The main reason I chose email addiction was because I felt to a certain degree I was “addicted” to email. The first thing I did when upon getting online was check my email – regardless if I was expecting an email or not. My email was set to refresh every minute and display a message box if any new emails came in so I would be notified when a new email arrived. Anyone else in the same boat as me?

Interestingly enough, there is heaps discussion related to email addiction online – Googling “email addiction” gives you a whole heap of results, all mainly on how to cure/deal with email addiction. However, running the same search in Google Scholar gives you close to nothing; the majority of research focuses on Internet addiction and not email addiction.

So, after many months of reading a lot of literature, changing my topic to "Email Addiction in the Workplace" so it is more focussed, writing up Thesis A, creating a survey and conducting a pilot study I’ve finally reached the next milestone – conducting my actual survey! You may be wondering why I’m telling you this, well it’s because it is an online survey and I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me out and fill out the survey - it should take you no more than 10 minutes. Thanks in advance

Unfortunately, there is no incentive to fill out the survey other than the warm fuzzy feeling that you've helped me in my thesis For those who are interested, I plan on posting up a summary of my results/findings after finishing my thesis which should be around late October/early November.

Recently my friend and I, have for some reason, talked to a lot of people about presentations - and we've been trying to convert them all to use "bullet-point-less" presentations. For those who we've talked to, you've probably already heard this, for those who haven't...welcome to a whole new perspective on presentations!

Late last year, through random blog reading we found a wonderful blog all about presentations: Presentation Zen. There was one post in particular that compared the different presentation styles of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates which I feel is a great introduction and gets straight to the point.

There is no particular style that is "right" but the main concept is to keep your slides simple. Don't overload your audience with information. Don't put a billion bullet points/lines of text into your slide. If you have everything you want to say written on your slides, then the audience doesn't need you to be there - they can just read your slides.

...bullets tend to make our presentations formal and stiff, serve to "dumb down" our points, and lead to audiences being confused...and bored.

Avoiding boring your audience to death with your PowerPoint presentations isn't easy. In my opinion, how you design your slides is very important (and also what you are presenting and how you say it). The approach I've taken is predominately to have pictures/photos and minimal words on the slides. For example, my most recent presentation was pretty much all pictures only. Those slides probably don't mean much at all by themselves, as they were only there to help get my point across. (If you're wondering, they were the slides I used for my Thesis A presentation about Email Addiction in the Workplace)

One of the very first questions people ask is..."Where do I get the pictures from?" Well, there are heaps of different places on the Internet that will give you all the pictures you need - for free! The two that I use most are flickr and stock.xchng. Sometimes I give Google Images a try, however most of the time the images found aren't good in quality. There are many other sites (though some require you to pay), in fact Presentation Zen has a whole list of them!

If I still haven't convinced you to give it a go, have a look at presentations from TED - they are awesome! Or read a few more of the many excellent posts from Presentation Zen.

edit: Found this after writing up the above post - a great video by Garr Reynolds (author of Presentation Zen)  presenting at Google about effective presentations.

http://pbwiki.com
In my opinion, this is probably one of the most useful sites for group work - a wiki. I'm quite certain nearly everyone has heard of wikis (think Wikipedia). As to if you've used one extensively (editing, participating etc) is another question, and I strongly suggest you give it a go. The nice thing about pbwiki is how easy it is to setup and use. The wiki markup syntax for pbwiki is probably one of the most user friendly I've come across, but it doesn't really matter since they also have a GUI editor (basically a WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get editor).

So what makes pbwiki so good for group work?
Short answer: It's a wiki
Longer answer: It allows everyone in your group to contribute to the discussion and throw in ideas. Everything is in one place, everyone can see the most updated information, and everyone can access everything. If someone accidentally deletes something, or you decide that an idea form a week ago was actually good but was deleted - don't fear - just have a look into the wiki history

http://assembla.com
This is a MUST if you are doing any coding assignment - Assembla provides you with Subeversion (SVN). It also provides a wiki, Trac and a whole host of other features, but the one I've found most useful is SVN. I won't go into the details, but the SVN repository will pretty much let everyone in the group work on the code at the same time and keep a running history of all the versions of your code (so if you accidentally do something horrible, you can revert back to the most recent working version). If you want to read more about the wonders of SVN have a look at Subversion's web page. Assembla also comes with a wiki, but I find pbwiki more user friendly.

http://drop.io
This is one of my more recent finds and haven't used it much but I do believe it will be very useful for file sharing. It basically lets you create a 'drop' - a place where you can store files online (up to 100mb). The distinguishing feature for drop.io compared to other file sharing sites is that it allows you to password protect your files. With the password, you provide users with different levels of access (View/View and Add/View, Add and Delete). In addition there is also an admin password which lets you change settings of your 'drop'. Another bonus is that to create a 'drop' you don't need to use your email address - just the name of the drop and a password if you want. The only drawback is 'drops' are only valid for at most 1 year, but it's not so much of a worry as you can always renew it.

