Blogging at SRA

The Society for Research on Adolescence biennial meeting is coming up on March 8th – 10th, 2012, in the beautiful city of Vancouver, BC [read: home of 49th Parallel Coffee, amazing restaurants, stunning international port city encrusted by snow capped mountains]. I am equally as excited about the conference as I am about being in one of my favorite cities in the Pacific Northwest.

At this year’s conference I will be posting daily updates over at SRA Blogs on international research and international researchers. Stay tuned!

LightSwitch

In preparation for a couple of upcoming projects, I am learning how to build database driven applications. I decided to spend time on learning to build a simple application after realizing that the tried-and-true option for these projects that others were recommending was wrangling multiple Excel files.

At first I considered Microsoft Access, however one of my upcoming projects may require multiple users. Access has many strengths, however it was not intended for multiple users. An additional consideration is that I want my applications to be web-based rather than stored on a single desktop.

I have settled on Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch and so far I am very, very happy with it. The Wrox book Beginning Visual Studio LightSwitch Development has been a great resource, too. And the academic discount that I found through Provantage.com has made the project financially do-able. So far I have not had to actually use any code and the process has been very straightforward.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

new to GNU, open to Open Access

Drupal Gardens has captured my attention lately. If you want to follow along in the development, feel free to stop by.  While many academics seem to rally around Joomla!, my pocket web developer recommended Drupal Gardens. I’ve been having a great time with it! The themes have social media features built in, the WYSIWYG editor is user friendly, simple views are, well, simple. So far, so good.

The project, ACCESS Resources, was an enthusiastic solution to a page limitation crunch for a book chapter my colleagues and I are writing. It is also a first step towards making my work more available, such as having a creative commons copyright and accessibility.

I’m interested in accessibility for a few reasons. Increasing access to research and information is one part of the translational research process. It is also an extension of social justice efforts toward negotiating the privilege hierarchy between those who are active members of higher education and those who are not. Accessibility in the form of Open Access publishing provides a connection between research funded with public resources with the public. It may even help promote academic freedom while maintaining the integrity of the peer-review process. I’m very curious to watch and be a part of the trajectory of the Open Access movement.

As I continue to learn more about Open Access publishing, I’ll share my thoughts. If you are new to to OA publications, here are a few of my new favorite sources: PLoS | Public Library of Science, PKP | Public Knowledge Project, and the DOAJ | Directory of Open Access Journals.