A meandering mind…

Well, it was bound to come, my friend the mind map is back again. Not much to say on this really, I am very much an advocate of it’s use.

Mind Map

In particular since the days of yore I have used Freemind for my mind mapping needs, it was an application I had become used to when I used work on the PC so I was understandbly pleased to discover a format for Mac. I know there are better versions available but this one is free and it does everything I need it do, which is all that I ask.

It is as I said above, a tool for mapping the mind. The number of projects and presentations that I have planned and laid out with this tool are beyond count but I know that I have used it a lot. It’s such a very fluid way of exploring the knowledge in your own mind and the links between certain information and presenting and recording it in a way that is both reusable and easily accessible for others to make sense of. It’s a very coherent way of presenting what can often be in ones own mind a muddle of information and ideas, as well as perceived connections.

It’s one I recommend everyone to try. As it’s a wonderful way of ordering ideas and thoughts into a visual diagram that can be reused and easily corrected after study and new information found can be added on simply without the labors of similar handwritten equivalents.

I know, I know. I must complete the third and final Building Blocks to success post but thought I would hold out on that for a little while yet. As it will be more of a summation of the process rather then a tackling of any particular digital tools to assist study, so instead I am tackling O.C.R. (Optical Character Recognition).

And what a tool! So, so very useful. For my thesis very few whole books exist that engage specifically with my area of study, namely the Magi in the Collectanea Pseudo-Bedae, so I find myself dipping in and out of many books. Often only needed a single chapter at a time. And rather then creating bulky hard copies I have been creating digital copies of them. It has become a rather large and bulky library of both discs for backup and on the hard drive itself.  It was about half way through February that this discovery was made and it has been a revelation! My printer, a Canon MP990 has an inbuilt OCR capability. Being very aware of the online resources for OCR Text Analysis I felt that was a rather cumbersome and slow way of tackling expansive text.

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The title, I am inclined to say, says it all! Building blocks, it was the objective in the search for several tools for digital management of what I have found is becoming a rather expansive and extensive collection of digital resources for my research. This post will be the first of three dealing with what I consider to be the several building blocks to success.

Logically it is prudent to start with GTD Software as it is known, or Got to Do. Logical because this is how I have managed all research and management tasks since beginning my research. At the beginning all the way back in October of our Digital History class Mike, our lecturer, went through the finer aspects of being organised. And, being honest it struck a cord. I came home that evening and sorted through my files diligently making lists of what needed to be done etc. It got me thinking, as I often do. This thinking can sometimes lead to… what can only be described as one thought being replaced with another. In other words I am prone to be forgetful, though it pains me to admit it! I needed something to manage this forgetfulness but also take it a step ahead, and factor in planning. So as I said I began searching for GTD Software. I could talk about the several versions I found which were free etc but they really weren’t up to much. I found them for the main part, limited. I did find one known as iGTD and it was a revelation, but was out of production! And following the crumb trail I found a wondrous thing. The programmer had moved to a new company who created Things. It was the dream program. The price was a factor. It was… expensive to say the least and took a lot to bring me to commit the funds to paying for it. But it has been worth every cent! Read more

Well, I was asked to throw this together for Dr. Scully in my MA Class for the other students in my class as well as hopefully it being useful for anyone else who stumbles across it.

The objective being giving the class a digital perspective on presentation through Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 as I believe it to be the most widely used in class. This has also been in line with the Digital History module I was doing with Dr. Cosgrave. Evangelising the Digital History message as it were!

So here’s the show and hopefully it will be of some use to those who come across it.

This blog comes in response to the reading of an article in the  technology supplement in the Irish Times. This article highlighted by Mike our lecturer in Digital History caught my attention. The idea of a focus on education, the idea of re-education. An important lesson I felt could be applied was the idea of emphasis on education, and the idea of re-skilling which I’ll come back to later one.

Paul Rellis, Microsoft’s country manager for Ireland, believes such investments are crucial and form a key part of the approach to developing a multi-disciplinary skills base early in the education system. “What we need is citizens coming out of school with good basic IT skills, skilled in communication and with an understanding and ability to relate to different cultures. Getting a combination of these hard and soft skills is vital.” Read more