First you need to connect QO to DB. You do this from within QO:

Add a Dropbox, Evernote, GoogleDocs or other account

Once you have clicked the “+” symbol you will get this menu:

Select which account you would like to connect to QO

Notice that you can add accounts from several different services including Evernote and Google Docs. The next step is to fill in your credentials.

Now, when you want to edit a file that is saved in Dropbox (or one of the other services) simply select it from the account listed in the left hand column.

Select the file you would like from your Dropbox or other account here.

QO will periodically automatically save the file to your DB account. Now that your DB account is set up you can also save local files to DB by using the “Save as” menu, navigating to the DB folder where you would like to save it.

I was never one to drag a laptop around but I carry the iPad with me everywhere – and as a result, I am able to get access to just about anything and everything I need without being tethered to a desktop computer.  As Director of Graduate Studies, I am besieged by email messages from anxious graduate students at the start of the semester – it’s really convenient to answer them as they come in rather than dealing with them for an hour or two after the kids go to bed.  I was in the library the other day and used the Notes app to collect some obscure citations that I couldn’t get on-line, sent them to myself, and inserted them directly in the reference section of a paper I’m writing – now that’s convenience.  At the first meeting of my graduate seminar, the podium computer wasn’t working (even a techno-whiz Chinese graduate student couldn’t get it to work) but when someone mentioned this amazing youTube video that illustrates the early acquisition of the prosodic features of language, I pulled out the iPad and was able to show it in seconds – Check it out:

Twins talking

So, the College is right – the iPad is super convenient and maybe that’s what Steve Jobs had in mind when he designed it.  It’s not about the tool, it’s about access to whatever you want, when you want it, not matter where you are – convenience? Oh, yeah!

I cannot use it for Instructional Design; I need at least two monitors for that.  I cannot connect it (yet) to the podium in our technology classrooms, but why should I? They have great machines there already. I have to admit, the first two weeks I just stared at it.

My children talked me into an iPhone.  I owned a Blackberry since 2002.  Needless to say, I was tempted several times to toss it out the window of my car (not when I was driving, I do NOT use my phone driving) or smother it in peanut butter so one of my golden retrievers would chew it up.  However, I got used to its shortcomings and learned it had a few benefits over the Blackberry, but they were personal benefits, not work related benefits.  The Blackberry rocks when it comes to productivity.

So, the iPad… I like FaceTime, that is pretty cool, but so is Skype.  In addition, my TAs this summer did not have iPhones or iPads and neither did my internship students who wanted to connect with me…so Skype it is.

I purchased a neat app iThoughts….it is a concept mapping or semantic mapping software.  It was good to jot ideas down, but it does not transfer to my semantic net software on my machines, so I had to recreate the maps again.

iPad travels well, it is easy to read when I post a document.  I use OneNote a lot for course notes; iPad does not read OneNote yet.  I also use OneNote to organize my research.  DOH!

Office Hours! That is it! I will use it for Office Hours!  Many of you know I hold most of my office hours at Paneras or Irvings….it was great, I was able to help students with their topic searches, and I could get to ANGEL and review assignments with them. Finally, an academic use that does not cause me 5 extra steps! <smile>

From Dave Test related to Lynda.com at PSU:

I just thought I’d add that the free lynda.com iOS apps also work with our site agreement with Lynda. On iPad, launch the app, tap “web portal login,” type psu.edu in the URL field, and tap submit. When WebAccess appears, login with your access account. On iPhone, launch the app, tap “log in,” tap “web portal access,” type psu.edu, in the url field and hit the Go button on the iPhone keyboard. When WebAccess appears, login with your access account. Lynda.com looks particularly good on the iPad screen, and with video mirroring on the iPad 2, you can output the content to a monitor or projector.

And from that, the Liberal Arts Scholarship and Technology Summit (affectionately known as LASTS) was born. This summit is being held exclusively for Liberal Arts faculty and graduate students to provide a forum in which to share insights and learn from one another regarding the use of technology for teaching and research. We have partnered with Education Technology Services (ETS) and the University Libraries and developed a day filled with opportunities to explore and experiment with technologies aimed at supporting strong pedagogy as well as aiding in scholarly research practices. Confirmed speakers include Christopher Long (LAUS), Kirt Wilson (CAS), Amy Dietz (LSER), Dirk Mateer (Economics), Cori Wong (Philosophy), Allan Gyorke and Jeff Swain (ETS), Dawn Childress and Stephen Woods (University Libraries) and a student panel of current Liberal Arts students who will share their thoughts and insights regarding the use of technology in their Liberal Arts education. In addition to the short talks and panel discussions, we will have breakout sessions that will allow the participants to talk in more detail with the presenters about what they discussed, and experiment with the tools themselves.

