Monthly Archives: May 2005

Call for DIY Education Pack Ideas

Posted on May 26, 2005 | 12 Comments

There’s a little light at the end of the tunnel with regard to my workload, so I’m taking this time to mention the status of the D*I*Y Planner.

First, there is still no version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org yet, so my template kit is still pending its “any day now” release. I am quite encouraged by the drawing tools in the beta, but the program still rather buggy at this time.

Second, my focus for the next while will be on “add-on” packages for the D*I*Y Planner which would be targeted towards more specialised users. The first two will be Education and Creativity. I’m still very much in the embryonic stages of what’s to be included, and how they will be structured.

Which brings me to the reason for this post: are there any students and teachers out there who have ideas about what you’d like to see in the D*I*Y Education Package? Currently, I only have the following templates in process:

Lesson Plan
Unit Plan
Course Overview
Materials
Bibliography (MLA), including an index card variant
HowTo: MLA Citations
Timetable, both five-day and blank versions
A marking template or two
Attendance
Perhaps some new brainstorming charts?

I lean towards the arts, not the sciences, so MLA is my first choice for documenting sources. That being said, I can see no reason why I couldn’t create other styles while I’m at it. I would like a few pros to double-check my work, though.

If you have any suggestions for additional templates, I’d love to hear from you: please leave a comment below or send me an email. (My address is found at the bottom of the menu at right.) Scholars, educators, students and educational methodologies being what they are, I sincerely doubt that these templates will suit everybody’s needs, but I’m trying to ensure that I take into account as many as possible. Your feedback is thus very important to me.

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Posted in Education, GTD, Productivity

Review: An Attic Called DEVONthink

Posted on May 22, 2005 | 17 Comments

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

- Sherlock Holmes to Watson during their first case, A Study in Scarlet

From hints in the Canon, I’m positive that Holmes nurtured a own home-grown content management system (CMS) of notes, newspaper clippings, pages torn from journals, snippets from medical textbooks, monographs on fingerprints and head measurements, observations on mud types and tobacco ashes, criminal trial transcriptions, and so on. Some of this was no doubt kept in his “attic” for casework, but there was much that didn’t fit (such as the fact that the Earth revolved about the sun, he claimed) and –should a pertinent nugget need to be recalled to solicit a possible solution for a case– that would require safekeeping for ready reference and analysis later.

I’ll leave the theorising as to whether Holmes would even bother with computers in this day and age to those Baker Street professionals who take great joy in debating such topics. However, I can’t help but wonder what sort of system he, as a knowledge worker, would utilise today.

I guess one might refer to me as a “knowledge worker” in the purer sense of the term (if you can indeed filter out the buzzword poisoning). Most of my time is spent instructing, consulting, preparing coursework, developing (mainly educational) multimedia, researching, writing, and coming up with solutions to uncommon problems. To do this requires a tremendous body of knowledge and information, very little of which I can actually retain in the little attic of my mind. Over the past few years, I’ve tried quite a number of ways to store and retrieve information, and they all have their pros and cons. In particular, I am very impressed with Tinderbox and the way in which it leverages agents, queries which act upon its freeform database and associated metadata to produce groups of links to items that match (and that can be further utilised in other scripts, like exporting to HTML for a website). However, I’ve never been able to find a content management system that also does an excellent job of handling non-textual media and concordance –finding items that are similar, based upon word relationships drawn out by context. That is, until now. Its name is DEVONthink.

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Posted in Apple, Organisation, Productivity, Sherlockiana, Technology

O where have the mom-and-pops gone?

Posted on May 21, 2005 | 2 Comments

Leeches, er... leeks About 15 years ago, I remember one of my many trips to a little produce store in downtown St. John’s named Lars. When I asked a simple question about the differences between apples, I received a (not unwelcome) half-hour lesson concerning eight varieties of apples, including a sample tasting session.

Today, I was in a large supermarket buying some vegetables, and the cashier stopped and stared in bewilderment at the produce on her digital scale. She held it up. “Leeches?” she asked.

“Uh, leeks,” I responded.

“…Same thing…,” she muttered under her breath, no doubt thinking I was a know-it-all.

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Posted in Cooking

Walking and Talking

Posted on May 9, 2005 | 6 Comments

A few years ago, I had a really bad bout of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) that made almost any typing or pushing quite painful, despite my careful consideration of ergonomics. Slowly, with a decrease in my typing workload, the problem alleviated itself to the point where I wasn’t worried about it anymore.

In the past couple of months, however, I’ve been creating quite a lot of educational content for an online course, and my wrists are seriously beginning to hurt again. The CTS has made a comeback and becomes more noticeable with each passing day.

I’m aware that are both short-term and long-term semi-solutions to CTS, but it’s far better to address the origin of any problem rather than treat its symptoms. So I took a careful look at what I was doing, and how I might address the issues.

Correct ergonomics (the placement of fingers, hands, wrists, back) can only do so much, especially if you already have CTS, but I was doing almost everything right, using various silicon and foam wrist rests, a proper chair, good desk elevation, and correct positioning of my hands. So not much more could be done about that: I was doing things by the book.

Upon careful consideration, I realised that –out of around 16 hours a day of computer work– roughly 80% of this is “hovering” my hands above the keyboard, poised to type, while I thought of the next sentence or paragraph. (When I do type, it’s in bursts ranging from 60 to 80 words per minute.) So why not take away my hands from the keyboard while I think? Well, there is a certain immediacy, even an urgency, of having the hands in such a position; it forces you to write eventually. So what to do?

Well, I mentioned that I often think better while standing or pacing (which is why I’m thinking of following Ed Bliss’ advice about a standing desk). Then I remembered something: about ten years ago, I used to always keep an inexpensive portable cassette recorder –you know, the little microcassette handhelds with a built-in mic– in my car so that I could dictate project notes while driving. I dug it out and started walking around, speaking my lessons into the mic, using the pause button while I thought of the next phrase or paragraph. Afterwards I sat down, plugged in a set of earbuds and played the recording back, typing the words at high speed. Now, it wasn’t perfect, but it gave me the first draft ripe for editing. Not only does this make matters more efficient and easier on my hands, but the extra brain-power generated by walking around seems to help me come up with and expand ideas that may not occur to me while sitting.

So my current “model of efficiency” for producing written content is:

Create very rough outlines for the lessons on paper, essentially as prompts
Walk around with the cassette recorder and paper, dictating the content, using the pause button for thinking
Transcribe the spoken notes at high speed on my laptop
Edit the material as needed, adding links and images
Publish

I’ve only been doing this for a few days, but already my wrists are thanking me and my material seems to be better thought out and more imaginative. This is not to mention the potential for actually getting some exercise while I get things done. I’ll be pursuing this workstyle for the duration of my contract (not much longer now), and perhaps beyond.

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Posted in Creativity, Productivity