A real time, multi-user, online notebook. Real time is real time, with little delay. Public Pads can be set up instantly, with custom URL’s if desired, but have no security (and can’t be deleted). So, they are very, very public pads.

There are a couple of services that help do some of this automatically and give you a place to store and share the images. Scanr works with cameras, including camera phones, that take at least 1 megapixel images (that’s most newer phones and nearly all digital cameras). Quipit has similar requirements. In both cases, you take a picture of the whiteboard, handwritten/drawn document, or typed document, and send it to the service. They process the picture to increase the contrast, remove shadows and camera artifacts (like flash glare), and crop the background out, and provide a link or account where you can download, share, email, or fax your image as a PDF document. Registration for both requires an email address, and agreement to the terms of service, which are fairly standard.

For the most part, a standard 1 megapixel shot in either service will do nicely for a whiteboard or for handwritten notes, but not for typed documents. Both services have lists of phones that work for whiteboard, notes, or typed documents, so you can easily check if your camera phone will work. Lighting and careful photography are still important, no matter how good the image processing, so both services provide tips for improving your images.

Both Scanr and Quipit have Facebook applications for sharing classnotes. Quipit allows you to post documents to a blog. Quipit works in color or black & white, while Scanr says it is dedicated to high quality black & white images. Both services have tagging and searching.

Security is based on passwords and both services have SSL security for login, however transmission is not necessarily encrypted. You are sending images from your camera phone via the text messaging system, or from your computer via email, and neither service has control over that part of the system. So use care if you have proprietary or personal data.

So the next time you have been scribbling on a napkin, or brainstorming on a whiteboard, get out that camera phone and give one of these a try.

They are also working on an independent offline editor. Offline viewing is already available via Google Gears. No Microsoft Office required, just the Google Gears download. Very intriguing. Plus Zoho offers plugins for IE and Firefox to view documents in Writer (doc), Sheet (xls), or Show (ppt).

And I’m checking out the Notebook. Not only can you do web clipping (like Google’s Notebook), but you can incorporate documents and other Zoho services, add audio and video (like YouTube), record(!) audio and video, and use the built in chat or Skype. And all of this can be edited collaboratively and be published for public viewing (with comments, too.) I’m going to experiment with this for doing online presentations. (Oh, and did I mention that they’ve got a Web Conferencing module, too?)

(*Thinkfree will be offering an online/offline sync, but it looks like you’ll have to pay for it.)

The programs available in the Suite (or separately) include: Firefox (web browser), Thunderbird (email client), OpenOffice (office suite), AbiWord (word processor), NVU (web editor), Sunbird (calendar & task list), FileZilla (FTP client), and Gaim (instant messenger). The whole Suite will fit on a 256 Mb drive. There is also a version without the OpenOffice (but including the stand alone word processor) that will fit on a 128 mb drive (which can be bought for $20 these days).

All of these programs have desktop (non-USB) versions, so you can work on your files at home, at work, or on the go. (One warning: Sunbird is still in alpha and so may not be the best choice for a desktop calendar program, but Portable Sunbird can import/export to Apple’s iCal or any other calendar program that uses the iCal standard .ics file format. Sunbird does not sync with Palm OS devices. Yet.)

This would be a great system for Mac users who are stuck using Windows computers every so often, too. No worries about whether or not Microsoft Office will read your Mac files, because OpenOffice has a Mac version that reads/writes exactly the same files as the Windows version. OpenOffice will read and save to Microsoft formats, too, and save to PDF and HTML.

Update: Here’s a great example of using an online desktop for teaching: Owen James’ HigherEdBlogCon presentation and his SuperGlu site. Anything that has an RSS feed can be added, so I put in my RSSCalendar feed. (I tried my Reader2 feed, but it wouldn’t validate.)

There are other online desktops with different features and different linked services. Some of the others are Groowy (Flash based–watch out for the contacts import if you don’t want to send invites to everyone you know!), Protopage (public view), Pageflakes (multi-page organization), Microsoft’s Windows Live (integration with Microsoft products like MSN Search and Hotmail, including a potential link with Office Live), MyYahoo! (coordinated with Yahoo services) and Fold (a beta test with some interesting “foldlets”, cookie based, i.e. single computer use).

Another word about security: I’m going to keep hammering on this every chance I get. When you sign up for these services and enter in your email, contacts, or other personal information, remember that you are sending that info off to a third party. Groowy caused a big stink by having the “send invites” box checked by default when you import contacts. They’ve fixed it, but a lot of people are really annoyed (I didn’t import my contacts when I tested Groowy). Several of these services have you enter your email and other service passwords to display information. Consider carefully if you want your passwords stored on someone else’s server. You can always just put a link to the service in a note, so that you can click through. (Also remember that most of the email boxes just show the most recent emails received at your account, pre-filter–in the case of my work email that’s mostly spam these days. Do you really need to look at that all the time?) Some services have a public view, so you need to consider what you want to show the world, but even the private ones are stored somewhere under varying security. You probably shouldn’t use these services for sensitive or confidential information.

