"Open Enrollment" at the California Community College →

Lee Gardner for The Chronicle of Higher Education on the latest survey of the California Community Colleges system:

More than 472,000 of the 2.4 million students in the California Community Colleges system were put on waiting lists for classes this fall

While 472,000 students seems like a very large number of students on the waiting list (and it is in real numbers) it is still less then 20% of all community college students.

But what is more concerning:

[California Community College] open-enrollment system served 2.4 million students in 2011-2012, down from 2.89 million students in 2008-9

Over 400,000 students disappeared from the California community colleges during one of the worse economic recessions of the current college-going age when it would be expected that more students would be incentivized to stay in or go to college.

That is rationing, in an open-enrollment system, by any name.

Zotero and Papers 2 article workflows

I have been working with Zotero for some time now and seen it grow over time. I have run into a few issues of workflow by using Zotero. One is reading/reviewing/annotating PDF articles added to my Zotero library for active and future projects. The second roadbock is citations in other programs that are not currenlty supported by Zotero plugins.[1] Still have not solved the latter, but the first is coming along.

A few workarounds have been created, including a plugin for Zotero that round trips the PDFs in Zotero out to Dropbox, which can then be annotated through any PDF reader app that supports Dropbox sync on the iPad. Later the plugin on Zotero can check that synced Dropbox folder to pull the annotated PDF back into Zotero. The downside is it requires forethought in order to load the required PDFs into Dropbox and to sync them back later on. Not ideal, but not too bad. The other nice thing about this is it can pull the highlights and other notes into a text file.

Another option is Zotpad for the iPad ($9.99 currently in the iOS App Store). Mark Sample over at the ProfHacker blog recently did an extensive review of Zotpad. It has come a long way since it was originally released, including being able to sync over-the-air with the Zotero server, your own WebDav server or even Dropbox. Currently, Zotpad does not allow to make annotations within the app, it does allow you open your Zotero PDFs into other iPad apps and then when finished important back into Zotpad. Again, not perfect, but getting better.

These two issues in workflow have made me look around for other citation/article management systems. I have been playing with Papers 2 from mekentosj.com and their iPad app. Without going into the full review, the pluses currently for Papers 2 over Zotero is tight intergration into the OS X and the ability to cite in any writing application.[2] The minus is Papers 2 app only can sync with its iOS app while on the same network, but the iOS app does allow annotations in-app and those annotations/notes can be pulled out as text files.

EndNote used to be the only option for citation. Between Zotero (open source) and Papers (for-profit app developer) no one should need to look at EndNote to get serious work done in academic research.

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1. Currently Zotero is limited Word and OpenOffice and does not support citing sources in other programs such as my two favorite writing environments–Scrivener and Byword.  ↩

2. I plan to work on a larger review of those two citation/article management systems in the future. My final choice is still up in the air at this point.  ↩

Could not have said it better myself →

Shawn Blanc:

Here’s a metric that can help you determine if you’re on track for reaching your goals: are you spending your time, money, and attention differently than most people?

Are you leading or following in research or higher education? If you find yourself too often thinking about following others in the race, it is time to start thinking about where you want to be in 5, 10, or 20 years.

TICAS Report - Making Loans Work (at community colleges) →

TICAS has been one of the few organizations to consider that student loan borrowing at community colleges can actually help students retain, complete and transfer. They have been making good arguments while at the same time maintaining their stance on college costs and the Project on Student Debt.

Their latest report looks at how some community colleges in California approach responsible borrowing for their students. Well worth the read.

When to write and publish →

There is some great advice about writing out there, but Brett's perspective hits home.

Two things to keep in mind:

• You never know when a hero of yours is going to happen upon something you’ve written.
• If you always write to the best of your ability, then you’ll always be improving and you won’t need to decide to do something the right way. You’ll just do it. And, you’ll want to do it better.

If you want what you write to be taken seriously, then give a shit.

Everybody makes mistakes, but carelessness is as obvious as it is difficult to forgive.

I know there were many times when I just don't want to write or work on research and it comes down to finding a way to still write when you do not "give a shit". Just don't publish until you do.