A beginner's look at Zotero

I was alerted to the potential of Zotero after reading a positive review in a blog post on tech tools at Inside Higher Ed. Zotero is a tool that allows you to amass and organize a bibliography, drop citations into your documents in preformatted styles like APA, MLA, etc., generate reference lists, and share your library collections and those belonging to other people with similar interests.

Zotero lives in your browser and is synced to the web-based version. It sounded like a useful tool - one that would do away with the mind-numbing slog of putting citations and references in proper format if nothing else - I was immediately interested in whether students would gravitate to it for this purpose. So I set out to learn how to use it.

The first thing I learned is that Zotero is designed for Firefox or Safari and doesn't work with Internet Explorer. There is also a stand-alone version that has a Chrome plug-in which made my happy as Chrome is my favourite browser. I downloaded both to have a look.

Let's look at Zotero using the Firefox extension. After you have downloaded Zotero (and Firefox 4 if you don't have the current version) there is an icon in your Firefox navigation bar that lets you add something to your Zotero library with one click if the item is a book (i.e. you are browsing in Amazon etc) or a publication with available bibliographic information. If you are searching for articles from a database like PsycINFO from within your library's gated access, you can even add a folder of search results in one click if Zotero has a site translator that works with your database search engine (it doesn't for Capilano University's search engine).

You can also add items manually. It's good if the items have a doi because then you only have to enter that manually and all of the other bibliographic information is added automatically. You can add whatever you want manually but the automatic entry is only possible for items that Zotero recognizes as books, articles, etc.

You can tag your library items, add notes, and attach pdfs and screenshots. Once an item is in your library you can leave it unfiled or you can organize your library into collections and save items into one or more of these. You can also share your collection with others and view the collections that other people and groups have shared. Zotero also has a good search function that allows you to quickly search through the items in your library.

Zotero creates a bibliography or reference list automatically in a number of styles such as APA or MLA. In the test run I did using about 10 library items, the references appeared in perfect APA style except for one item which had the article title wrongly capitalized in the original - Zotero does not appear to correctly identify these types of mistakes so manually checking of the resulting list is still required. It is however, better than similar Reference lists I've seen generated by MS Word or EbscoHost. It appears from the discussion forums at Zotero.org that these glitches are being fixed, but I am not a big fan of having to correct something manually unless there is a large net gain in the overall amount of time I have saved.

Zotero also has an add-in for MS Word that automatically cites authors in your library in correct - in this case  APA - format. It seems to assume you want the citation to be inside parentheses so anything outside parentheses would have to be done manually or corrected.

So the big question is would I use Zotero? I'm not sure. It is obviously a useful tool, but its greatest utility will require commitment and a preference for using it over or as well as other tools. I use delicious to bookmark websites that look useful but that I don't frequently access, or to save items for students. It tends to be where I save bookmarks that have some potential to be useful for a while. I use Twitter to capture websites that have some immediate use or appeal. So I probably won't use Zotero merely to archive information from the web because I already have tools that are quick and easy.

Zotero could be useful to me as a professional development tool - keeping track of books and articles that I am interested in reading. But there are probably faster ways to do this - I could save them in an Amazon search without having to go the extra step and putting them into Zotero.

The greatest potential of Zotero would seem to be saving and managing items that are being used in research and writing. However having vast numbers of items means that organizing them into collection would be critical because it would take too long to look through them or to remember what's in there otherwise. Plus I'm more likely to do a current search of available books and articles when I need then, rather than rely on a library that may not have been kept current. I do like the generation of References and if I were doing a lot of scholarly writing this would be useful. The interface is easy enough - it looks like iTunes.

I suspect students may use Zotero as an aid to formatting citations and references in styles such as MLA or APA. However as a tool merely to create proper bibliographic formatting - I think it would be too much trouble. Students with lots of writing to do would probably find Zotero useful for organizing their bibliographies and for helping them get citations and references correctly formatted. A big benefit to using Zotero is that it should increase the correct attribution of sources - something that is becoming increasingly lost in our copy-and-paste culture.

The changing educational landscape

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article called Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century by Jeffrey R. Young. Young shows that students nowadays may expect that professors will upload their lectures and other course content to the web so that students can view them at their convenience, thereby making actual attendance in classes obsolete. He further points out that the technology exists to allow prospective students to bypass traditional college or university courses completely; by picking and choosing from the many excellent free online offerings, today's student can educate themselves. Young cites evidence that students' deepest learning takes place outside the classroom anyway - in the ancillary moments of education found in internships, research opportunities and the like.


I found this piece thought-provoking in many ways. 


