EPL 692 Tools Review

Among all the tools covered in EPL 692, I found the following particularly useful for future research.

Zotero will be my primary bibliographic manager, although I just found that I had a RefWorks account established in Fall 2008 (How come I forget about this?). Moviemaker is another tool I will definitely use- maybe start from making a short movie for my nephew’s birthday! Audacity and ExpressScribe are the tools I will use for audio-only interviews and transcriptions. I might consider buying Transana if I have videos to be transcribed and coded. WEFT QDA will assist me in analyzing data once I pass my candidacy (hopefully within a year). Wikipedia is a good friend of mine. Use it almost every day- just as a reader, never as an editor. Maybe I will put myself into the latter role someday. Zamzar is a good conversion program. I once used it to convert a student’s paper into a .doc when he saved it as a .wps. The only thing I don’t like about it is the several pop-up advertisement windows accompanied whenever I visit the website. Survey Monkey is an interesting tool- I am sure I will use it more often next quarter, since I will be enrolled for EPL 807, a course focusing on surveys.

I am trying Google Wave, which kind of combines e-mails, instant messaging, wiki, social networks, blog comments, and more together. I think it can be a powerful tool for collaborative researchers since it incorporates various sources of information into one application product and allows multiple participants to work on the same tasks together simultaneously.

DiRT is a good resource to go to if I want to know new tools for digital research. Of course I will visit the EPL 692 blog for new information as well.