The website is a little confusing, since it’s actually a TiddlyWiki itself. Find the DownloadSoftware tiddler for a blank TiddlyWiki file. The “empty” file does include a couple of entries of instructions. Just click on the links to change your title, subtitle, and basic settings. Then start making notes or “tiddlers”. The only rule is that your note titles must be have no spaces, for instance OnlineReserves instead of Online Reserves.
By assigning tags to each note, you can organize your notes into categories. For instance, I’m using a TiddlyWiki to, among other things, save text instructions for some of the basic library functions, like creating a library password and using online reserves. So one tag that I use is “instructions”. I have mine on a USB drive, so that I can edit it on any computer, but I back it up to my faculty web site, so that I can access the information from any computer. I can’t edit the web site, without saving the file back to the server, but I can view it whenever I need to. If you’re curious, the URL is http://home.southernct.edu/~hedreenr1/Tiddly.html (with a capital T).

If you don’t like the basic look, you can modify the CSS styling with by creating a tiddler called StyleSheet with a list of CSS formatting commands (background color, fonts, etc.) You’ll need to know basic CSS syntax. More information, with examples, is available on the TiddlyWiki site under CustomStyleSheet. You can also change the default tiddler to display when you first load the wiki, and the left side navigation bar.
Everytime I go to the site there is something new. Jeremy Rushton, a consulting technologist in the UK, is the creator behind TiddlyWiki and he is constantly fiddling and improving the site and the program.

Update (4/11/06): After using TiddlyWiki from my USB drive for a bit, I’ve noticed one awkward thing. When you save your file, TiddlyWiki saves a time/date stamped backup. After a while these get pretty numerous, so you should probably make a point of cleaning the old ones out every so often.

If you can publish pretty much anything in a blog, respecting your blog hosts Terms of Use and general copyright laws, you can use a blogging tool for notetaking. If you have an Internet computer handy in the place you are taking notes, you can type right into the blogging tool and have “live” notes. Otherwise, use the blog as a place to reflect and organize your thoughts afterward. This is perfect for the Reflect part of the Cornell Method of Note Taking or similar systems.

Reflection is a valuable part of the learning process. You go beyond memorization, and put the information into terms that make sense for you. How does this apply to your studies, job, or life? How does this relate to other things you’ve learned? Not only does the information become more useful, because you’ve thought about how it applies to you and what you know, but it also becomes easier to remember.
If having your class or research notes online for all the world to see makes you nervous, then take advantage of the privacy and/or draft functions available in most blogging platforms. In edublogs.org blogs, like this one, I could password protect a post. In Blogger (blogspot.com) blogs, I could use the Save as Draft function. When I downloaded the Opera web browser, I had the opportunity to start a blog that has private access functions. LiveJournal (popular with teens and students for personal use) also has privacy functions. Those are just a few examples.

You can also use a blog for collaboration. Group blogs allow all members to post. Or other group members can comment on your notes (if you turn on the commenting feature available on most blogs).

There are many social bookmarking services, and I’m using del.icio.us as a popular example of this type of service. The characteristics of del.icio.us and similar systems are: easy bookmarking of links, space for short notes (256 characters in del.icio.us), keyword tagging (more on that below), and full public access.

Keyword tagging is probably the biggest benefit of these systems. In your browser’s Favorites/Bookmarks list, you can organize your links into folders, but each link can only go into one folder (you could save a link more than once.) With a tagging system, you assign however many words you want to each link. This means you can personalize your “retrieval system”. For instance, if you find a site on mercury in fish, and you have an interest in environmental issues, you might tag the site “fish mercury pollution”. However, if you are interested in the medical risks of mercury to pregnant women, you might tag it “fish mercury toxicity pregnancy”. If you are have an interest in fish biology, you might add the fish species name as a tag. Etc., etc.

This provides an easy way of organizing notes for classes and projects. Figure out a unique tag for each course or project. The course number (ENG101, etc.) is a good place to start for course-related work. Sources for your final paper might be tagged “ENG101final”. Sources for a group project might be tagged “ENG101GroupB”. If your whole group uses the same tag, you can all find each other’s sources by searching for that tag. (It’s useful in this case to check to be sure you have a unique tag.)

While these services are designed for saving links to webpages, there are a few tricks for working with none online sources. You can link to the library catalog record of a book, for instance, or a webpage that cites the book or article you are interested in. Just make sure to note what it was you were actually saving in the note or description field. You can use a blog or other online publishing tool to save notes and save that link.

