chapters in The Wealth of Networks later in the course, but let me already note them here:

Chapter 6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media (433 KB) Paper-friendly version (232 KB)

Chapter 7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere (716 KB) Paper-friendly version (503 KB)

 

Regarding Benkler, public sphere, and Habermas, Howard Rheingold, in his blog Smart Mobs, posted a nice reflective piece on a talk Habermas gave a few months ago in the Bay Area. Essentially Rheingold asked Habermas whether the public sphere may have been given a 'new lease on life' thanks to the 'wealth of networks' formulated by Benkler.

A video **not** mentioned on the above Wealth of Networks wiki is available at the MIT Press site and includes a discussion between Benkler and Henry Jenkins, entitled News, Information and the Wealth of Networks.

 

Tools for organizing research

A thread on the LibraryThing discussion list, entitled How do you organize your research, is rich in suggestions and assessments of various software available for a variety of research-related tasks. Some of the tools mentioned include:

• EndNote
  
• PMWiki
  
• Seedwiki
  
• Stikipad
  
• OneNote
  
• EverNote
  
• Bookends
  
• Total commander
  
• Bubbl.us
  
• thinkature
  
• Freemind
  
• Taggtool
  
• Tag2find
  
• Docsvault
  
• askSam
  
• diigo
  
• Zotero; "Zotero is AMAZING!!!!"
  

I strongly recommend reading the entire thread and trying out some of these tools for the paper required for this seminar. I also recommend browsing through the other resources on LibraryThing.