I have been enjoying several days back in Ohio visiting with family and friends, but I am now back into full-steam-ahead mode for the coming semester.
I have gathered together the five most popular posts from 2012. I know that most of these deal with technology and social media; in the coming year, I will be writing more about other sides of academia, including pedagogy, policy, and my own research.
2013 is already looking like a busy year for me, not least because of an exciting move from the University of London to City University of Hong Kong. That means new courses, new students, new administrative systems, and a lot of new projects. Since I have set some time aside this week to take stock and review my plans for the coming year, I wanted to share one of the things that keeps my note-taking organized and ultimately helps to support my work as an academic: a clear, consistent tagging system that I use everywhere I can.
The academic life is a chaotic mixture of teaching, research, service, knowledge transfer, partnerships, publicity, and planning, so it has been important for me to find a way to seamlessly blend these strands. To this end, every piece of information that I put into Evernote or Things immediately gets these types of tags (I use the hashtag to denote a type of tag–these don’t actually form part of the tag itself):
Context > #Output > #Topic > #X-Ref
Because I use this same tagging system in both my task manager and my note taking software, it is incredibly easy to cross-reference details or to find the information that I need. Before I explain how these tags function within Evernote and Things, here’s a quick summary of each:
Continue reading “4 Tags That Make Sense of It All: Best Practice for Tagging Academic Notes”
With all of this semester’s exam scripts marked and off my desk, I have finally begun to read the books that have been piling up in my Kindle over the past semester. (On second thought, can eBooks ‘pile up’? Surely we need a new metaphor in the digital age.) One that I have particularly enjoyed is Helen Sword‘s Stylish Academic Writing. Far from an abstracted treatise on writing (as so many advanced academic writing texts are), Sword’s work highlights both the finest and guiltiest features of contemporary academic prose and uses these examples to demonstrate practical techniques for better writing.
The companion website to Sword’s earlier book The Writer’s Diet (unfortunately not available on Amazon.co.uk) offers a diagnostic tool to check the ‘flabbiness’ of prose. The diagnosis of several pages from a recent article of mine was not entirely positive. My writing, it seems, is a bit overwhelmed by adjectives and abstract nouns, but, then, so is a great deal of recent academic writing (see below). So my resolution for 2013 is to make my concrete nouns work harder, because up until this point they have been getting a free ride from my favourite adjectives.
Lots of people shared their interesting and unique systems for organizing research and writing data. While many academics prefer to use paper-and-pen to organize their work, there are also many that are finding a hybrid digital and paper system to be a great way to keep everything where they want it. You can see all of the great ideas and insights here.
Congratulations to the winners of the contest:
In the coming year, I will be writing more about Evernote and how it can be used for teaching and research in higher education. Many thanks for all of the entries, and I look forward to sharing more ideas as Evernote Higher Education Ambassador.
“Research” in the early days—and by that I mean in the days of elementary school—was a straightforward affair. Or it was until the revolution of the parenthetical citation marked a turning point in the yearly convention of the spring research paper. In those early days, “research” also looked quite different, in that it was largely done by looking books up in a card catalogue and then writing notes on index cards. Continue reading “Making It New: Innovation in Arts & Humanities Research”
