There's an excellent AU library plugin for Firefox, as well - I use them together quite a bit.

I just figured out the highlighting and annotation for web docs (enabled when you View Snapshot): score one for active reading, online.

I found Zotero 3/4 of the way through my program but I had already been organizing all my articles and texts for every single paper and class in ref works so although Zotero looks much better I won't switch now unfortunately because I am now well into my final project. For anyone new to Athabasca though I highly recommend one of these great sites for keeping and organizing all your references because when it came to do my final project after five years(!) I had all of my favorite articles readily accessible.  I did know what my final project would be about roughly since I started so all my papers and assignment were researched and written with my final project in mind. 

There's an excellent AU library plugin for Firefox, as well - I use them together quite a bit.

I just figured out the highlighting and annotation for web docs (enabled when you View Snapshot): score one for active reading, online.

I found Zotero 3/4 of the way through my program but I had already been organizing all my articles and texts for every single paper and class in ref works so although Zotero looks much better I won't switch now unfortunately because I am now well into my final project. For anyone new to Athabasca though I highly recommend one of these great sites for keeping and organizing all your references because when it came to do my final project after five years(!) I had all of my favorite articles readily accessible.  I did know what my final project would be about roughly since I started so all my papers and assignment were researched and written with my final project in mind. 

There's an excellent AU library plugin for Firefox, as well - I use them together quite a bit.

I just figured out the highlighting and annotation for web docs (enabled when you View Snapshot): score one for active reading, online.

I found Zotero 3/4 of the way through my program but I had already been organizing all my articles and texts for every single paper and class in ref works so although Zotero looks much better I won't switch now unfortunately because I am now well into my final project. For anyone new to Athabasca though I highly recommend one of these great sites for keeping and organizing all your references because when it came to do my final project after five years(!) I had all of my favorite articles readily accessible.  I did know what my final project would be about roughly since I started so all my papers and assignment were researched and written with my final project in mind. 

Hi Mark,

A decade from now, researchers will be looking back at the role of the Landing and its first users, and wondering what was going through the users' minds and what background they had. So, I have invited bloggers from within AU Landing to participate in what George Siemens referred to as a pause-point - preparing a reflective post that places us at the point where the Landing is about to become more widely used (I am hoping). I have invited alumni, faculty, students, and researchers to reflect on their blogging activity, and how the AU landing fits in with it.

Thus, for me, everyone participating in the pause-point as bloggers are "pioneers", in the larger context of a generation of users looking back over a decade, two, or longer, and having a snapshot of the thoughts of the first users of the Landing.

The one crucial shift in the way we will likely be learning in future is the emphasis on life-long learning, on lifestreams, and less emphasis on course-based instruction. The web as most people know it is 15 years old (1995 - year of the web). Sometimes, I think, we need to look far enough forward to consider creating content for our future selves and for the next generation, as much as creating something of short-term use.

I apologize if the impression I gave you all was that I was using a colonizing vocabulary. The choice phrasing of the pioneer is hopefully explained from a longer view rather than a colonizing perspective. It was certainly not my intention to do so.

I recognize that my choice of words in the overview of blogging processes is heavily influenced by my life experiences - For example, I have chosen terms such as berry-picking, piling, weaving, jigging, setting, path-finding, path-making and path-sharing. The descriptive metaphors explaining knowledge construction processes reflect in large measure what we all do to collect and harvest information online either individually or collectively. I also use seeding and homesteading as identity construction processes as well.  

The use of five or six questions to generate a pause-point is a blogging meme, and the intention is to start an open discussion among previously unconnected bloggers. The power of the meme is that it generates a lot of collective sense-making and enables everyone to contribute when they can what they can, and benefit from the others' responses.

Thank you for your post, Mark.

Glenn:

It's a trip to try imagining the digital mediascape in even just ten years ... given how different everything is now from what it was in 1995 -- or in 1987, for that matter, when I watched -- but paid no attention to -- the early fax-handshake squeals of the Internet's popularization on the TV show _Max Headroom_. Imagining "content for our future selves and for the next generation" resonates uncannily with _Star Trek_ and a moving SF film I just watched, _Moon_ (which, unlike anything _Star Trek_, I highly recommend); more to your point, it seems both ironic and entirely necessary that blogging today, still widely imagined (romantically) as spontaneous overflow of individual expression and as a "rough draft" of history, will provide (at least in part) the documentary record of future history. (Assuming the next generation won't be preoccupied entirely with fighting over fresh water in a tropical, radiation-saturated stormscape. But I digress.)

About your choice of words: no apology's looked for or necessary. I know you don't espouse a "colonizing perspective." I was being a bit of a jackass to comment in that tone on this point. But as a scholar of postcolonial literature, I'm sort of contractually obliged to call that sort of thing out. The metaphors we pick build the language we use, and the language we use builds the world we live in, and so if we're pausing to take stock of early blogging in the Landing, we can pause to consider the frames of this activity's representation. My revised posting suggests some alternatives to "pioneering," with its Euro-centric connotations of clear-cutting, mastering Nature, and protecting imperial property and prospects from a horde of demonized Others. I wasn't so much calling you out on this as calling out the vocabulary that frames so much current discourse on digital life. Note the pervasive ease with which "digital natives" are criticized for "destroying civilization" through their disregard of social propriety and norms, their constant chatter, their fetish-objects: between the pioneers and natives of the digital frontier (and the whole line all the way back to Gibson's "console cowboys"), a whole -- and wholly obsolete -- discourse and ideology are given free rein to colonize -- and thus control -- our imaginations as today's weavers, seeders, and pathfinders (love those alternatives), spelunkers and data miners (um...), cybernauts and conceptechnicians, remixologists and dubjects, digiterraformers and datascape artists. We're distributed subjectivities of the in-formation society, still very much (always already?) in process; let's not let nineteenth-century ideologies live rent-free in our heads.

Lastly: is there a group blog page/site/group that I should link this post to?