Teaching in Higher Ed

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Cataloging course resources using PKM

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Cataloging course resources

One of the compliments that students regularly give me is that I use current examples in my classes.

Generally speaking, they quickly follow the compliment with an example of another professor who shows dated videos in his class with regularity. I suspect that when others get it wrong, I get to look that much better than I actually am…

kodak

Of course, I always remember the time I showed a video in class about Kodak's marketing approach and one of my beloved students texted me from the back of the room.

He shared that on that very day, Kodak had filed for bankruptcy. We got to have a good laugh about it and fortunately, the event didn't take a toll on my credibility with him.

How I use my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system to catalog course resources

I have a defined personal knowledge management system (PKM) that I've been using for years now. It helps me not have to think very hard to bring current examples into a class. I'm also fortunate to have many current and former students who know I have an interest in a particular topic or company and who will send articles and videos my way.

Here are a few other ways I work to use PKM to bring current examples into my classes:

Use tags in Pinboard.in to make retrieval easier

I always include any course numbers that are related to the topic of the resource, as well as whether the asset being saved is an audio or video clip.

For example, I recently bookmarked this episode of NPR's Planet Money called “Free Parking.”

It is about a guy who decided to attempt to solve a problem of scarce resources in his neighborhood: parking spaces. He created an app that attempted to make life easier for residents, but he wound up in all sorts of trouble.

I used the following tags on Pinboard.in for the episode: busn114 (the course number for my introduction to business course), audio (so I can search for audio clips on a particular topic or course number), and economics.

Here's how it looks on Pinboard:

pinboard-tags

Streamline your PKM process to make saving resources easy

I use Feedly as the service where I subscribe to various blogs and other web resources via RSS. Then, I review the information that comes in using Newsify on the iPad. There are plenty of great RSS readers out there. I like Newsify for its dark mode, when I am reading at night, as well as for the way it displays the headlines, so I can quickly skim through them.

Regardless of which service you us, it is imperative that it has a quick method for saving articles to whatever bookmarking service you use. Pinboard.in has worked great for me these past couple of years. It even easily imported my bookmarks from Delicious, once I decided I had enough of getting frequent error messages when I tried to save to Delicious from within Newsify.

Automate bookmarking using Pinboard.in or IFTTT

While my RSS reader does much of the heavy lifting of finding and saving resources, Twitter also is finding its way into my process. I used to go through the laborious process of finding an article on Twitter that I wanted to save, opening it in my browser, and then saving it using the Pinboard.in Chrome extension.

Now, I've set up Pinboard.in to automatically save any Tweets that I favorite into Pinboard.in. I don't have to do anything except click the star to set a Tweet as a favorite. Pinboard does the rest.

pinboard-meet-twitterHashtags are automatically created as Pinboard tags, though I often find myself needing to do some refining for the resource to fit into my tagging methodology. I have a task in my weekly review that reminds me to check items that have been added to Pinboard for Twitter and to add the necessary tags at that time.

If whatever service you use doesn't have a setup like the one that Pinboard does, check out IFTTT to see if there's a channel that can add the bookmarks for you. If this is the first time you've heard about IFTTT, it is worth checking out the Introduction to IFTTT from ProfHacker.

Getting Started

If this post is all new to you and it is starting to seem overwhelming, start small.

1) Sign up for a bookmarking service. I recommend Pinboard, but Diigo is also good if annotation is important to you.

2) Install the Pinboard (or Diigo) browser extension into whatever program it is you use to browse the internet. That way, you'll have a little button you can press to save an article, without having to navigate to the Pinboard or Diigo website each time.

Here's what my Pinboard browser button looks like on my Google Chrome browser:

pinboard-button

3) Bookmark articles, blogs, videos, etc. to use in your courses. When you come across an article or video that might be good for one of your classes, click the Pinboard/Diigo button on your browser and enter the associated tags and any other information you want saved. Here's an article from the Chronicle I saved today about what if the Harry Potter novels had taken place in a historically black college or university.savingbookmarkIt took me less than a minute to see the link to this article on Twitter, skim it to note that it was of interest, and to save it to my: race, diversity, and higher ed tags on Pinboard.

