As I’ve been trying to work on the PG Cert, I’ve become more and more in need of those organisational and referencing (who knew that would have become so different! – Everyone, I guess…) skills. So…

I talked to Bethany Moulange, from academic support about referencing material, especially from the internet, and she was great. She made me feel less scared by CiteThemRight, by just showing me how it works and what she uses it for. She did the same for Zotero, which I’d already installed, but felt intimidated by. I still do a bit as I can’t work out if it’s the right way for me, but I suspect it is.

One of the hardest things about this is that I suspect I might need different tools for different things and I can’t really cope with the disorganisation of that.

So… I’ve just tried OneNote, which I hoped might do a few different things. Here’s my first page:

I watched this video which was by Dr Paul Penn, recommended by Santanu and it confirmed what I thought really. I need something that allows me to take notes in the way that write, but online.

I’m really interested in how all this is for students and how using laptops might be removing some the benefit we could be getting from studying, by reducing the potential cognitive benefits of hand writing, whilst at the same time opening so many doors, particularly in terms of accessibility. There are so many skills you need to effectively study. I’m hoping that through two projects with our team we can look at them in more detail. One is supporting an academic colleague in a bid to do some research into effective online notation. The other is some work we’re doing on Digital Capabilities. In a recent focus group with students for this project, a student said she uses Padlet to collate her notes which made me think we should develop a bank of different methods from students themselves as part of our student-facing support.

I tried out mindmapping with Padlet for an online talk I attended last week and found it was great for incorporating all the links people sent in the Chat as well as organising my thoughts in the way I would usually on paper. I wonder if I can embed it into OneNote…?