While all of the above will work for any social bookmarking service, there are a few reasons to use del.icio.us in particular. For one, del.icio.us is easy, quick, and quite stable. There are also dozens of addon tools for del.icio.us. The most useful for note-taking is Pasta. Pasta allows you to save a text note to del.icio.us and then access it just like you would any other link.

There are a few problems with del.icio.us and the similar services, as well. Your saved links are (almost) completely public. Also, since all you are saving are links, it doesn’t help if the page you had saved disappears. I’ll mention a few related services that help with these problems in separate entries.

Just about every school, college, and university offers a free email account to any student. Many of them allow you to keep your email account after graduation. You receive at least one email account with any ISP account. There are also hundreds of free email services. So there is no excuse for not having an email account. You probably should have at least one main account, and a spare or two that you use for registering for accounts and services. By using several email accounts, you reduce the chance of getting spam and other unwanted email on your main account.

At least one of your email accounts should have a web interface. This way you can check your email at any web computer, and email things to yourself anytime you are online.

The collaboration aspects of email are obvious. However, you should remember the potential delay if you try decision-making by email. All it takes is one person not able to reach their email for a few hours to hold up the whole process. Having group-members in different time zones can exacerbate the delays. On the other hand, groups spanning multiple time zones can also take advantage of the “delay” by emailing projects in sequence. As the next person comes online, they can pick up the work, then pass it on to the next time zone. Email allows worldwide collaboration, without someone having to get up at 2 am for a conference call.

You can also use email to take notes. Send an email to yourself with the citation (author, title, etc.) of the book or article you are reading, and a link if it’s online, with a summary, facts, or quotes that you want to remember or use in your paper. If you use email that allows you to sort emails into folders, you can bring all the emails for a particular class or project into one folder. GoogleMail, Yahoo! Mail, Eudora, Thunderbird, Outlook, and Outlook Express all allow sorting, as do most email services and software these days. Thunderbird can even be used directly from a USB drive, allowing you to have the benefits of a desktop client (like offline reading/composing) and still be mobile.
Again, and this is probably the only “should” you’ll see in this site, you should have email to do online research.

You must set up an account with Refworks, either via the university server or using the Group Code assigned to the university. (Contact the Reference Department for more information.) Once you have the account, you can log in from anywhere. There are no required downloads.

There is a Refworks Tutorial from Refworks, plus a Buley RefWorks Tutorial and a RefWorks QuickStart Guide designed by Buley librarians. Buley Library also offers classes on using Refworks, see http://www.library.southernct.edu/refworks.html for a schedule.

Most of the major databases allow for automatic importing of references in Refworks, though each one does it in a slightly different fashion. For most, mark the citations you want to import and go to the Save function. One option should be to save/import into bibliographic mananagement software. For databases like EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier, Refworks is a direct option. For others, like Science Direct, you must download a file in RIS format and import in 2 steps. Check the help files in the database or Refworks, contact me or the Reference Department for more information on individual databases. You can also import directly from library catalogs and PubMed through the Search function. Imports may need some editing, especially for format. Print Journal is the default for most imports. Occassionally, links will need to be moved to the URL field for proper electronic citations. You can also enter citations manually.

You can organize your citations within Refworks into folders for different projects. Since a citation can be in more than one folder, you can reuse citations in different projects. Folders provide the basis for creating Bibliographies/Reference Lists, so it is to your advantage to create a new folder for each paper/project. Citations are also searchable.

The real gem of Refworks is the ability to create Bibliographies in nearly any citation format. Bibliographies can be created from any folder of citations, and displayed or downloaded for copying into a word processor. There is also a downloadable program called Write-N-Cite which works with MS Word. Using Write-N-Cite, you create in-text citations and the bibliography is automatically generated at the end of the paper. Check the tutorials for more information, as the process is a little too complicated to cover in this review.

There are several fields to use for user notetaking. The Notes field is sometimes used by the import function for database information. However, there are 5 User fields which are also searchable, and so make very good note fields. You could use these fields for quotations you wanted to use, commentary on the article itself, or cross references to other articles, or any other notes. There is no indication of a character limit for any of these fields.

Refworks is not designed primarily for collaboration. There is a separate product, RefShare, (not subscribed to by SCSU) for collaborative efforts. However, users can assign a Read-Only password for others to view their citations, and a group could share a password, though someone still has to provide a primary email address for registration. There is no particular notice against this in the Refworks Terms of Use, but as it is a subscription service, you should not share with someone outside the university who would not be able to get their own account.

I have not seen anything else that is quite as comprehensive a bibliographic management program that is accessible over the web.