Category Archives: digital tools

We need to teach Critical AI Literacies and we need to teach them now

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As the internet – well the parts of the internet inhabited by developers – melts down over the release of GPT-4, the successor to GPT-3/3.5 which learns from images and videos, I’ve been thinking about the responsibilities we educators have to our learners. It’s a foregone conclusion that many workplaces and work practices will increasingly be augmented by AI tools. Curiously, it is not necessarily the promised land of automation of all those tedious jobs where a human has to look across multiple platforms, files or databases in order to assemble, update or generate something meaningful. (How many times a day do I copy and paste via Notepad to strip formatting?? Why can’t Windows remember the last folder I was working in??) So much for AI freeing up time, if anything, the cognitive and administrative load on educators is increasing because of AI.

Image generated by Dall-E with the prompt “someone inside a computer”

So where should that limited energy and effort go?

My opinion is that it should go on helping students develop skills to understand, critique, and generally deal with AI platforms, or at least be prepared to engage with the (hopefully) regulated and ethically sound platforms of the future. I’m not for a moment saying that we should get all students onto ChatGPT now, but we need to start thoughtful discussions with them about AI. They themselves are best placed to ask the really difficult questions, like what is the carbon footprint of a ChatGPT search? What cis white Western, male biases are AI tools replicating? Can new knowledge be made or will we be eternally returning to a increasingly bland lowest common denominator of what we already know?

Prompt engineering is absolutely a skill that students should be developing. As is editing and refinement of the output of AI. Even more so is the skill of knowing when it is appropriate to use AI and when not to.

In addition, there is a skill we will all have to relearn; reading. Reading is no longer what it used to be now we know that what we are reading may be been generated by a non-thinking, predictive model. Skim reading, fast reading, knowing when to skip whole paragraphs or jump to the relevant bits will all be massively important when we a drowning in sea of content. And that’s just for text; images, video, audio are all going to have to be viewed, watched and listened to with circumspection. This places another layer of barriers for disabled students or students to are being taught in a language different to their first language; how does one skim read with a screen reader or when you need to live translate in your head as you go?

The internet fire hose of stuff is about to get an upgrade, and we all need to (wet)suit up. And this time, it will be using all the knowledge of how easily manipulated we are into outrage and spreading hate and lies. Digital media literacy, data literacy, science literacy; let’s throw them all in, because without these as graduate attributes, any idea of the university as a ‘good’ for society is left for dead.

Behind it all, there are some people and companies who will be making a lot of money. It’s never been more important to interrogate the ‘black box’ of a technology, especially as the debate rages on about whether developers can any longer see into the innards of the algorithms. Surely now is the time to start equipping ourselves and our students with critical digital and AI literacies?

Artificial intelligence inserting doubt into the relationship between educators and learners

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As the various responses are washing over us in education about the implications of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, I’ve thinking about its consequences for the relational aspects of education.

Just as deep fake video, AI generated images and even naturalistic voice platforms make us second-guess the veracity and provenance of what we are seeing or hearing, human-like text generation has inserted a doubt into our minds. The first doubt is of the educator of their own skills; can they discern what is student-generated work and what is not? The second is the more obvious question of whether the work they are spending time grading and giving feedback upon is the words, thoughts and accurate reflection of a human’s learning. In combination, these doubts therefore become present whenever a lecturer sets about the task of grading and/or giving feedback on student work: has artificial intelligence has been used or not? So the potential impact on students, who are putting in time and their original work, is their work is, by default, potentially being treated with distrust from the start.

Robot
Photo by Alex Knight on Pexels.com

This leads to the other area of doubt, which is on the learner’s part. They may doubt that their work or effort is being taken at face value as their own effort. Secondly, taken to the next logical level, they may doubt that any personalised feedback and grades they seemingly receive from a human educator may in fact have been generated by AI. This ‘weaponisation’ of AI can be by both sides looking for efficiency, or simply a crutch to prop up a lingering doubt that their own work is really any better than AI (yes, academics have imposter syndrome as much as students).

