WSU Teaching & Learning Blog

BibMe is a relatively new web-based tool designed to simplify the creation of citation lists in MLA, Chicago, Turabian or APA formats. The online tool features “auto-completion” of books and articles you can find via their quick search tool, so adding many items is quick work if you know what you are looking for.  You do have to create an account, but it is quickly done, with no need to go and retrieve an email from them before you get started (a common requirement these days). You can save up to 10 working bibliographies. 

When you are ready you can export a created bibliography as a rtf file for use in Word or other word processing tools. While the tool is really easy to use, it doesn’t try to match the power of desktop applications like Endnotes (available at not cost to WSU students and faculty). For instance, it doesn’t have a format to enter and save individually authored chapters in edited books. However, if you are looking for a way to create a quick list of works cited, BibMe is definitely worth a look.
    

Readers might be interested to see these results from an online query asking learning professionals from various backgrounds to identify their top tools for learning. Specifically, Jane Hart and more than 100 other affiliates of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies in the U.K. responded to the question “What are your 10 favorite tools for your personal learning/working or for creating learning for others?”

Here is a link to the top tools arranged by type. It was interesting to note that over 75% of the tools in the list are free.

I think our OTL workshop on Blogs and Wikis in Academia went well today. We had a good turn-out. I would have liked to give people a bit more hands-on experience with posting and tagging blog entries, but my timing was thrown off a bit by the movies that were shown. Good stuff, but I need to account for it in the planning.

Our two lucky winners of PBWiki Gold accounts were our own Annette Feravich and Law School Librarian Anne Cottongim.

I’m attaching the handout from the session. The file is a 1.5 MB pdf, so be ready for a sizeable download.

Here’s some links of special interest from the session;
Writingwiki.org - Advice on using wikis in college writing

The Academic Blog Portal (listing of scholarly blogs)

Higher Ed Blog Conference - ie HigherEdBlogCon

Directory of topical Blog “Carnivals”

Free blogs for Educators at EduBlogs.org

Introduction to Blogging in Academia from UT Knoxville

Technorati State of the Blogosphere Reports (shows growth of blogs over time)

Kebberfegg (crazy name, great tool) was developed by Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz fame. It is a tool to help you generate large sets of keyword-based RSS feeds at one time. Keyword-based RSS feeds (some people call them “search based feeds”) are those RSS feeds generated as a result of doing a search — for example, both Yahoo News and Google News have keyword-based RSS feeds. Basically, by using a feed from a search, you can get alerted every time a new item of interest appears in the searched resource without revisiting the website.

As the Kebberfegg site explains, “Keyword-based feeds are great because they can save you a lot of time by automatically updating search results and sending them to your RSS feed reader. But it can take a lot of time to set up all the keyword-based feeds you might want to use across several different resources. Kebberfegg gives you one place to set up as many as 64 keyword-based RSS feeds at a time, in yummy HTML or OPML flavors.”

More on how to use these later…