The summit will be held on Monday, August 15, 2011 in Foster Auditorium, beginning at 9:00 a.m. and ending at 4:00 p.m. Lunch and breaks will be provided throughout the day. There are still a few spots available, so if you are interested in attending, you can do so through our wiki at https://wikispaces.psu.edu/x/pDCTB. You will need to log in with your PSU access ID in order to be able to add your name to the registration.

If you can’t make it, we plan to stream the event on UStream via http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lasts11 , as well as record the talks and archive them. You can also follow us that day on Twitter with the hashtag #LASTS11. We hope to host this summit twice a year, with the next one coming in January, right before the spring semester begins, so stay tuned!

If you have any questions, let me know! Hope to see you there.

http://www.macgasm.net/2010/06/15/notebook-app-rule-notebooks-ipad/

So far, I’m using it to make to-do lists, keep track of meeting notes, sketch data figures, and organize project timelines and action items.  It also syncs to Dropbox so that you can access all the notes from other machines.  I’m sure I’m not using Notebooks to its fullest potential yet.  That is the one downside.  Some of the navigation through Notebooks is not so intuitive.  I find myself referring to the help manual somewhat often.

An essential app for me is Sente.  It is an outstanding reference manager program that allows you to build a synced database and access it from many machines, including the ipad.  The best thing about Sente is that each time you edit the database by adding references, attaching pdfs to references, or annotating pdfs as you read them, it syncs through the Sente servers to update the same database on all your other machines.  Importantly, the synced reference database does not have to unique to a user.  For example, a lab of people could share and update a single database from multiple machines and there are no worries about having multiple copies open at the same time.

Setting up Sente is fairly easy since one can  pull existing reference databases from other software (e.g., Endnote) into Sente.  Papers is a competing app, but I don’t think you can annotate pdfs in Papers and it does not support electronic books.  Sente also has nice tools for searching and downloading references.  It’s been a life saver for me.  I highly recommend it.  The only draw back as far as I can tell is the price.  Unfortunately, it’s not cheap as far as apps and software goes.

iPad for Presentation via Flickr through CC by cplong11

At the beginning of July, I participated in the Hermeneutics Colloquium at the University of Freiburg.

For the conference, I had written a paper, but I brought neither paper, nor books, nor physical copies of articles of any kind.  Rather, I relied on my iPad and MacBook Air while in Europe. Together they weighed much less than even one or two books and a folder with a physical copy of my 45-minute paper.

What they offered me, however, was access to a wide set of resources upon which I drew both in the days leading up to the delivery of the paper and, in the hours prior to my reading of the paper, I was able to quickly integrate references from presentations earlier in the same day directly into the text I read.

This required, I will admit, wireless internet access, which was somewhat difficult to come by in Germany, because I was renting an apartment without WiFi.  Still, wireless access was available to me through the University of Freiburg, and that allowed me to be much more flexible in the delivery of the paper than I might otherwise have been.

The Dedicated Reading Copy

Last December, I read a very helpful article on the ProfHacker blog about preparing a Dedicated Reading Copy (DRC) for presentations in academic venues. I have since integrated some of the advice given there into my standard practice for presentations.  Let me talk about the process and identify the value the iPad adds to it.

Because the paper I gave is part of a larger book project on which I am working, I wrote the paper as if it were a chapter of the book.  This meant, however, that it needed significant revisions and truncation for delivery as a 45-minute paper. Once the draft of the chapter was complete, I edited the DRC with an ear for the audience to which the paper would be given.  (It is not surprising that editing the document with the audience in mind led to the inclusion of material that in fact enriched the chapter of the book.)

Preparing the DRC, however, requires more than simply revising the content of the paper. It also includes adding notes to myself (usually in red) about how to read a certain portion of the text.  Sometimes I tell myself [SLOW DOWN HERE] or [PAUSE FOR EMPHASIS]; sometimes it involves prompting some extemporaneous comment, the theme of which I note, but don’t write out. These notes make the delivery of the paper more dynamic, but to prepare them requires thinking in concrete terms about how the paper will be heard and even a bit of rehearsing.  Ultimately it is the rehearsing that makes the presentation stronger.

The Role of the iPad

The iPad offers me some important affordances with regard to the DRC. First, it gives me color, so I can mark my notes to myself in a color that makes them easy to distinguish from the text itself.  Sometimes I even use multiple colors for different kinds of notes if necessary. More importantly, however, is the fact that the font can be enlarged easily to make the text itself easier to see when reading from a lectern.  Finally, reading from the iPad allows me to easily scroll through the text with a finger and, because the iPad is tilted slightly toward me, it is easier to transition between the text and looking up at the audience. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the iPad is less obtrusive than a laptop because it does not position the screen as a barrier between people. This is particularly important in the context of a presentation when the distance between the speaker and the audience can be difficult to traverse.