While I don’t fully subscribe to the thesis from Adrian Wallbank’s piece in The Times Higher that AI should be resisted and kept completely away from the classroom (good luck policing that), I agree that assessment should be used as a process for students to reflect on their learning:

“What I suggest ought to be assessed (and which helps us navigate some of the issues posed by ChatGPT) is a record of the student’s personal, but academically justified, reflections, arguments, philosophising and negotiations. Student work would then be a genuine, warts-and-all record of the process of learning, rather than the submission of a “performative” product or “right argument”, as one of the students in my research so aptly put it. This would enable our students to become better thinkers.”

Ben Thomson, the excellent technology journalist (another sector and profession that is having an existential moment of crisis about AI), also contributes a parent’s view of the education situation and says the new skills learners could develop are editing and verifying information. It’s not a bad point and perhaps an obvious end-point for the information abundance students live within now and in the future. Seeking out the human skills needed to work with AI-generated content and assessing those skills is a good way to go.

As I gather advice and resources for colleagues to help us mull over the short-term and long-term strategies we need to employ, I don’t think I can resist any longer the thought that this is a game-changing moment for education. In a YouTube video, from  in Charles Knight, he puts it well: the economic model upon which higher education has be operating – that is, the time-pressured systems of assessment for staff and students, relying often on precarious labour – has left itself vulnerable to gamification. I’d argue that gamification of that system is now in the hands of everyone, staff and students. Knight rightly calls that now is the time for appropriate resourcing of staff workloads to enable them to design assessments and time to grade them. I can only add to that, investing in people – those who teach and support learners – is more important than paying money for technologies to catch people out. As many before me have observed, the latter is an arms race that cannot be won. Teaching and learning is relational and it’s through prioritising that with time, money and status will higher education be equipped to deal with the doubt and distrust inserting itself between educators and students.

School of Computing 3rd September 2020: Resources and References

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Here are my keynote slides and the Mentimeter responses.

Resources (Sorry, these are mostly for Edinburgh Napier staff only)

The Digital Support Partnership 12 Principles for Online Learning and Teaching

Example week by week module planner

Touch Point Module surveys

Moodle Help! How to I teach online? Community (Self enrol)

Digital Tools webinars Tues-Fri 12pm daily

Help with Teaching Online – Q&A (Mondays)

References

Bali, Maha (2017) ‘Inequalities within Digital Literacies’in  https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2017/8/2017nmcstrategicbriefdigitalliteracyheii.pdf

Berg, Maggie, (2013) The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

Beetham, Helen (2017), Digital literacy and democracy, https://helenbeetham.com/2017/02/22/digital-literacy-and-democracy/

Eng, Norman (2020) What Frustrates Students Most About Online Classes (Covid-19 Edition) https://normaneng.org/what-frustrates-students-most-about-online-classes/

Farrell, O., Brunton, J. (2020). A balancing act: a window into online student engagement experiences. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 17, 25 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00199-x

Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust and Bond, (2020) The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning, Educause Review, https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York and London: Routledge.

Naffi, N., Davidson, A.-L., Snyder, D. M., Kaufman, R., Clark, R. E., Patino, A., Gbetoglo, E., Duponsel, N., Savoie, C., Beatty, B., Wallace, G., Fournel, I., Ruby, I., & Paquelin, D. (2020, August). Disruption in and by Centres for Teaching and Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic Leading the Future of Higher Ed. International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA). https://www.docdroid.net/L0khasC/whitepaper-disruption-in-and-by-centres-for-teaching-and-learning-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-leading-the-future-of-higher-ed-21-08-2020-pdf

Neroni, J., Meijs, C., Gijselaers, H. J. M., Kirschner, P. A., & Groot, R. H. M. De. (2019). Learning and Individual Di ff erences Learning strategies and academic performance in distance education. Learning and Individual Differences, 73(February 2018), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2019.04.007

Stanford, Daniel  (2020) Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All https://www.iddblog.org/videoconferencing-alternatives-how-low-bandwidth-teaching-will-save-us-all/

Swansea Academy of Learning and Teachin, ‘ABC at Swansea University’, https://salt.swan.ac.uk/abc-learning-design/

UCL Designing programmes and modules with ABC curriculum design https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/case-studies/2018/jun/designing-programmes-and-modules-abc-curriculum-design

Building Learning Communities Through Building in a Virtual World (Minecraft)…and then breaking it

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On Wednesday I ran two workshops for Edinburgh Napier staff on Minecraft. It was billed as a hands-on exploration with a view to thinking about how it could be used for learning and teaching. As it happened, it was an experience in how to manage vastly different skill levels where some participants jumped in confident in their ability to navigate a 3D world, while others struggled to orientate themselves. Feedback mentioned feeling quite uncomfortable and unsure of what to do. This was not accidental, as I was hoping for participants to experience what it is like as an inexpert learner in a wholly disorienting space. I was also hoping that they would collaborate in the world to do tasks together. I think I achieved the former, while the latter was less in evidence, although there was very lively conversations between participants in real life as they were sitting side-by-side in a computer lab.

