ALIVE @ Samford University

This morning we went live with Mesa Online, a website for students taking Spanish courses in the World Languages department. The idea behind the Mesa program is that students sign-up for a time to have lunch or dinner with a small group of students and one faculty member. During the lunch or dinner, all conversation must be in Spanish. The previous sign-up system involved a large list of timeslots posted on the wall. My Fall 2008 software engineering class took upon themselves the task of converting the paper-based system to an online system. I helped the students bring the project to a conclusion just in time for it to go live today for the Spring 2009 semester. As of 3:00PM, exactly 100 students have created their Mesa accounts. There is still work left to be done on the administrative part of the website, but I will post updates as the semester progresses and as we see whether the system effectively meets the needs of the World Languages Department here at Samford.

January 28th, 2009 | Tags: mesa, programming, web 2.0 | Category: Software | Comments (3)

I have been a long time user of bibliography search engines such as citeseer, the ACM portal, IEEExplore, etc… but I have always turned to standalone software applications such as Endnote and JabRef to manage the articles I find. This summer I created my own web-based annotated bibliography tool and just barely got it off the ground before the need for it subsided. Now, tonight as I am organizing my references for an upcoming conference presentation, I just discovered a tool that surpasses the tool that I created and adds a social networking element. The website is called CiteULike (screenshot below) -

As far as I can tell, the only way to group entries in your library is by creating a special “group” where any registered member can join and post entries or by tagging each entry that you want to belong in a category with a special keyword. I have opted for the latter approach as I only want articles that I post to be in my reference library. The screenshot is showing a post that I just made. The site seems to be pretty response and there is an active bookmark link that you can add to your browser toolbar to quickly create a new bibliography entry from the page you are currently viewing.

November 20th, 2008 | Tags: tools, web 2.0 | Category: research | Leave a comment