Month: September 2015

Updates from the CON IT Department, September 28, 2015

Flash Friday

Tune in to CarmenConnect at noon this Friday (10/2) for a quick half-hour of information you can use in your work every day. This week, I’ll cover five simple productivity tools and strategies to streamline your workflow and perhaps even make your everyday life a little easier.

This will not be an in-depth tutorial on any specific topic. We’ll take only 4-5 minutes per tool/strategy, so prepare for a virtual wild-ride intro tour through each one. Your students are using these tools already, and this should serve as a good opportunity for you to join them and learn how they are managing information and collaborating with each other.

Join the session at 12 p.m. on Friday (10/2): http://go.osu.edu/jonitornwall

The Internet of Things

I sometimes have a few choice words for my refrigerator when it runs out of snacks. Imagine my surprise when I learned my new refrigerator can now talk back. Not only that, it can connect to my phone via Wi-Fi and find out information to help it meet my snacking needs, among other things.

That may seem harmless enough, but the FBI recently issued a bulletin warning people about the “Internet of Things,” or all of those devices we have in our homes and workplaces that automatically send data about us into cyberspace. Do you have an internet-connected fitness monitor? Printer? Medical device? “Cyber actors,” or those who seek to cause harm by leveraging the power of our digital connectedness, aim to use internet-connected devices to attack their targets. Take time to read the FBI Public Service Announcement and their recommendations.

Go digital with your lit reviews!

If you are storing all of those articles and references on paper, making notes in the margins, and organizing them with colored sticky notes, it may be time to consider moving to a digital reference and citation manager. Our CON grad-entry student on the CON IT team, David Merriman, explores one of the many available options for you in his recent article on Mendeley. I use Mendeley myself and keep all of my articles and references there so they are accessible any time, any where I have an internet connection. You can read and annotate your PDF articles, cite while you write, search through your articles easily, create bibliographies in many different formats, and best of all, share folders of articles with your colleagues.

Getting Started with the Mendeley Citation Machine

Mendeley is a free reference manager and citation machine with many capabilities.  It allows for saving and storing research documents in a cloud based system for easy use across devices.  It is a powerful annotation tool that allows for notes to be typed directly on documents as they are read.   Mendeley integrates well with many word processors including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice allowing for the direct import of citations and subsequent bibliographies, practically eliminating errors created in this type of documentation.  There are a host of other features that one can implement within the program but the above are the most often used applications of the software.  It’s  easy to use so let’s get started!

Adding journal articles to Mendeley is as easy as downloading the document and then dragging and dropping into Mendeley.  However, there are times Mendeley fails to extract the correct information for citing the document.  An example would be for a title to be incorrectly labeled as an author’s name instead.  This flaw is relatively rare, but when it occurs, you need only reenter the information manually.  As the group at Mendeley have great tutorials, let’s take a look at one concerning this topic.

Mendeley has also made it easy to read and comment on research articles as you go. Highlighting and commenting (via “stickies”) are buttons found on the Mendeley interface that allow for quick place-marking for ideas.

Perhaps the most powerful and time-saving aspect of Mendeley is its in-paper citation capabilities. To get started, you first must add Mendeley to your word processor.  If you are using Microsoft word, click Tools and then install “MS Word plugin.”  When you next open Word, Mendeley will now be present in your Reference tabs.  To utilize it, let’s watch another Mendeley video.

You should now have a good enough grasp upon the inner workings of Mendeley to get started.  Enjoy!

Is the Internet of Things putting you at risk?

      by Awais Ali

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to any object or device which connects to the Internet to automatically send and/or receive data.  As more businesses and homeowners use web-connected devices to enhance company efficiency or lifestyle conveniences, their connection to the Internet also increases the target space for malicious cyber actors. Similar to other computing devices, like computers or Smartphones, IoT devices also pose security risks to consumers. The FBI is warning companies and the general public to be aware of IoT vulnerabilities cybercriminals could exploit, and offers some tips on mitigating those cyber threats.  Please see the FBI bulletin to learn more about the security risks posed by IoT devices.