Life changes. Once I had finally gotten the hang of grad school, it was time to leave and join the real world. As with any major change, my tech needs changed as well. I decided to take inventory and research the necessary changes to restore my efficiency.
As a grad student, my Panasonic CF-R3 was my mobile nerve center. I carried it with me every day to and from lab. Like most large universities, free wifi was available everywhere. I flirted with other technologies, but my laptop was really all that I needed.
I am currently an adjunct professor and professional tutor. I use my R3 to prepare lectures, worksheets, and maintain my gradebook. I have a home office but I work in a variety of different places some of which have internet access but most don’t. Since email is my lifeline, I have become increasingly frustrated by the lack of access to my email. I now need a smart phone and a plan that would potentially allow me to connect my laptop to my phone.
As part of the relaunch of Scarlet Umbrella, I am going to begin with a series of posts concentrating on my current mobile lifestyle. Yes, it is somewhat egotistical but since I always like to learn about how the big tech guys use technology and software to improve their lives, I figure I may as well share how one of the little people uses mobile tech. Planned topics include paper technology, my panasonic CF-R3, my Asus EEE, my gear bag, and my current quest for the perfect smart phone and phone plan. Welcome back to Scarlet Umbrella!
Asus, asus eee, computers, franklin covey, mobile, mobile lifestyle, nerve center, panasonic, r3, smart phone, technology
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Filed Under (Academia, Miscellany) by Susy on 11-10-2007
and slowly emerging from the rock that I was hiding under while I was finishing grad school. Now that I’m finished, expect more posts on the tabletscape as soon as I catch up on all of the mobile tech news I have missed!
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While I disagree with the claim that ChemPad will replace ball-and-stick models (they’re way too much fun), ChemPad looks like a nice tool for your tablet to help with visualizing molecules from two-dimensional drawings. It allows you to rotate molecules to analyze them in 3D space. The program has handwriting recognition to allow you to draw the scructure, and has both ball-and-stick as well as space-filled modes of viewing.
chemistry, education, software, tablet, tablet+pc
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By now, most tablet PC enthusiasts have heard about Virginia Tech requiring incoming freshmen in the engineering program to purchase tablets. This requirement has been met with enthusiasm among us tablet PC aficionados but concern among the student body who wondered if the program would actually utilize the tablets enough to warrant the cost in purchasing a tablet.
The university I attend has a program with a major computer manufacturer to provide students with laptops at a discount. Students are strongly encouraged to purchase a laptop and laptops are supposed to be incorporated into every course. The problem with laptops is that they aren’t really optimized for student activities such as note-taking. It’s typical to see students lugging around textbooks, notebooks, and their laptops when I can’t help but think it would be better to encourage the implementation of tablets instead of laptops.
The problem that most students complain about is that it is difficult to integrate notebooks into the classroom and that they end up lugging around dead weight. It is difficult to integrate notebooks into a classroom. The typing gets distracting and the temptation for the student body to use the time for activities other than the lecture is there. Having taught some myself, I understand this concern. This is one of the main reasons I encourage universities that have technology programs to start suggesting the use of tablets instead of laptops. Tablets provide transparency. You are no longer creating a shield around yourself, everyone around you can see what you are doing. This helps alleviate some of the distraction aspect of laptops and encourage professors to be more willing to allow new technology into the classroom.
To provide more use for tablets for students, software needs to be provided for them or they need to be shown where they can get the software to improve the classroom experience. At the bare minimum, tablets should come with the Microsoft Education Pack
installed. The Education Pack comes with GoBinder Lite which is a simpler version of the more powerful GoBinder which among its features includes Blackboard integration so it can download syllabi, class schedules, etc.
This situation is frustrating to me as a tablet user. To be fair, my university does offer tablet PCs at a discount with a nice software package including Office and OneNote. However, this offering is not emphasized enough and it is not recommended to incoming students in the brochures they receive about the university’s technology program which I find bizarre.
education, software, tablet, tablet+pc, tabletpc
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I learned today that they have come out with a new version of Endnote. Yay. The torture continues. I say this because we use Endnote at work. Endnote is a bibliography manager with integration into Word. By bibliography manager, I mean software that will randomly crash and/or decide that it only wants to display your chemistry journal references in APA format. By integration with Word, I mean will cause you to have a nervous breakdown before your paper is written because it helps Word crash every 5 seconds. By Word, I mean most evil word processor ever created.
Needless to say, I have been exploring other options even though Endnote/Word is the standard in my department. I’ve been playing around with Sente which features integration with Mellel instead of Word. I’ve never actually tried Mellel, but I’ve heard good things about it. I’m also exploring using LaTeX. I know that there is a learning curve but the advantage is more control of how your document is set. I have Carbon Emacs on my Powerbook already so I am thinking about learning AUCTeX. Sente has an export function to BibTeX so theoretically I could use it to manage my bibliography and use either Mellel or Emacs for the actual writing of the paper. (Yes, I know how difficult Emacs can be, but trust me, when you get it set up right, it can be incredible).
technorati tags: academia, emacs, software,
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