There are some limitations with the iPad as well.  In order to have the scrolling feature, I call up a version of the document in Word from Dropbox as opposed to reading from a PDF version. I use GoodReader as the program from which to read the document, and I have not found a way to make GoodReader allow me to scroll up and down a pdf document as opposed to swiping between pages.  It does this with Word, but not with a pdf file (at least as far as I can tell). What I lose with Word, though, are the footnotes and page numbers.  Because of this, I have used Pages on the iPad to present papers written in Word. Doing this adds the value of allowing me to edit text on the iPad itself as I go or immediately prior to delivering a paper.  However, Pages often has a tough time with the Greek characters I frequently use.

During the question and answer period, I often like to jot a thought or two as the question is being asked. If I use the iPad to do this, say with Evernote, it is nice because I have those notes automatically saved for later.  However, it is difficult to switch back and forth between the notes and the paper in a dynamic way during the question and answer period.

Even with these limitations, though, the iPad is an excellent device from which to deliver a paper.

One final anecdote from my conference in July underscores this.  The paper immediately before mine made a number of points that connected to my paper. I was able to edit the DRC very quickly in the break between our papers, add notes in color about when to mention the connection between our papers, and sync it seamlessly through Dropbox to the iPad. The DRC then had all those comments integrated into the paper itself. This made the paper more relevant to the actual discussion we were having in the conference itself.

Project #1 is a co-edited volume on solving problems in technical communication, which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. This summer we’re making final revision comments on the 19 original essays and tightening up the structures. Each chapter offers students a problem-solving heuristic in a key area of the field (e.g., audience analysis, new media design, usability, copyright). These heuristics were developed from a review of the literature and illustrated with an example from the non-academic workplace. There’s a lot to coordinate within and across the chapters. Many edited volumes put covers around loosely connected essays, but not this book: It’s coordinated down to the level of headings. Our expectation is that this structure will enable students to develop a coherent sense of how to solve communication problems across a range of complex contexts. But this level of coordination is time consuming and challenging, demanding constant attention to what the authors of 19 different chapters are saying and doing.

The book is big, in the neighborhood of 700 printed pages, and this size is part of the problem. I love reading from my iPad, and in the spring 2011 term read exclusively from it for my graduate seminar and research. But I’m simply not capable of tracking a manuscript this large on the iPad. By tracking I don’t mean sitting down, reading a chapter or more, and making comments. Well, tracking includes those tasks, but for this project it also includes constantly going back and forth between sections and within and across chapters to see how authors are handling issues and to see if the macro and micro structures are sufficiently parallel, consistent, and developed—and in what ways. This type of editorial work, at least for me, requires a very large monitor, the ability to see multiple pages at once, the ability to comment in multiple files at once, and the ability to navigate a file structure very quickly (there are nearly a thousand files associated with the project, which has been in the works for over four years). The screen shot below provides an incomplete view of a typical work session with the manuscript. (I had to close more than a half dozen windows to make the image at least somewhat readable.)

The image shows six active work spaces: three chapters from the same section of the book in near-final form, one of six figures from the active chapter, a file for revision comments, and Dropbox, the structure of which mirrors the table of contents and enables us to navigate and quickly open the different parts of the book. To prepare final comments for a single chapter, we have to be able to quickly consult numerous different work spaces, to see those work spaces simultaneously (for comparison and contrast purposes), and to edit any of those workspaces. IMHO, the iPad simply wasn’t designed for this type of large-scale, spatial work.

Project #2 is also large: It involves interviewing students and teachers in five sections of technical writing to gauge their experiences with the iPad. We’re looking at how the iPads themselves were configured for work and at reflective statements, but the video-based interviews are a crucial aspect of this research project. All of the interviews have now been transcribed, and it’s time to code the transcripts. What’s the problem? As far as I can tell, there’s not an iPad app for coding and analyzing interview transcripts (if you are aware of something, please let me know!). I need a program like Tams Analyzer, shown in the screen shot below, which supports the coding, searching, and analyzing of interview transcripts (the image below is from a study of the Sony Reader I did last year). So I’m dead in my tracks, as they say, when it come to using the iPad for this project.

So context of use matters a great deal (no surprise there, I realize). For projects where I need to look spatially across numerous texts, navigate and display numerous files, and conduct certain routine research tasks like coding transcripts, the iPad doesn’t seem to work very well for me. For many other literacy tasks, it seems to work a whole lot better.

I am trying again this weekend at a workshop I am attending in DC. I am hoping the third time will be the charm…..

5th inning score: research 2, iPad 3.