ePrints

Well, I finally finished the ePrints assignment last night. After looking at the dB, I figured it out, though like many other students it seemed like the hardest part of it was knowing where to begin. At first, I wasn't even sure if I had to download it until I read the dB! In any case, uploading some of the large .pdf files was definitely the most time-consuming part of it along with having to switch from IE (to access the VPN) back to Firefox, my regular browser. That wasn't such a big deal, though. I also mistakenly forgot to save some of the information I found for the citations in a text file, so I just decided to type in the entire abstacts instead of going into the VPN again for some of the entries. Again, I hope I get all the metadata that I needed to, though it doesn't seem as important (from what I read on the dB, at least) as getting 25 articles into the live archive. I also didn't provide URLs for the article. I figured the .pdfs were sufficient. I hope this is OK, too, and that I don't get points off.

And speaking of which, I'm wondering when we'll get our grades for the Jing/Zotero assignment. OK, enough ranting.

belated thoughts on Jing/Zotero assignment

When I first attempted to do the assignment, I realized that I'd never made an audio recording using a computer. I thought for sure that I'd have to purchase a microphone or a webcam, but luckily the laptop I was using during the time where we didn't have an internet connection via our desktops (a big storm a few weeks back knocked out our phone service for 3 days and also knocked out our modem and we had to wait for Earthlink to ship us a new one) did the trick. I didn't realize that most of them had built-in mics, so thanks to the instructors for the tip!

I found that it was relatively easy to use Jing, both in terms of the capacity it has for enabling users to make videos and in terms of screen capture (though this was a bit trickier; I had to do it 3-4 times to get it right). Therefore, I found that the toughest part of this assignment was to put it on this blog. In particular, while it was easy to get the video up, the challenge was how to make it fit the screen properly. I experimented with a few different approaches and finally was able to curtail it so that it fit my laptop screen, albeit at the expense of screen clarity. It's too bad that Blogger doesn't resize it automatically, but it's easy enough to change the HTML code references to height and width (thanks for the tips). I ended up changing only 3 of the references to height and width and not all of them, but I still think that it did the trick (?).

Now it's full speed ahead onto the eprints assignment!

Assignment 4 (Zotero Installation Video)

I apologize for the scratchiness of my microphone, especially towards the end of the video, but this is the first time I've ever narrated an audio presentation and it's the only mic I have at the moment. Anyway, I hope you can understand me.

I also apologize that this out-of-scale. I tried resizing the height and width, but there's still a disconnect between the screen size and what it shows on blogger.