The idea of open access to scholarly journals seems to be a big debate and this article talks about how publishers make millions of dollars off of research and peer reviews that are done for free. It also talks about Aaron Swartz who led the movement for allowing access to journals by basically "stealing" them and sharing them.
The ultimate guide for students who don't want to carry around their text books but still enjoy marking them up. With over 75,000 textbooks, Questia is an explosive host of information for the weary researcher. I really enjoy its easy navigation, ability to add comments in books, and wide range of topics. For an annual price of $100, I cut down on my book expenses and killed some book clutter in my apartment.
This article goes over tips that can be helpful when doing research online. I think some of these were discussed in class but some of them are new too.
An interesting article that shows how you can use Diigo effectively to collect information and bits of information from many different webpages in an organized way. The article presents some questions to think about when doing web research and how we can use tools such as Diigo to aid in gathering a large amount of information in one place. It also explains more in depth what Professor French has told the class regarding Diigo.
A couple of people wanted to do research on Aaron Swartz, who was arrested under the Computer Fraud Act for unauthorized use of MIT's network to download "all of JSTOR," presumably for rerelease onto the open web. Here's an article about a forthcoming documentary on him.
An article about a recent incident in China where a group of people were found to be selling fake scholarly articles to academics and producing fake medical journals for sale.
"Interlibrary Loan helps you obtain research materials you need that are not available from George Mason University Libraries or Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) libraries." I believe this is a definitely helpful webpage for all of us.
Don't forget about the Internet Archive and especially the Wayback Machine in your research -- lots of good free stuff here, and you can look at what websites looked like years ago.
Nii Quaynor, Africa's "Father of the Internet" is responsible for establishing the continents internet capabilities. Quaynor, the first African to be on the board of ICANN, was recently inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Natasha, Quaynor would be a terrific person to research for your presentation and final project. Very interesting, and I had never heard of him before.
Mostly useful for people who use Chrome, but most of these undoubtedly have analogues or versions in Firefox. A lot of good extensions for news, productivity and research, plus some stuff that's just plain cool.
While this website is helpful, many of the apps do not seem to be useful to everyday browsing, excluding a few in the Education section of the article. Granted, I still went and downloaded a lot of those apps because, as Nathan said above me, they're pretty cool.
Browser extensions are definitely neat -- all the browsers have them now, pretty much. Firefox was the first browser to be extensible like this, so there tend to be a lot of extensions available for it. Zotero, which we're going to learn about next week, started out as a Firefox extension.
I thought about defining "extension" in core concepts, but it's maybe a little more advanced than that. Extensions (also called "add-ons" and "plugins") are basically little apps that "plug in" to a big app.
You can download Wikipedia and only have it take up about 9 GB of space on your computer. It would definitely come in handy if you need to do research but don't have Internet access.