So those are the three sites I If I haven't convinced you to at least try out one of the sites, I'll just mention now that they are all free If you have any good sites for group work that you know of, please share - I'd love to see what else is out there.

"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."
Wilson Mizner

Research is probably something that uni students can't escape from - especially if they're doing honours and have to write up a thesis. Well, recently for one of our subjects which is a bit like preparation for thesis, we needed to write a research proposal. While searching through the Internet for credible sources, I discovered (or got told) a few tips and felt it would be a good idea to share them. So here are my 10 tips to hopefully make research a less stressful task!

1. Use EndNote
   If you're going to have more than 10 or so sources, then I strongly suggest you use EndNote. It might take some time to learn and set up properly for the referencing style you need, but it's definitely well worth it! You should be able to find a free download link in your uni website.
2. Use Google Scholar
   It is quick, easy and will save you heaps of time compared to using to your uni's online e-library catalogue. Google Scholar will pretty much search all scholarly databases at once. While chances are you will need to search multiple times using the uni catalogue because each service will only search within a select set of databases.
3. Tweak Google Scholar
   A bit of tweaking will make Google Scholar even more user friendly.
   1. Go to 'Scholar Preferences'
   2. In the Library Links section, search for your uni
   3. Hopefully your uni will be listed, if so tick the check box (If not, maybe ask a librarian and see if the uni can get listed)
   4. In the Bibliography Manager section, select EndNote
   5. Click on 'Save Preferences'
   Now when you search, for the papers you usually need to login to download you'll see a link similar to "Find it@UNSW" next to it. When you click on the link, it'll take you to your uni's login page and once you login you'll be taken directly to the article. Nice isn't it? Also, with EndNote, all articles should now have an "Import to EndNote" link, click on it to import into your EndNote library - no need manually enter the details (though be careful there are times when Google doesn't reference properly, but it's rare, and usually an easy fix)
4. Work at uni
   Do your research at uni. The Internet will likely be faster, you won't need to login to download the articles, and hopefully they'll be less distractions...
5. Google the Author
   Sometimes you'll find that your uni doesn't subscribe to a particular journal, or for whatever reason you just can't find the article. There is still one more option! Chances are the author of the article is from an university. I've found that if you Google them, and if you can find their staff page, 99% of the time they'll have their publication list...all free to download
6. Take notes while you're reading
   I still need to work on this, but I suggest while you are reading take notes! Don't just highlight important bits, summarise what you've read - otherwise after reading so many articles you'll surely forget where you've read what. Haven't tried this, but Google Notebooks have recently added "labels" function - so putting your summaries/highlights in there and tagging them will probably become useful later on, since you can easily search for what you need/want.
7. Organise your PDFs
   My suggestion is to name you PDFs in this fashion "LastnameF_year.pdf" (eg. SmithA_2007.pdf). If you've named your PDF, it makes it heaps easier to find! (a bit of time spent early on, saves heaps of time later). Though I've heard that EndNote links the PDFs nicely as well - will need to give this a try.
8. Reference List/Cited By
   This is something I was told and is very very useful! Any decent paper you have will have a reference list (if it doesn't maybe it's not all that credible). Guess what? A lot of those references will also be useful to you. Also, Google has a "Cited By" link - other papers that have used the paper you're reading; again, a lot of those references will be useful. Start with one or two papers and you'll end up with too many to read!
9. Pick a topic you like
   Probably not always possible, but if you can try to pick a topic you are interested in. It's very likely you'll have to read a whole pile of articles, and if you're not interested in the topic, it will be a very boring and painful process.
10. Start early!
    Sleep deprivation and stress is no fun

The last two are probably the most obvious, but also the hardest ones - though they will make a huge difference! If you have your own tips for researching please share them