Mind maps and OWL's

Here's the text of my first xtranormal movie.

So I've decided it's time to have some fun on this blog. I've recently decided it would be fun to make a movie instead of just typing up something. So twenty five dollars and an xtranormal account later, this is my first experiment in making a truly anonymous video blog.

Now... let's talk about mind maps. Oh, mind maps. What a useful tool for organizing old ideas and coming up with new ones. As you can see in one of the posts below this, I've used Freemind to play with organizing some of the ideas for my terminal project that have just been swimming around my head. If you look at it, you can kind of get a sense for what I'm thinking about in terms of MALL history, case studies and a basic outline for a needs analysis. Maybe the most useful part of Freemind, for me anyway, was its ability to track research abstracts. This lets me see how one bit of information is connected to another bit of information. My only complaint with this software is the fact that you can't link it to bibliography software like Zotero or Endnote. That really would have made it a complete package.

All right. Now let's talk about the second part of last week's class. I'll tell you, I try to spend as little time mired on the Purdue OWL website as I possibly can, mainly because I'm not the biggest fan in the world of A P A formatting. That being said, the OWL site is a great resource for all things citation related. It is laid out very well and I really has no trouble finding my way around the site. The in class exercise even made it a little tricky, sort of like a sadistic version of a treasure hunt. It was mean, but it was also a very useful activity. And to tell the truth, I'm really looking forward this week's lesson on using Endnote. I've used it once before as part of a demo in Trish Pashby's 608 class last term, but there's a ton I still need to learn.

So. That's it for right now. I think I'll post the text of this entry somewhere on the blog too. Just to be safe, you know? By the way, I'm probably going to try to build part of my presentation for next week using xtranormal. I think that it has some real potential in an educational setting, especially since I plan on using ANVILL as my platform. We'll see how this flies.