The internet for academics, part two!

Using (and not using) your VLE

It may be that your university's policy requires you to use your VLE for certain tasks. If not, try these alternatives:

To collect work and distribute documents, try www.drop.io or www.dropbox.com. Dropbox is especially good because it creates a kind of 'my documents' that you can access from any computer, and you can share specific folders & files with other dropbox users. They're free and they work really well. You can see who added what when, and who took what when too.

To set up discussion groups and forums, try www.ning.com. Again, it's free and very good.

Google has an excellent calendar function. You can make as many calendars as you like, and make them visible or invisible with a single click.

Bookmarks

Do not keep your bookmarks in either 'bookmarks' or 'favourites' in your browser. You won't be able to see them when you're on a different computer, when you change computers, or when you change browsers (which is worth trying - try the browser 'Chrome'). For bookmarks, try evernote (excellent and private), or delicious (very good and social).

Email and contacts

Don't keep your contacts in your university email account. If you do, when you leave your university you will also lose all your contacts. If you can, route your work email through a third party. Google mail is good. It's free, has lots of capacity, and google will let you export your email data to other providers.

Lectures and presentations

www.Flickr.com has millions of images on a 'Creative Commons' licence - you can use them for free and legally as long as you attribute the source. You will find better photos on flickr than you will on a google image search.

www.prezi.com is a freemium service for creating presentations. It is much better than powerpoint. (Freemium services have one basic option that is free, and several other options that have a cost. Lots of freemium services are very useful.)

Online presence

At the bare minimum, you should have active profiles on academia.edu and linkedin.com. Set them both to email you with weekly digests of activity so you don't have to check them all the time. Put up a photo of yourself and a means of contact that does not go through the site itself (e.g. email).

Bonus credit

If your name is available as a domain, such as www.zoerose.com, buy it. You can buy it at a domain registration service like www.godaddy.com. This will be useful to you one day, even if you don't use it just yet.

Get on twitter. It's better than you think.

Write a blog. Use wordpress or blogger. Follow other blogs. If you can't be bothered maintaining your own blog, contribute as a guest to collaborative blogs.

Make a website (preferably in the domain you just bought). Link to your published articles and keep an up to date list of achievements. Include a photo of yourself.

Because

The more you do now, the better positioned you will be when the next phase of the internet comes along. Which it will.

And it will be really, really cool.