Last week, I published The Ultimate Guide to Productivity: A Chonicle. It's the list of the 137 participants in Ben Yoskovitz' group writing project, The Ultimate Guide to Productivity, at Instigator Blog. This series is a productivity guide aimed primarily at college-aged students, but some entries on the list will appeal to those of us who are a little beyond college age, too. It's based on The College Student's Productivity Guide - 27 Apps, Tools, and Resources posted at the Online Education Database.
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The posts split this way:
- Online Research
- Buying and Selling Textbooks
Handy Tools- Homework Composition
Social Networking*******
ONLINE RESEARCH
Try Free Book Notes for links to over 2500 cliffnotes, book notes and summaries,
chapter summeries, literature notes, and study guides for over 1600 books, plays, and poems. Through their data base and links index, if they don't have it, they can tell you who does. The site is easy to navigate and the information is free.
The wiki aspect of Wikipedia often disallows information from it being cited in formal papers. Nevertheless, with its many listed outside resources, the site is a good place to start researching. In addition to having about 7.5 million articles in 253 languages, these other resources can be helpful: Wiktionary, dictionary and thesaurus; Wikinews, content news; Wikiquote, collection of quotations; Wikibooks, textbooks and manuals; Wikispecies, directory of species; Wikisource, content library; Wikiversity, learning materials and activities.
The next research step might be the reputable MSN Encarta with its encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, and atlas. Encarta also offers resources in
adult learning, such as information about online degrees, career training, lifelong learning, and jobs & internships; resources for high school and college students include college prep, test prep, financial aid, and grad & professional school.
For the last word on words, go to Merriam-Webster Online. A few attractive features are a thesaurus, a Spanish-to-English translator, and an audio pronunciator. Merriam-Webster also offers a free toolbar that allows the user to find definitions on any website, as well as a free daily e-mail learners dictionary.
The ISI Web of Knowledge calls itself "the premier research platform". Journals and white papers are available in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities on the site of this academic research library. Some of the info at ISI is free to the public; they also offer a paid subscription to access the entire site.
Questia is a membership research site offering a wealth of information: books, magazines, journals, newspapers as well as a bibliography composer and note taking and writing tools. The tools here are developed to allow students to locate information quickly, "quote and cite correctly, and create properly formatted footnotes and bibliographies automatically".
Columbia University provides the archive site Fathom, with resources such as lectures, articles, interviews, exhibits and free seminars. Content is provided for Fathom by field experts from its member institutions. Additional resources are also available from the site.
A non-traditional source, Bloglines can be an invaluable research tool for the most up-to-date information in any field of study. In addition to being available in 10 languages, other features are blog and news feed search and reader, mobile version, e-mail subscriptions, and saved searches that deliver articles matching keywords and phrases.
Please check in to the next part of this series, which will deal the Buying and Selling Textbooks and a variety of Handy Tools.
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