HE NoteBook for Professors
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HE NoteBook for Professorsby durbrow - 10:19AM, Jul 04, 2003 |
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I am trying to use NB to tackle 3 problems with one tool:
1. Providing lesson outlines and worksheets to students. 2. Documenting teaching and scholarship activities for promotion and tenure and job search. 3. Sharing drafts of manuscripts with co-authors. I would be curious to know if anyone else is doing this too and if they have had more success than me. I've run into two limitations with NB. 1. You can't publish the ENTIRE NoteBook as you can in a similar product. 2. You can't password protect parts of your NoteBook or outline. Again, let me know if you are interested in this and I post my feeble attempt. Eric. |
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When you say you can't publish an entire Notebook, in what form are you publishing it now? I know we need to beef up our import/export capabilities, so any feedback you can give us on this would be very helpful. As far as password protection goes, is per-Notebook good enough or do you really need per-page?
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There are really a few different needs for sharing documents. First, there are documents that people just need to be able to see. Second, there are documents that people need to be able to edit. 1. Uneditable documents. I am starting to use Notebook to prepare my own lecture notes. At times, it would be very nice to be able to share these notes with students, as handouts and also as web pages. There is no real need for students to be able to edit any of these documents. Printing handouts and distributing electronic handouts as pdf files is fairly easy, and the printing enhancements in 1.1 make this practical. I would still like to see some further improvements, to make Notebook a little more word-processor like. I would like to be able to specify page margins, put on custom headers and footers and page numbers, and specify the spacing between paragraphs or cells. (I would like to have my cells be single spaced, but have an extra half space between cells.) Multiple notebook pages can be exported this way. However, it is difficult to correlate the page numbers in the print dialog box with the page numbers in the notebook. This is understandable since they are measuring different things, but it would be nice if there were some easy way to see what the correlation. I haven't tried converting notebooks to web pages yet, so I don't know what the strengths and weaknesses of Notebook. In another thread, Jayson asked if cells need to be able to expand and contract (if I understood his post correctly). I don't really see any need for this, myself. 2. Editable documents. Sharing documents with others (especially those unenlightened PC folks who can't use Notebook) is a bit trickier. Exporting as RTF is actually a good solution. However, if a page has any graphics, Notebook uses the RTFD format, which can't be read by any program except TextEdit. In these cases, it would be great if there were an option to have Notebook skip the graphics and export as an RTF file. (Right now, tabs are also exported as a series of spaces -- could they be exported as tabs, or are there issues with that in the RTF format?) The real issue is getting the notebook into a word processing document with a minimum of fuss and loss of formatting.
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Kelly: Regarding the first part (Uneditable uses) may I ask what you are posting or have included on your NoteBook? CV, papers, lectures right? It may sound petty but do have each note section for a lecture on a separate page or as a flowing outline?
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Maybe I set my NB up incorrectly but I noticed that I am only able to export one section at a time. I am not sure if this is what Kelly and Eric are referring to. When I setup my chapters I did each as a new page within my Novel section. It just seemed the most organized way to proceed. The indiviual chapters export fine but I will not be able to export one complete book when I am finished. I suppose I could have made each chapter a cell and then collapsed them but I thought of how I might actually use a physical notebook and that is how I setup my NB.
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Durbrow: Right now I am using Notebook for preparing lecture notes, a research journal, and a personal health journal. For lecture notes, I have thus far only used Notebook on a trial basis toward, the end of last semester. Prior to last semester, I did all of my lecture notes by hand. This made revising a nightmare, but every time I tried to computerize this, it was very difficult. Finally, at the beginning of last semester, I started using OmniOutliner as a "thinking pad" for organizing my new lectures. (OmniOutliner is a nifty program for to-do lists and the like, but since it is text only, it is really very limited for course notes.) Around this time, NoteTaker came out. I tried it, but became very frustrated by its weird, buggy interface, and was really preturbed that I couldn't get rid of the spirals! (Even as a kid, I always used 3-ring binders or bound notebooks, never spirals!) I never registered it, and decided to take a deep look at the outliner capabilites of good old AppleWorks, which worked reasonably well for me. Then in April, NoteBook came out. I played around with it over the weekend, found that it was NoteTaker done right, registered it right away, and then did very little with it for the next month. Anyway, to finally get to the point, I have only used NoteBook a little for course notes. However, based upon my AppleWorks course outlines, each page in my notebook will be on a given topic, which in most cases will cover 1-4 lectures. These are mostly notes for me to use during lecture, though I will probably distribute most of them to my class as pdf files. The classroom I teach in next fall has a computer projection system, so I will also use my notebook as a respository for computer generated graphics that I want to show. (My course is in crystallography and x-ray diffraction, so I will be able to show crystal structures using the awesome Mac-only CrystalMaker program.) I am also using NoteBook as a research journal, as a thinking platform for my various research projects. I haven't yet hit upon an organizational scheme that I am completely happy with, however. Should each project have its own notebook, or a subsection in a main notebook? What is the best way to divide up my topics in each project? How do I divide up research into the literature? And so on... I won't be using NoteBook for things like my CV -- NoteBook has many strengths, but it isn't a word processor, and it isn't really fair to fully expect it to behave like one. Of course, I can always include word processing documents in a NoteBook when I need to. When formatting is important, I will use a word processor. When thinking and organizing is most important, I will use NoteBook.