I had designed the world with escape rooms where participants had to work together to

hello

Unexpected vandalism

break free to an area where they could do unstructured building. Education Edition Minecraft includes Scratch-like coding plug-ins and in the afternoon workshop, one enthusiastic participant managed to overwrite the escape rooms with huge letters made out of grass and earth spelling out ‘Hello’. It was chaotic and yet another lesson that I can’t always control what learning happens.

Yesterday I spoke about the workshops during our Learning and Teaching conference. Here  are the slides I used including responses from staff on some questions I posed about the conference.

Here is the blurb for my talk:

Drawing on the workshops during the research and teaching day, this session will explore how the ‘LEGO-like’ building functions of Minecraft can allow users to manipulate their environment, thereby developing skills in design and creativity. Doing so collaboratively necessitates communication and co-operation, enabling the building of social presence and relationships, an area notoriously difficult to achieve in distance and online learning. By working through tasks as novices, the workshop participants experienced what it is like to be a beginner learner and the dis-ease and emotional responses this can create in the individual. Mistakes are inevitable and wholly necessary to learn how to use the various tools in Minecraft. The 3D environment also prompts questions around accessibility and inaccessibility, including how some digital technologies can be disadvantageous for some while inclusive for others. Lessons from the workshops will be shared, including what it was like to learn, collaborate and ‘fail’ in an unfamiliar environment and how this could inform planning and design of learning for students. It will end with a short plenary discussing experiences, drawing on all the sessions during the day.

Key literature
Sharples, M., De Roock, R., Ferguson, R., Gaved, M., Herodotou, C., Koh, E., Kukulska-Hulme, A., Looi, C.-K., Mcandrew, P., Rienties, B., Weller, M. and Wong, L. H. (2016) Innovating Pedagogy 2016 Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20677.04325.

A seminar on roadblocks to using technology-enhanced learning

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Photo of sign saying 'Road closed'

Road closed for Edinburgh playing out

I attended a really interesting presentation this morning by Joel Smith on research he conducted with Laruen Herckis on the ‘Complex Barriers to Instructional Innovation with Technology’ at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. The seminar did two things which made me very glad I attended. Firstly, the research findings aligned closely to my own research, even though their disciplinary approaches (philosophy and anthropology) are different, which is always encouraging. Secondly, it reinforced to me the importance of educators having space and support to talk about, and develop, their understandings of teaching, before conversations about specific methods or technologies are discussed. I want to facilitate these very conversations and this is the reason I did a PhD in this area, and why I want to do more teaching. It’s nice when a seminar validates your life choices.

Their final report is yet to be published, but you can read about it briefly here. They identified four ‘roadblocks’ to educators at their institution using technology for teaching and learning.

1. Collaborations often failed because of miscommunication around priorities. This can be avoided if there is someone, a ‘champion’, to co-ordinate and clarify communication.

I recognise a lot of my previous work as a learning technologist in this point; I often found myself doing the ‘chasing up’ emails with academic staff, detailing actions to be taken and expected time-frames. Without that, things often fell apart.

2. Institutional structures and processes are out of sync with individuals careers, institutional support for teaching, technology infrastructure and global changes in technology.

Yes, there is never really the time to take a step back and dig deeper into teaching. In previous roles I’ve had, there have been years when there was never a good time to take annual leave, as all non-teaching time was spent developing online teaching content or staff development. Joel spoke about how achieving tenure was a priority for educators in his institution and, until that point, they could not afford examine their own teaching. There is also a slow/fast mismatch between higher education and technology (there is a really interesting examination of this by Land and Bayne 2008), although I think anyone working at a HEI these days is most likely reconciled to the inevitability of restructuring, change, etc. The slowness of higher education can mean wide-scale adoption of technology is a deliberate act, so perhaps hasty mistakes are avoided. On the other hand, the look-and-feel of many VLEs can give the sense of being in a time-machine. I don’t really believe that universities need to be on top of all the new technologies, but I do think they have a responsibility to be ahead on the big issues like data use, ethics and ways technology and human behaviour are enmeshed and changing each other.

