Infotention

Thomas Honeyman is a student at the University of Southern California and co-founder of a music collaboration platform. Recently, he found that focusing on tags gave him the most flexibility by associating the notes he creates to his tags.

Much like author Michael Hyatt, tags have become the engine that helps power the organizational success with how Thomas manages content in Evernote.

*THIS IS A NEW WEBSITE* Consult the left-hand navigation panel to see what pages are actually complete! In addition, you will see many new pages here in December 2014 and January 2015 as I prepare my classes for the Spring semester. More information here about How to Follow my Spring 2015 Inoreader Adventure.

Inoreader is one of the most powerful tools that I use for teaching online. In this website, I'll be sharing examples of how I use Inoreader to keep up with my students' blogs and also to connect with other educators online. THANK YOU, Inoreader, for helping me so much in my work!

This tutorial shows how to use a Google Docs spreadsheet as an RSS Feed reader (see example). You can aggregate news feeds from different sources into one spreadsheet (similar to alltop, popurls or addictomatic) and then publish it as a web page.

If you have a blog, you can use the same trick to embed RSS feeds in web pages. The Google Docs approach is preferred over Flash or Javascript widgets because here you have complete control over the presentation layout and formatting of content.

To master mindfulness, you do not need a master's in mindfulness. But starting this year, those who want a professional degree in the meditative practice can get one.

In a first-of-its-kind program in the U.S., Cambridge, Mass.-based Lesley University this year began offering a Master of Arts in Mindfulness Studies. The degree requires two years of study and 36 credits at $925 a pop (that's $33,300 if you're counting). Course work is a mixture of theory and practice. Readings include books published by the forefather of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and studies about the effects of meditation on health, education, and business. Other requirements include an internship, capstone project (thesis), and attending a week-long silent retreat.

But, beyond adding an M.A. to one's accolades, what are the applications for a degree in mindfulness?

Many teachers we know enjoy teaching students how to wield one of the most powerful thinking tools: metacognition, or the ability to think about your thoughts with the aim of improving learning. A metaphor that resonates with many students is that learning cognitive and metacognitive strategies offers them tools to "drive their brains." The good news for teachers and their students is that metacognition can be learned when it is explicitly taught and practiced across content and social contexts.

A student who is excited about being in the driver's seat and steering toward learning success may well be destined to become an independent thinker on the way to charting a responsible course for school, career, and life. Being metacognitive can be likened to being more conscious, reflective, and aware of one's progress along the learning path. Teachers have told us how they feel an extraordinary sense of pleasure teaching their students useful strategies that can be applied to all aspects of their lives in and outside of school.

If you’ve read any lists on Twitter tips, whether for beginners or for experts, you’ve likely come across the common advice to use Twitter lists.

Twitter lists are useful, helpful, and effective for managing and optimizing your Twitter experience. There’s also a number of unique ways to go about them.

I researched the topic and found 23 popular and outside-the-box ideas for what to do with your Twitter list. See what I learned in the post below, and add your favorite uses in the comments.

Ever wonder which tools super-productive and über-organized people use to get things done? Fast Company contacted 10 productivity experts, and asked them which apps or tech tools help them get through their day.

"People who are doing social media for more than 35% of their job need a certain set of tools and tips to manage their time.   But, more and more smart nonprofits are enlisting their staff members as champions online and are using their personal brands and networks in service of the organization’s goals.   These staff members most likely do not as much dedicated time to spend on social media – so there is the potential of getting overwhelmed.   So, here are  a few tips for those find they need to “squeeze in” social: -"

One of the defining features of human evolution is the emergent capacity of human beings to think about thinking. The ability to think about thinking is often described as a metacognitive skill.  Cultural evolution is itself a metacognitive process, as each new generation thinks about the thinking of previous generations - the contents of thinking, the process of thinking, and the products of thinking - and modifies the culture of thinking in multifarious ways. 

our Mac’s Services menu can be very useful. The Services menu has become a hidden feature used mostly be power-users, but it’s very easy to use. It’s a bit like the Share features on Android or iOS.

The Services menu is present in practically every application on your Mac, although it is easy to miss. Applications you install can add quick actions to this menu.

I’ve tried various feed readers through the years, but I’ve honestly never been able to settle on one that I want to use every single day. However, I figure if I can create a stream of my favorite websites and news sources right inside Google Spreadsheet — where I go every single day anyway — then it’ll be far more likely that I’ll actually check out the feeds and read some of the updates. So, with that motivation in mind, let me show you how I pieced together my very own home-grown feed reader, and how you can too.

You learn these 15 Twitter hacks.

Once you pick up on these power user features, you’ll become a Twitter ninja in no time.

Chrome's address bar doesn't do much at a glance. Type in a URL and you're taken to a web site. But it can do a lot more if you know how to use it.

We've covered plenty of great Chrome tricks over the years, but the address bar has always been a bit neglected. You can actually do a ton with it though, so let's dig into some of the better tricks.

Laptops do not make students take notes in a particular way. Rather, they are tools that enable a wide range of note-taking practices, including both summary and synthesis as well as verbatim transcription. Like any other tool, however, students need to be trained how to use them effectively. As this study suggests, when students are not provided this training, they may develop habits that may not be beneficial to their learning. 

It is our job as instructors to identify beneficial habits and teach students how (and when) to apply them. That we do not do so is not a failure of laptops or students, but a failure of their education in an increasingly digital society.

I am not criticizing Mueller and Oppenheimer's research, only the implications they draw from it. The correlation between laptop use and verbatim note taking is incredibly useful information for it allows educators to address how students use their tools. It certainly does not suggest that laptops are "harm[ful]" or should be restricted. The "pen" is not "mightier than the keyboard."

Rather, it demonstrates the need for explicit instruction in how to most effectively take notes, either by pen or laptop. In other words, it points to the need for digital literacy instruction. Indeed, because text can be input into laptops faster than by hand, these tools actually provide a potential benefit to note-takers: the ability to take more notes. This feature of laptops, combined with instruction in how to take notes, could make these tools more effective than pen and paper for learning, not less.

So notes are important, we get that. But how do we use them to their utmost? How do we even gather them together and store them? How do we use them for our writing, for our thinking? These are all important questions which I don’t feel have been properly answered, and where those answers have been given, they’re buried or hidden somewhere out on the internet.

I want this post to get into the weeds about how to get your materials off a Kindle device, how to store it usefully on a Mac (my apologies, PC/Linux users), and how to repurpose those notes to be creative, to write, and to think.

Highly successful people have many of the daily distractions of life handled for them, which allows them to better focus their attention.

"Since so much knowledge is now digital, there is no shortage of material from which I can learn. On the contrary, I’m usually drowning in too much information. But that’s a discussion for another day. For me, right now, the major problem is that I lack an easy and effective system for capturing and recording my learning. My memory alone will not suffice. What I need is a personal knowledgebase, which I define as an external, integrated digital repository for the things I learn and the resources from which they come.

Many have tried to solve the problem I’m encountering now, and numerous digital solutions exist. Some of the most popular options include Evernote, Devonthink, and Voodoo Pad. Over the course of my graduate studies, I’ve tried many of these programs, but all have fallen short of what I really need, given my own workflow."