François Briatte
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This document is part of the "Computing Advice for Students" series. It is a prequel to "10 Computing Tips and Tricks for Students" and "10 Additional Computing Tips and Tricks for Students", and contains a few recommendations that are not repeated in those two documents.
- Use some form of agenda or calendar application.
- Bookmark your university portals and important pages.
- Use a specific, secure browser session for university-related work.
- Use a specific user folder to store study material.
Note -- Other documents in this series will come back to Web browsers at several points.
- Use a proper email address, not a pseudonym.
- Set up your email to show your full name as the sender.
- Use email filters to stay on top of your inbox.
- Use a sensible email signature.
Note -- Politeness and correct language are not computing requirements, just standard requirements of communication between human beings.
- Learn to use your browser bookmarks.
- Learn how to print to PDF format on your system.
- Learn to use Perma.cc and [Save It Offline][save-it-offline] to save Web pages and videos.
- If you are tech-savvy, also learn about wget, jDownloader and youtube-dl.
Most importantly, stay organised -- rename files to sensible names, and keep folder hierarchies to the simplest scheme that you can come up with.
Read "10 Ways to Make A Computer Painfully Slow and Unusable" after you are done reading the main documents of this series.
To spare your laptop battery:
- Close your Internet (Wi-Fi) connexion.
- Close memory- and/or CPU-intensive programs.
- Lower your screen brightness to 50%.
- Read the material for Tip #4 (see below).
Memory- and/or CPU-intensive programs are covered in the [document][slow-pdf] linked to in the previous tip. One if its recommendations that applies here is to use a plain text editor instead of a word processor (e.g. Microsoft Word) to take notes in class.
- Learn to use Google Scholar and other academic search engines.
- Use your course readings, including 'additional' ones from bibliographies.
- Use your university library to its full extent.
- Learn about academic journals, and get familiar with a few of them.
Important – Academic integrity requires that you will be able to cite, and possibly provide, your sources, so save them and do not 'copy-paste' material without making a proper citation to the source.
- Take a look at the citations in your course readings.
- Take a look at the references listed at the end of your course readings.
- Learn about the Harvard 'author-year' bibliographic style.
- Consider using a reference management program like Zotero or Mendeley.
Important – remember the academic penalties for plagiarism, including 'not knowing how to cite properly' and self-plagiarism.
- Did I already tell you about naming your files properly?
- Did I already tell you about organising your folders as simply as possible?
- Learn to use quick search (e.g. Spotlight on Mac)
- Learn to search by creation/modification date or by file format
Tip #3 of "10 Computing Tips and Tricks for Students" will tell you about 'launcher' programs that vastly improve searching for disk files or looking for information online.
- Haven't your read enough clickbait in your life already?
- Do you really need to read that many media 'articles' (i.e. badly rewritten press releases) a day?
- Do you gain anything from spending 2+ hours per day on social media?
- Are you watching online videos like old people used to watch soap operas on TV?
Last, are you sure that the last course reading that you decided to skip is as uninteresting as you think it is? Are you not at university specifically to learn to read – and, in a few years, to write – complex, long arguments written in some form of 'technical' language?
- Your teachers do their best to pack course syllabuses with interesting material.
- Try a few 'long-form' publications like Le Monde diplomatique and the The Atlantic.
- Youtube is a great resource once you start looking for proper conferences and talks.
- Blogs (and among them, scientific blogs) are often cosy and fun.
Many of the points listed in this overview are covered in further documents of this series. You should now head to "10 Computing Tips and Tricks for Students" for some more focused advice.