3. Concepts of ‘good teaching’ held by educators are extremely strong and difficult to displace, even in the face of evidence-based alternatives. 

I think it is even more than this – we can hold two contradictory ideas of ‘good teaching’ as simultaneously true. As humans we tend to compartmentalise, and I have seen educators who put teaching in their discipline in one box, and put teaching in all other disciplines in another box and never the twain pedagogies shall meet. Examples include remarks about discussion boards, MCQs, reflective writing ‘not working in my subject’. Also, changing (or really expanding) these mental models of ‘good teaching, takes time. Again, the extended support, or indeed provocations, from colleagues to help this happen need to be planned for and resourced.

4. The academics who took part in this research had strong identities as teachers and their actions were strongly influenced by student satisfaction. This led to a reluctance to change their teaching or adopt new methods for fear of alienating their students.

One subjects of this study was quote on their desire not to embarrass themselves in front of students. In my research, a number of lecturers stated similar concerns, often with technology eliciting strongly negative emotions. The point about teacher identity and perceived threats from technology were also present in my research, although some were more comfortable embracing external influences on their teacher identity.

Their recommendations for addressing these roadblocks were that polices and practices needed to facilitate conversations to uncover educators’ mental models. At the end I asked Joel a question on how to have those important conversations about conceptions of teaching at an earlier stage of the process (i.e. before decisions are being made about technology). His answer was that university administrators have understand this and put in place procedures to enable this happen. I couldn’t agree more. We are fortunate in countries like Ireland and the UK that universities provide

professional development and qualifications in teaching, particularly to new staff. However, I can see that in the 10 years since I obtained my PgCert in teaching, educational research and thinking has moved on. It would be good to see policies put in place to sustain and develop these conversations about conceptions of teaching throughout an educators’ career.

What I learned working on an e-learning helpline for students and lecturers

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Life ring

‘Help’ by Neil Turner CC BY-SA 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/b9JrVF

After I completed my PhD I took a six-month contract in a large, well-resourced university doing ‘e-learning support’. The work was very similar to parts of my previous learning technologist roles elsewhere, but the scale of everything was much bigger. Additionally, it was my first time working within a department with no academic or teaching remit and the culture and language around the use of technology reflected that.

The university provides and supports an impressive array of digital products for teaching and learning: VLEs (more than one), assessment tools (including text matching and peer assessment), classroom polling, digital exams, lecture capture, video streaming, virtual classrooms, digital reading lists and eportfolios, to name a few. For each tool there was a named individual in my team with the expertise and vendor relationship to deal with unusual problems. I was impressed with the commitment my colleagues showed for providing the best possible service to the end users. Requests for support came to me through the call management software, so all my communication with people who needed help was through typed messages. It functioned as a very efficient, transparent system where the busy-ness  of the queue could be seen at a glance and calls passed between individuals as needed.

I can’t put an accurate figure on it, but would appear that the majority of lecturers were using these tools by rote. Courses were rolled over from semester to semester, assessment dropboxes set up as they were previously and, if there were discussions about why certain tools were being used, there weren’t happening within my earshot. What’s more, courses all had named secretaries who were responsible for student enrolments and administration of assessments. So, for example, a course secretary would follow a checklist of how to set-up a Turnitin dropbox. Again, a highly efficient process which frees up the time of the academic, but for every box ticked or not ticked within the set-up screen there are pedagogical implications, yet the lecturer has no input and probably little or no awareness that there are such choices available. And this is before any discussions take place about whether Turnitin is actually an appropriate tool to be using for assessment.

The increasing ease-of-use of software makes it more accessible and efficient to use if there is little or no learning curve. However, this very ease-of-use means that we don’t have to think about it much and this can be a problem. Teaching with digital technologies should be a considered and constantly re-evaluated process. Indeed, my PhD research found that the majority of lecturers were constantly balancing the costs and benefits to them and their students when they used digital tools. But if the the tools are practically friction-free to use, or someone else is there to do the legwork of setting things up or solve the problems, then the educator is at a remove from the consequences of using them, and therefore from thinking about deeper implications.