I don't upload my lectures for students in my face-to-face classes. One reason for this is that I tend to use PowerPoint slides with minimal information on them as I lecture - they act more as visual prompts, with keywords. Much of the "good stuff" - the discussion, dialogue, conversation -  about the lecture material does not appear on the slides. Furthermore, I often edit or change as I go along. So uploading the slides may well be inaccurate - it would certainly be incomplete. I also believe that working through the material in class with an expert and other students is a valuable experience that does not get replicated by reading the slides on one's own.


The question here is whether or not professors in face-to-face classes should also try to deliver the class online for students who don't come to class. If this were possible, then students would rightly question the value of coming to classes at all. But it isn't possible - nor is it within the expertise or job description of most professors teaching face-to-face classes. Rather than replicating face-to face classes online, professors should use technology to support their classroom work. Alternatively, students can take online classes where the professor's role is rather different - more the guide on the side than the sage on the stage.


Young questions whether the sage on the stage model of pedagogy should be used at all. A valid question. My first reaction was that Young's suggestion that education outside the classroom is the most meaningful sounds a lot like my experience at graduate school. I had a few formal courses, most in esoteric areas of psychology that I had no experience or burning interest in, but my education outside the classroom was immense, far-reaching, and profound. It was self-driven, collaborative, and engrossing. Rather than abolish classes, why can't we bring more of these experiences into the classroom?


Could students direct their own learning through selection of online materials without the need for a professor and become well-educated in the process? Of course they could, given sufficient interest, time and self-discipline. Would this be equivalent in some sense to traditional education? Probably not. If I suddenly decided to become an engineer, chemist, or archaeologist it would probably take me years of trying to sift through the online world to find the focus, material, and depth that traditional education could provide. In the real world, only the retired and the independently wealthy could probably pursue that kind of education to the level of expertise needed to work in their chosen field.


Young questions the role of instructors in education. There is a great deal of research on the benefits of a constructivist model of online learning - students learn better when they collaborate with other students and their instructor, and when the instructor is fully engaged in the process. Students in online courses who are left to fend for themselves without instructor guidance flounder. The rates of student attrition in such courses far outpace those in face-to-face classes. Most of my students work many hours a week and simply don't have time to become fully independent learners; many are straight out of high school and lack time management skills and self-discipline. For them, college instructors are more than just curators of material. We give content and context but we also guide and mentor students in the process of learning, and evaluate the outcome so that students and others in the wider community can give recognition to the learning. 


The affordances of technology have changed the educational landscape. Young's article raises some excellent questions about how we should navigate this new world.

Pedagogical uses of VoiceThread

If you are new to Voicethread , I put together this brief presentation of examples. Your comments are welcome!



Go here for more examples of Voicethread in education.

The role of lectures in e-learning

One of the best ways to kill an online course is to try to replicate a lecture-based f2f course. Imagine the students in that online class - in isolation, watching online lectures and taking notes, writing papers and exams. No interaction, no collaboration, no sharing, no community, no instructor presence - a set of possibilities not explored or realized.

Does that mean that online lectures have no place in e-learning? I think not. While I would never want to have a whole course consisting solely of online lectures, used judiciously, online lectures can be extremely useful. I would broaden what I think of as a lecture to include the more general category of presentations given by experts in their particular field, who are excellent, engaging speakers, talking about topics directly related to the course material.

Hearing and watching someone speak about a topic can bring it to life - witness the many TED.com presentations that do a wonderful job of describing, evaluating, and synthesizing material. Some examples that I have included in my psychology courses are Phil Zimbardo's talk on the potential of ordinary people to commit evil acts,  or Martin Seligman's presentation about the potential of positive psychology. A 20-minute presentation (plus a complete transcript) by an accomplished speaker who is an expert in his/her field can open up a world of possibilities to students.

A couple of good sources for online university lectures are Academic Earth and Lecture Fox - both of these offer lectures or entire courses from a number of top universities such as Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, UBC, Oxford, MIT and so on. You could easily incorporate snippets or pieces of lectures - most include transcripts as well.

I use online lecture/presentations as the starting point for online discussion. For example, when we cover social psychology, students read in our course textbook about Phil Zimbardo's famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment - a prison simulation using undergraduate subjects who played the roles of guards and prisoners. They then watch Zimbardo's recent TED presentation in which he shows how conformity to group norms and institutionalized expectations can create situations that encourage behaviours such as the prisoner abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison by US soldiers. This provides the basis for an online discussion in which small groups of students apply what they have learned to analyzing the psychological basis for conformity and its consequences in other historical instances, and the situational and personal factors that promote nonconformity.

Used wisely, online presentations are a winning combination of technology in the service of pedagogical goals. What are your success stories?