academhack

It seems that more and more I find myself wanting to manipulate/work with PDFs. I generally only accept work from students that is in PDF or RTF form, many of the articles I download are formatted as PDFs, even many users manuals are PDFs. So here are some tips/tools for managing PDFs:
Organizing PDFs: [...]

The other day when I wrote a post about free software, Charles left in the comment section a link to a list of programs for academics which he wrote. Charles’s list is even better than the aforementioned wiki, and contains references to audio, reference, RSS readers, . . .well the list goes on and on. [...]

Looking for a Word Processor? Zaine Ridling at Donation Coder has written a thorough review, and by thorough I mean over 15,000 words, covering various word processors. Not only does he review major and minor desktop word processors, but he also has a rundown of online ones. With each Word Processor he presents [...]

Free Software: Everyone loves Free Software. This site is a wiki which lists various sources of free software that might be of use to those in Academia. The list is not vary extensive right now, but hey its a wiki, so you can just add to it. It does cover the major ones [...]

The Read Write Web, one of those top quality blogs, has a rundown on Web Applications for Students. This list is long, thorough, and sorted well. The article goes thru replacements for office, notetaking apps, mindmapping apps, useful sites for studying, and so much more. And, the best part the article starts [...]

I finished reading David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous a couple of weeks ago. Not an amazing book, but worth the time. His thesis is pretty straight forward, but he does have many examples and cases to back up his analysis, many of which are outside of my field of knowledge so they were interesting [...]

Supposing you have time, here are some things of note.
Find a tutor: Lifehacker post on a service that helps you find a tutor, or if you are a tutor find a student. As of now the service only works Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Just as instructive though is the discussion about the [...]

I was talking with a faculty member the other day who was complaining about being sent a .pdf, as he was unable to “edit” it in any way, he wanted the more friendly Microsoft Word document. (If you don’t know what a .pdf is click here, most of the “professional” documents you get are in [...]

Two things worth checking out this morning over your coffee, or depending what time you read this your lunch:

Jen covers her use of Easy Grade. Me, I have never had a class where I was keeping track of this many assignments, so investing the time to try out a grading program seemed a bit on [...]

Okay, finally, without too much further ado, and two plane rides of writing later, I am going to outline all the steps I go through to “build” a presentation. Let me say a few things up front though. First, this again is not an expert thing, this is simply what I have developed [...]