I believe that education in all disciplines should explicitly incorporate pedagogy into the curriculum. I also believe that this should include directly addressing digital citizenship, starting with educators role-modelling appropriate digital citizenship. This can be a simple as an announcement outlining why they made choices to use (or not to use) certain digital tools for teaching and learning. In doing so, they would be encouraging their learners to think about the choices that we make about technology every day. It could even be the first step to becoming an open education practitioner.

Post-PhD Reflections: Part Three – Revisiting My PhD Digital Toolkit

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Post-it notes

Image by Dean Hochman (CC BY 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/ebt15q

When I re-read my original post My PhD Digital Toolkit I am struck by my quest to use “dead time” productively. Admittedly, there was quite a bit travelling between Edinburgh and Glasgow in my first year which I felt had to be put to good use, but the anxiety around time spent on doing other things was probably centred around inefficient use of time when I should have been working (see Post-PhD Reflections: Part Two – The Hours and Minutes for proof that I could faff). As the years went by I learned to gift myself the time spent travelling as relaxation, so I would instead listen to podcasts or nap. Like most of my relationships with technology, I like to play and experiment for a bit, but then I get serious and streamline – anything not absorbed seamlessly part of my work-flow gets thrown out.

So, a quick review. What were the essential, use (nearly) every day hardware and software?

A lightweight, quick-to-boot laptop, so I never had any excuse not to take it with me nor any excuse not to open it up and do some work.

This was an expensive bit of kit, but four years later it’s still going strong. I used it almost daily and it’s lightness meant that I could chug it around everywhere, and could still carry notebooks, books, lunch, water bottle and coffee flask in one backpack. I learned early on that working at home didn’t suit me, so I would tramp to a few of the university libraries around Edinburgh to work. I used an external mouse and, when the need arose to block out background noise I used large closed-cup headphones for either music, white noise (SimplyNoise) or Coffitivity.

Top software:

Evernote: Everything went in here and as it added OCR to PDFs, it became invaluable for searching through my notes. I transcribed my interviews into Evernote (encrypted, obvs) and most importantly, typed up rough notes on everything I read. Clipping directly from a browser was great for grabbing important pieces of text on the fly.

Dropbox: Syncing files across devices and backing them up to the cloud = invaluable. I did end up going for a subscription on this. I also continued to use it to store my Mendeley files and database.

Speaking of Mendeley, this also worked well for me and the final dreaded pull-together of references for my thesis wasn’t that painful, though I had been quite thorough in making sure references were correct as I went. I had a few instances where I accidentally had Mendeley open on more than one device at once, which meant the entire database had to be re-configured which was a pain, but worth the effort. In general I opened PDFs stored in Mendeley in Adobe Acrobat as the Mendeley highlighting and note-taking tools were only visible within Mendeley and I wanted to be able to access these outside of the software sometimes – this was particularly the case when Mendeley only existed on Android as 3rd party apps, since rectified.

I worked with Scrivener for about a year, but my laptop was very high res and Scrivener wasn’t optimised for 3200×1800, so menu items were impossible to read. Scrivener’s strong point, being able to re-arrange and map out the structure of a large document, was only marginally useful for me and I soon decided to work directly in Word. Word’s heading styles allowed me to navigate between sections quickly and Mendeley’s plug-in meant that I could pop in citations as I wrote. I never quite liked that what I was seeing in Scrivener wasn’t the final look and feel.

There were two other tools which I picked up and used as needed along the way. The first is KabanFlow which helped me plan and keep me on-task with time-consuming, routine tasks (see image below). For example, I used it for tracking myself while transcribing my data collection interviews and used the Pomodoro timer functionality to stay focused and take breaks every 30 minutes to get up and stretch. The second, slightly similar tool was Workflowy. While I sometimes get depressed looking at to-do lists which I’ll never get to the end of, this is a deceptively versatile list tool was a dumping ground for everything I needed to remember. I could go for weeks without opening it, but other times it became vital for checking that I was covering everything, particularly when pulling everything together towards the end.