[reminder] What approach do you use for cataloging your course resources? [/reminder]

 

Sharing tools

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Sharing is an integral part of one's personal knowledge management system.

This week, I bookmarked a post with 44 social media tools recommended by pros. While I do get tempted to explore new tools, especially on a week full of grading, I'm staying away for the time being.

sharing tools

It did get me thinking about the most essential social media tools that I use, specifically in the process of sharing. Michael Hyatt did an episode this week where he spoke about how he gets a blog post done in 70 minutes each week. I typically can cut that time down even more, by leveraging the following:

Use Canva to create blog and other sharing graphics

Having graphics included with social media content increases the likelihood that someone will see and then share your content. If you need some creative ideas for how to use visuals, check out this article from the Social Media Examiner.

Canva makes it easy to create a graphic. You can use one of their predefined sizes, or input a custom size. The service is free, though they do have graphics for sale on their site for $1 a piece, so be prepared to upload your own graphics or be sure to restrict yourself to their free options.

Schedule your social media sharing via Buffer

Buffer is a service that allows you to pre-schedule content to share across all of your social media. I intersperse original content, links to others' blog posts, and quotes from my podcast episode to spread the word even further.

Once you have content placed in a schedule, you can drag individual items around to suit your needs. It even has a shuffle button to really mix things up.

Discover excellent content from your friends using Nuzzel

Despite using an RSS reader daily, there are still occasions where I am at a loss for solid content to post. Nuzzel does the curating for me by looking through who I follow and recommending relevant content.

When I first head about Nuzzel, I didn't think it would offer any additional value. I was wrong. Each time I've used the app, it has served up rock-solid content and has done so in a streamlined way.

[reminder]What tools do you use to make the sharing process easier?[/reminder]

Pinboard.in | A great bookmarking/archiving tool

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When it comes to new apps, Dave is often a bit more willing to experiment than I am.

He's gone back and forth between the two read-it-later services: Pocket and Instapaper, more times than I can count. On the other hand, I made the switch to Pocket upon his suggestion and am not willing to re-learn a new system, just to capitalize on a couple extra features that Instapaper now offers.

That's why I think I was so suspicious about making the switch to Pinboard.in.

Dave had made the move and kept recommending it to me. At first glance, I wasn't sure how it would be better than the Delicious bookmarking system that I had been using.

However, I finally decided to take the plunge when I saw that I could have Pinboard.in bookmark/pin everything both inside their system, but also on my Delicious account. There just wasn't that much to lose.

pinboard

What is Pinboard?

From their FAQs:

Pinboard is a personal archive for links you find online. You save bookmarks to the site and can find and search them later from any computer. The site can automatically import your links and tweets from a number of outside services.

Pinboard also offers an archive feature that will save a local copy of everything you bookmark in case the original page goes offline, and let you search all your bookmarks by their full text content.

How do I use Pinboard?

Pinboard is so easy to use that a person might suspect that it only has one application: to save stuff. However, I wind up using it in a number of ways, including:

As a source for inspiration and ideas for blog posts and social media interactions

Once a week, I go onto my main Pinboard page that has all my pins in one long list down the middle. I take a look at the pins I've added in the last week and determine whether they might fit into my main blog post for the week, or if they might be good individual Tweets or Facebook links.

When people ask me for resources on a given topic

The power of Pinboard comes in when you set up a system of categories, or tags with your bookmarks. As soon as you save a bookmark, you have the option to add one or more tags at that time.

Later on, if someone asks me for my advice or resources regarding educational technology, I have an easy link to send them that has all the resources I've saved on a given topic.

https://pinboard.in/u:bonni208/t:EdTech/

twitterAs a way to capture resources from Twitter with one click or tap

I have Pinboard set up to automatically add any Tweets that I favorite to my pins.

