How to Present Your Work Online: 6 Tips

In my previous post “Should Students Have a Portfolio Website?” you can read why it can be a good idea to present yourself and your work online, and what tools you could use if you’re not a web designer yourself.

So someone heard about you and searches for you on the internet. Your own website will hopefully one of the first things to be found. Your name is on it, they read the ‘about’ page and browse trough your work. Now what do they actually find out and remember about you? There are a few things to take in account: Read more

Should Students Have a Portfolio Website?

During your studies you will do a lot of work. You will get a lot of assignments, some leading to great results, others leading to less great results. What will you do with your work after it’s being presented, assessed and evaluated? Having your own portfolio website can be a good way of sharing your best work with the rest of the world.

Especially if you’re studying at an art school, a portfolio website is a good first step into the big outside world. Graphic designers, painters, writers, composers, theater makers, architects, all forms of creative students. On the other hand, sharing interesting research results, papers or case studies can be done in any kind of field, so there’s no need to stop reading if you’re not an artist. Read more

25 Worthwhile Student Productivity Websites

The internet is a great source of information for the productive student. We can read books, and I love to, but every day new great tricks are invented and shared with us via the internet!

That’s why I would like to share  this list of interesting student productivity resources with you. Not all of the websites and blogs mentioned are specifically targeting students, but on all of them you will find helpful information on various student productivity related subjects. I hope they will be beneficial to you!
In no particular order: Read more

Gain Freedom by Disabling Your Network Connection

Recently I discovered Freedom for Mac OS X. This application disables all wireless and ethernet networking on your computer for up to three hours at a time. When you open the application it asks you ‘how many minutes of freedom’ you would like.

Set the amount, hit ‘OK’ and it you will not be able to use your internet or your wireless network anymore. Afterwards your connections will be re-enabled. You can quit Freedom before the time you set, but this does not get you back on the internet. You will have to restart your computer to for that.

Why would we want to do something like that? Is it so hard to keep yourself focused on your task at hand? Yes, for some people it is! What could be so distracting then? There are more than a few things that can keep you away from what you should be doing. Read more

Close All Those Browser Tabs!

How many browser tabs do you have open right now? Be honest. Are you going to have a look at all those websites today or will you keep the tabs open until you find some time to review them, maybe later this week?

Every morning I open my RSS reader (NewsFire in my case) and the feeds come pouring in. Great! Fresh content! I start hitting my spacebar and scanning the headlines. But then there’s a voice inside my head warning me, “if you’re going to read all these articles, it will take you more than an hour, are you willing to spend so much time this morning just reading what other people have to say? Don’t you have to start working?”. It’s good to have this built in warning system, but then what am I going to do, because I already started hitting that spacebar and reading the news? Read more