Screenshot of KabanFlow Pomodoro statistics

The final piece of technology which I shouldn’t omit is (of course) the post-it note. Most mornings I would write everything I wanted to do on a post-it note (including nice, fun things) and keep it in my eye-line. I didn’t always stick to it, and sometimes it ran to more than one, or even two, notes, but the reward of crossing things off with a pencil never failed to thrill.

 

 

I can code

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This is a response which I wrote to a blog from last November by the inimitable Sheila MacNeill entitled Why don’t I code?

Coding engenders a binary thinking which can extend beyond the code itself; it either works or there are bugs. What you are aiming for is to be bug-free. But this can lead to not considering the bigger questions.

It’s quite a relief to exist in a bubble where problems are puzzles that require a fix. What’s more, finding that fix is a pleasure; when it goes well, coding is hugely enjoyable. I think this may contribute to coders encouraging every one to learn to code.

Non-coders are hugely important – by asking the questions that coders sometimes forget to think about. By getting coders to explain why, by demanding.

Those conversations are important. Coders are fixers – every problem is an opportunity. But just because you have the skill-set to fix, it doesn’t mean that you have the skill-set to analyse the bigger problem. Sometimes it is better that the problem is framed by someone who doesn’t have a clue what the answer could be.

I learned to code because I thought I wanted some kind of mastery over machines. Now I’ve come to realise that this is actually not possible – I am sociomaterially entangled with technology and my own agency is severely compromised by auto-playing videos of cats on YouTube.

What I do have is confidence. I can take an educated guess as to what anyone is talking about in most areas of technology. (As an aside, as a woman, somehow I felt the need to acquire a masters in computer science to exercise any authority in an area in which I’d been a hobbiest since childhood.) Learning to code trained me in systematic trouble-shooting and close reading of text. This of course is applicable to lots of areas of life, not just software development. Deciphering emails from colleagues is the first example that pops into my head.

Since I wrote this response I see that commentators on Sheila’s blog have come up with similar ideas about the dangers of losing critical thinking when the focus is on getting everyone to code. But there is a balance to be stuck. Yes, people have specialisms and everyone does not need to code, but the mysterious black box of technology needs to be made more accessible in its meaning and impact for society. This doesn’t have to occur at code level, this can happen through conversations between us all.

My PhD Digital Toolkit

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As a technologist, I’m always on the look out for tools to make my life easier. I particularly like using ‘dead time’ like travelling productive. Before starting the PhD I looked at how I worked best and tried to eliminate excuses for getting on with things. With me excuses like “This chair isn’t comfortable” or “I can’t find information fast enough to hold an idea in my head” can be destructive to productivity.

