academhack

One of the things I am trying for the second time this semester, is assigning wiki contributions as part of my class. I tried this last semester with mixed results. I created a wiki and suggested topics for students to contribute on, and had the class work on it as a whole, with the expectation [...]

I must admit that when I first heard about Twitter I thought it represented the apex of what concerns me about internet technology: solipsism and sound-bite communication. While I obviously spend a great deal of time online and thinking about the potential of these new networked digital communication structures, I also worry about the way [...]

I am currently working on a longish post about using Twitter in academia, but in the meantime I have collected some useful links to peruse.

First up Big Think. Think of YouTube for ideas. The polish on this site is nice, and it seems to be off to a good start with some rather substantial names [...]

First, an exciting piece of news for all of those who like free stuff and RSS: NetNewsWire (high-powered RSS client for Mac) and FeedDemon (a PC version) are now free. That’s right free as in free beer, which is doubly good because RSS helps you get free speech as well.
Second, I recently did an interview [...]

I have spent some time (actually too much time) over the last three-four weeks figuring out all the details to my syllabi for this coming semester. I will be teaching two courses which I have not taught before (one grad, one undergrad) although the topics are similar, meaning that I didn’t have to design two [...]

One of the more frequent questions I get asked as an academic is what program do you use to manage all the information/articles you come across. In fact, even academics with more luddite tendencies want a program to manage all of the journal articles or papers that are stored on their computers. For me I [...]