Amazon just acquired Shelfari along with used and rare book company Abe Books. Abe Books has been a long-time partner with and 40% investor in LibraryThing, a Shelfari competitor, so the Abe Books acquisition also gives Amazon a 40% stake in LibraryThing. A crowded shelf indeed. Details covered by Publishers Weekly and TechCrunch.
I’ve never been [...]

For my needs, Windows Live Writer (WLW) is the best desktop blogging application I’ve found.1 WLW makes it easy to insert elements and format posts, even allowing you to write using your blog’s stylesheet so you know exactly how the post will look once it’s published. I also appreciate the easy access to drafts and [...]

I received an email from a teacher/friend asking for tips on script format to pass on to her creative writing students. I sent a quick reply,1 but I also mentioned that the students should consider using some software that was developed specifically for writers (instead of business professionals).
I’ve tried a number of these tools, but [...]

Setup: Part One
One of the requirements for my Masters in English1 was the standard scholarly research course. The major assignment of the course was to create a bibliography on a subject or author and then compose a bibliographic essay from the findings. I chose to research H. P. Lovecraft because I’d been interested [...]

As I settle into this new blog space, I find I need to make some changes to my categories. I’ve been putting it off, though, because I’ve been dreading the laborious task of opening each post to make the changes.
Tonight, I found Rob Miller’s1 plugin “Batch Categories (v1.4)” that allows for the batch editing [...]

It seems like the last week or so has been filled with some great updates to some of my favorite online (or online-related) services. Admittedly, they’re not all directly related to education, but good news is good news.
Here are the highlights:

Wordpress is updating to version 2.5, and it looks pretty sweet! (I don’t [...]

I’ve just dumped Word for RoughDraft,1 at least when it comes to stories and scripts. So far, RoughDraft is much, much better than a typical word-processor for writing prose and scripts, and a decent replacement for (and certainly cheaper than) FinalDraft or Movie Magic Screenwriter.2
I haven’t worked much with FinalDraft, but MMS does have [...]

If you haven’t already heard, some exciting news (and two clarifications) from Dan Cohen:
I’m pleased to announce a major alliance between the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive.
The Zotero-IA alliance will create a “Zotero Commons” into which scholarly materials can be added simply via the Zotero client.

Cohen’s [...]

Over the last week or so, reading and the role of books have been popping up everywhere, it seems:

Reading is getting a lot of play in the press: the NEA warned that Americans are reading less and their proficiency is declining, though it appears the NEA needs to learn how to read data. Then, [...]

Google and Weekly Reader’s Writing for Teens magazine have put together a few lesson plans to help teachers and students use Google Docs for collaborative writing. The lessons provide instructions for using Google Docs, student-oriented suggestions, tips, and checklists for working through an online, collaborative revision process, and an educator’s guide. Helpful stuff.
The [...]