Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all Postgraduate Students from the Postgraduate English Team. We look forward to working with you more in 2011!

Vocabulary Powerpoint

Here's a Powerpoint about Vocabulary Learning from ENGL 503 that may interest you all:

 

YouTube

It may not be too surprising to learn that the ever growing GOOGLE empire also acquired YouTube; For all the nonsense on YouTube, there are also some exceptionally good educational materials.

And with today's webcams and digital technology, you have some options in how you can make good use of YouTube and other such sites:

1) Rather than keep a Blog, you could keep a VLOG (Video-Log) as a study-research diary. This would help improve your oral fluency and act as a useful check mechanism to see if you really understand what you're studying or researching.
2) Video presentations can be uploaded into YouTube.
3) Video presentations and Video CVs are becoming more common. They can be stored on YouTube (or elsewhere) and linked from your website or Blog.

One warning about YouTube: It does periodically get closed down in some parts of the world (rather pointlessly since it is always possible to access it through  a proxy server).

Surveys, Forms and Questionnaires

One other point about GOOGLE Docs: You can custom design online forms and surveys - a resource that you might find rather useful in some types of research.

GOOGLE Documents

Although Blogger and GOOGLE sites offer only limited storage space, this is not really a problem, because you can create and store presentations, documents, and charts in GOOGLE documents, and create links to them.

GOOGLE Docs is simply Google's answer to MS Office. It's not as sophisticated, but it's flexible, and its online storage mechanism means you can access your documents anywhere you go, not to mention share them with as many or as few people as you choose.

Some people make back-ups of their Office documents in GOOGLE docs to guard against theft, loss, and failure of their computers and storage devices.

GOOGLE Docs also has a wealth of templates, e.g. for reports, cvs etc.

GOOGLE Sites

If you would prefer to establish a more traditional fixed website at speed, setting up a GOOGLE site takes approximately 5 minutes; again, thinking ahead, cvs, presentations, academic work, video and much more might be organised into a highly professional looking website calculated to impress future employers, and promote your research activity.

Blogger

Blogger as you will have realised is the home of this site; it's another GOOGLE-owned operation, and again simple enough to use. A Blog functions as a diary / interactive web-environment, and can be public (like this Blog), or kept private for personal use.

Four reasons to consider keeping a Blog.
i) A great medium to keep a research and study diary.
ii) A simple way of improving your writing fluency.
iii) A possible medium for gathering and presenting your work to a public audience.
iv) A possible medium for organising a portfolio of your achievements for future employers.

Picasa

Picasa is GOOGLE's photo storage site, and the equivalent on GOOGLE to FLICKR. It's a useful site to store and categorise your personal photos.

What has this got to do with postgraduate English you may ask?! Not a lot, possibly; but images you may use in your research work may find a place here (and a unique URL you can use);  and one day you might find that a professional / research album of some type may come in very handy in research work (e.g. presentations) and when applying for employment.

As we'll discuss later, traditional methods of applying for jobs through old-style cvs are very much being overtaken by technological developments.

I-GOOGLE

I-GOOGLE enables you to create your own private homepage. Again it is very user-friendly, and enables you to collect the feeds, web-links and gadgets that you find most useful in your day-to-day work in one place.

GOOGLE Reader

Have a play around with GOOGLE Reader (under the 'more' button); it enables you to store and share websites and RSS feeds that you find particularly useful.

Blog Searches

One further search facility GOOGLE has is a BLOG search (Blogger, one of the most popular Blogs on the Internet is Google-owned). Many people use Blogs and for all kinds of reasons, some of them very specialised and research-orientated. It's worth therefore doing a BLOG search using some key search terms; you might just find some material that will be both useful and interesting to you.

Video and Image Searches

Probably everyone is familiar with GOOGLE video and image search; two things worth noting however:
1) There is no reason as such why you can't use these sources in research.
2) Material is often copyrighted, and if you use it, you must reference it.

Check out the APA website to check on referencing conventions.

Wonderwheel

An alternative option to Timeline you'll see is Wonderwheel, which provides a linked graphic of the main themes in the fiekl you are searching for.

Timeline Search

On your left after a standard GOOGLE search, you'll notice some other options; one of these is timeline, which will give you a list of research results in chronological order to give you a kind of history of the topic you are interested in. Very good if you want to get an overview of developments in a particular field.

GOOGLE News

Google News in the top toolbar is at first sight a digest of just what you'd expect - the latest news. But it is also a search engine in its own right, which means you can use it to search for all the latest news in your subject field, as well as look back through the news archive. It's a good way of staying in touch with all the latest developments in your field.

Create E-mail Alert

If you look at the GOOGLE Scholar toolbar, you'll see a 'create e-mail alert' button. This is quite neat. With GOOGLE Alert, you type in your search terms and then set GOOGLE to conduct a regular search for you (daily, weekly etc.). When GOOGLE finds a new hit for you, very simply you get an automatic e-mail from them. So, it's well worth deciding on key research words and phrases for your studies and setting up a GOOGLE Alert system for yourself.

Of course, you'll need a free g-mail account to take advantage of all of this - but on balance it's well worth having.

GOOGLE Scholar

Google Scholar is an academic search engine. For example, if you are doing scholarly research into tourism, you probably don't want your search results to include bargain holiday offers from travel agencies and the like. GOOGLE Scholar is the answer; again, you'll find it under the 'more' button on the main page. 

Google Books Search Types

Most search engines provide hits in order of 'popularity'; GOOGLE Books allows you to alter this, so that you can search. for example, 'architecture' as normal, but click in the left-hand options column to restrict the search to the most recent books publihsed, or books in the nineteenth century only; a pop-up calendar enables you to custom set the search for the exact dates you're interested in. You can see these options if you double click on the webshot in the last entry.

Google Books

Up on the top right hand side of the toolbar is a label with the title 'more'; This is not very informative, but click it, and you'll find a whole range of useful resources and specialist search engines. One of these is Google Books, which when you enter a search term provides you with a list of books on the subject or topic you have entered:

GOOGLE Advanced Search

It's easy to ignore GOOGLE's advanced search feature, as it's almost unnoticeable on the main search page, just to the right of the search box.  But in fact it's a very user-friendly search engine to refine your searches to track down what you're looking for with greater speed and efficiency.

Take a look, and see what you can find.