While that sounds like it would get crazy to try to keep all those favorites organized, it really isn't all that necessary. I have it set to use any Twitter hashtags as tags within Pinboard. In most cases, there aren't tags, though, and they just wind up going in a category called untagged.

If I were inclined, I could manually go in there and tag them all at a later time. However, I haven't found that necessary, given the robust search features in Pinboard and the nature of the kinds of things I favorite on Twitter.

Recommended steps

If you are going to take advantage of Pinboard, be sure you have:

  1. Set up your account
  2. Added the button/extension to your browser's toolbar, so you can easily add pins while you're on your computer
  3. Add the Pinboard extension/share button to your iOS device, so you can easily add pins while you'er on your iPhone/iPad

[reminder]Do you use a bookmarking/archiving tool? If so, which one is it and why is it your preferred tool?[/reminder]

Working out loud in higher ed

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Someone asked me the other day if it was strange listening to myself on podcasts.

 

working out loud

I'm now doing a monthly Q&A show on Dave's (my husband's) Coaching for Leaders podcast, as well as the weekly Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. I listen to many of them before they air, so that I can create the show notes. All of them wind up in my listening queue on Overcast (my preferred podcast app). My weekly routine has me often listening to them in the car, or when feeding our baby girl at night.

There are often moments when I listen where I wish I would have phrased something differently, or not laughed when I talked about something quite serious. Lately, I'm frustrated at the number of times I'm saying the filler word “so” on the show. Prior to that, the recordings were littered with “you know”s. I'm always working on some aspect of my speech patterns that could potentially be distracting to the listening audience.

Yes, it can be uncomfortable to hear myself, especially during some of my less-than-stellar recording moments.

However, there are so many great things that have come from “working out loud,” a phrase first coined by Bryce Williams. When we work out loud, we make our work visible to a network of people with similar interests and missions as our own.

John Stepper describes working out loud as:

…making your work visible in such a way that it might help others. When you do that – when you work in a more open, connected way – you can build a purposeful network that makes you more effective and provides access to more opportunities.

Robbin Good has a content curation guide that explores emerging practices in content curation and how to get started. There's also this interview with Maria Popova, the editor of Brain Pickings, one of the greatest examples of content curation that exists. It almost feels wrong to refer to it as content curation, or even working out loud. She refers to her work in a far more descriptive and eloquent manner as she writes on her “about” page:

Brain Pickings is my one-woman labor of love — a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Mostly, it’s a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life.

It is risky and takes dedication to work out loud, but the benefits are plentiful.

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Stop yourself from becoming a digital hoarder

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How do we know when we have truly gained the trust of a colleague in academia? For some of you, it may be when you are asked for advice. For others, perhaps it is when your help is requested. For me, it seems to be when people are willing to confess that they have become digital hoarders.

Digital hoarder

This first happened about four years ago. My friend admitted that she had been letting people down and not following through with her commitments. Let's call her Laura. I'll admit to having been sometimes frustrated that she didn't get back to me on stuff, since we were on committees together and our paths crossed regularly in our work. It was easy to forgive her, though, because I know Laura cared so much and had so much on her plate. What I didn't realize at the time was her big secret as to why she was getting increasingly worse at managing her life as a professor.

We were in my office and she finally broke down and cried one day. Laura had forgotten about a meeting she was supposed to attend and had no idea how on earth she was going to get things together for an end-of-the-year event. She said she just couldn't keep up with it all, particularly the email. We talked around the issue for a few minutes, but then got to the heart of the matter. She had more than 7,000 emails in her inbox, much of which she associated with unfinished business.

The costs of having a lot of digital clutter aren't immediately evident. Storage costs for data have come down so much that IT departments keep raising the storage they make available to us and it is easy for us to buy another hard drive or sign up for another cloud service. The costs come when we think about how much time we spend trying to find what we need, or having to start over again with something. There's also the stress of having a system we don't trust.

Here are four steps to stop yourself from becoming a digital hoarder:

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