In terms of hardware, I bought a new desktop 6 months ago. I even ripped out the CPU and case fans and replaced them with silent ones to reduce noise. And I bought a laptop tray to make working on comfortable chairs/sofas more feasible when I get sick of sitting at a desk. Actually, I’ve been experimenting with standing at my desk, but that’s probably another blog post. I also bought a handheld scanner for £30 which I’ve already used to scan selected pages from library books and documents that have been given to me in hard copy.
But it has mostly been software. Some of it is for my tablet (Google Nexus 7 inch), my smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S3) and for my desktop and laptop (both Windows 7 64). Being an Android and Chrome user, Play store apps and Chrome apps work well with my general Google ecosystem. Most of which are free but I did spend money on the following:
  • Evernote premium: no limit on uploads, offline notes, search with PDFs and no distracting flashing ads. £35 per year
  • Scrivener: Writing tool for structuring, writing and revising. I haven’t used it that much yet, but I know I’m going to need this for a thesis. £29
  • ezPDF Reader: A very flexible PDF reader for Android with good annotating functionality, night mode and voice reading. £2.50
  • Simplemind Pro: A mindmapping (desktop and Android app) which can sync to Dropbox. £3.76 (app) £31.55 (desktop software)
Everything else is free or a trial version.
Dropbox is a no brainer. It sync files across computers and devices and makes the USB stick redundant.  I have 50gb space, most of which came for free with my Android devices but I’ll probably shell out when that space expires. It’s become too useful to me. I also use it in conjunction with other applications. For example, Mendeley. Although I will be watching it like a hawk since it was bought by Elsevier, I can’t get over the usefulness of Mendeley sorting out my mess of articles into neat folders and renamed files. I have set up a system whereby I store both my PDFs and the Mendeley database files in Dropbox which allows for me to access the up-to-date files on any device. It was very important to me that any annotations I made on my tablet synced back seamlessly. It can be very frustrating searching for the version of an article where you’ve made annotations. This system can get unstuck if I accidentally have Mendeley open on two devices and Dropbox starts to create conflicting versions. It can take a while to sort out and I know I’m using Mendeley in a way which is not supported by the company. For me, the benefits outweigh the risks. Let me know if you’d like more information on doing this (it involves doing a little bit of register editing).
Reading is a big part of any PhD so I’ve got a few tools which help me reduce my excuses not to do it. On the desktop I use Adobe Acrobat Pro (an old version) and use highlighting and commenting tools. For my full note taking I use Evernote with the name of the article/book for title and ‘reading notes’ for a tag. You could just use the free Adobe Reader for highlighting and commenting but I like being able to use the character recognition tools for my scanned documents. Having all text searchable is invaluable.
I’ve experimented with some fast reading apps (both Chrome and Android). These  flash one word at a time at a pre-defined pace in order to train you out of ‘sub-vocalising’ and therefore, in theory, you can read more quickly. While I find them good for light reading like blog posts or news, I don’t think I’ll be using them for scholarly reading. I am quite a fast reader already and sometimes I find myself re-reading academic texts because I’ve read too quickly to completely understand. To slow down my reading (and to drown out the noise of the driver’s radio on the bus to Glasgow), I sometimes read while simultaneously listening to the text being read. I’d recommend trying Ivona TTS (text to speech) which can be installed on a smartphone. It can read back any text in a compatible app (such as ezPDF Reader) in a reasonably human voice.
For task management, I have been using Nozbe task management Android app and desktop app. It’s got a nice interface but my trial has expired and I’ll probably not pay a subscription. I’ll think I will return to Google Tasks and use 3rd party apps to access them on my mobile devices. I’ve never completely nailed using task managers. Maybe it’s just me, but I always have a bunch of tasks at the bottom of my list that never get done which does my self esteem no good. On my desktop I use Sticky Notes to have small chunk of info readily accessible. I’ve been using them for my Athens login for the past month.
For time management and motivation I’ve been using Rescue Time which is both a desktop and mobile app. It monitors what you are doing. You can categorise activities (Mendeley = v.productive, Facebook=v.distracting) and you get a score at the end of the day, overall time and a breakdown of how you spent you time. You can compare days and try gaming yourself to do better. There’s a premium version but I’m finding the freebie does enough for me. So far today I’ve been online for nearly 8 hours, 76% which was productive, which is pretty good going for me. For the times I need to get my head down, I use the Clockwork Tomato Pomodoro app on my phone which switches it to airplane mode for 25 minutes, then rings a bell for a 5 minute break. It has a lovely interface and records your stats. It’s quite satisfying to see those purple bars add up on my weekly calendar. As with all these things though, it’s only useful if you use it honestly.
Finally, there have been a few reports lately about the effect of using a screen before going to sleep at night and how exposure to blue light is detrimental to falling asleep. Coincidently I have been using f.lux for a few years on my desktop. I used it originally because I dislike having a bright white screen when using artificial light. But it turns out that f.lux is perfect for warming up those harsh blue tones. It changes the colour on your screen subtly at sunrise and sunset. I heard a review for Twilight for Android and realised it did the same thing, so I have that running on my phone and tablet. It has a distinct red hue but it’s easy to turn off if I wanted to see something in truer colours. It’s a shame I can’t scientifically prove that they’ve helped me get to sleep quicker, as I think I’m pretty tired most nights anyway.
And on the subject of getting to sleep there is one other digital tool, though not directly related to doing the PhD, it helps me relax: audio books. I subscribe to Audible and fall asleep every night listening to a book. I don’t really feel I can afford to pick up a book for pleasure time-wise any more but I find audio books a great way to fill in some dead ‘pre-sleep’ time and it takes my mind away from all the things I need to do. I’d recommend Proust’s In Remberence of Time Past, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Joyce’s Ulysses.
I’d love to hear about any other tools people use to help with their studies.