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James: When printing and exporting as a pdf file, you can pick any page range you want. I think your difficultly is in exporting editable text, like rtf files. Here I would suggest exporting your individual pages, then assemble them into a bigger document in your word processor.
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Thanks Kelly. I didn't know that the PDF export option would allow multiple pages.
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Thanks Kelly for sharing you use of NoteBook as well as your organization scheme. So it sounds like you have multiple lectures on one page [focused on a topic]. Thats sounds more sensible than my original approach: I was going to put each lecture on a separate page. In NoteTaker this was NOT a good idea because the system bogged down with many pages. Also, if NB does come up with a notebook posting function to publish to the web then your students can always just print the web page, right? I get a lot of fuss from students on PDF files. Also, have you tried KeyNote and sharing XML files with students? On using it as a research tool: I was hoping that I could use it to share ROUGH drafts of scholarly papers with co-authors so that they could see what I was working on. This is not collaborative writing but it is probably easier to elicit feedback from colleagues. The problem with this is the sensitivity of sharing draft publication results in a non-password protected environment. Probably a bad idea.
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I've never gotten bad feedback about distributing pdf files, and given my knowledge of html, they are a lot more time efficient for me. I haven't done much with Keynote yet (though I do own a copy), and I am hopeless as to what to do with an xml file. In fact, I have never used a presentation program for lectures, and I don't intend to. Our students really prefer good old fashioned lectures using a piece of chalk. They find it easier to follow the flow and take notes. With computer presentations, most professors tend to lecture too fast, and it can be harder to take notes. That's why I am somewhat hesistant about distributing my lecture notes, since there is real benefit to students having to produce their own notes. On the other hand, there is also benefit in having a GOOD set of notes, so I will probably compromise by publishing my notes sometime after the lecture, but never before. (Often they are not available before, anyway.  ) My notes are primarily for ME, to let me know what I want to say.I don't worry about my coauthors distributing work before it is ready, so I don't worry about password protection. But I have never had more than three coauthors on a paper, so it hasn't really been an issue. Kelly Miller Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Colorado School of Mines
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I posted in another discussion about trying to use NB with Keynote. How exactly are you using KEynote and NB. Keynote will not import XML nor will it open it. I also tried to drag and drop to no avail. I am more familiar with Keynote from a graphic perspective so I may be missing something. I typical am using Flash amd QT as well as hacking the Themes XML documents. I know you can import PDF but??
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quote: I don't use Keynote, but I think what is happening is that Keynote only uses XML files coded in a special way as display instructions, and that not just any XML file will do - i.e. an XML file created by Keynote will work, but one you make yourself won't work, unless you follow the file structure Keynote is expecting. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
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Keynote uses valid XML to write their theme files. The can be easily edited by hand to allow you to design your own themes. Omni Outliner exports as a Keynote file and can then be easily "themed" using whatever theme you choose. Notebook exports XML into OPML which is a variant of XML. Omni Outliner also supports this format. OPML is also supported by Userland's Manila CMS and their Radioland outliner. OPML is based on XML 1.0 a W3C standard. Hope the info is helpful.  [This message was edited by James on Fri July 11 2003 at 11:35 AM.]
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quote: No, you are correct. XML is a specification for creating an XML-based file format. By following the XML rules, tools that understand those rules can operate on the contents of your files. These tools, however, cannot generally understand what all the stuff in the files mean. For example, the OPML file format is an XML-based way of representing an outline. You can read it into a tool that displays XML files, but only a tool that understands the OPML tags can turn that data back into an outline. I think of XML as more of a meta-file format than a file format.
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did you ever find any good applications for organizing job search information?
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Jayson
Member
07:42PM, Jul 04, 2003