academhack

For those who are not on twitter and following the recent meme about changing TOS, you should start by reading this post and the subsequent follow-up.
To be fair to Facebook part of the momentum here is a general sense of angst about who owns what when it is stored in “the cloud” or on “social [...]

The cycle goes something like this: textbook companies make a lot of money selling books to college students, used bookstores cut in on profits by buying and selling these books to students, textbook companies raise prices to recoup profits and publish new editions every year attempting to muscle out the used book market. But, then [...]

DevonTechnologies has just released the beta version of DevonThink 2.0. And yes, this is likely the best thing I will get for the Holidays. Whether this says more about me and my geeky/scholarly loves, or about the people who will give me gifts I leave to you. (Actually my brother and I instituted a ban [...]

If you are not reading Mark Pesce’s blog The Human Network you really should start. But more importantly if you are in education you should carve out some time to read a recent series of posts he has published which all focus on education. Actually I suspect that these are the published versions of a [...]

I received an email yesterday, as I am sure many of you did, from the MLA (actually the email was from Rosemary Feal but I digress) requesting help funding graduate students. What interests me about this email is the direct appeal to “grassroots” funding rather than trying to find big donors. I realize that I [...]

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, that I had no idea about this handy tip from the Google Blog and finding versions of articles which initially appear to be behind a paid subscription database. Now usually I am within the campus network so getting to a paid article database is not a problem. But this [...]

Holding on until election season is over. In the meantime here is a new site to keep you occupied:

lumifi is a online research tool for helping you to search and organize information from the web (sort of like a web based DevonAgent, DevonThink). You can watch the introductory video here.

HASTAC’s digital media and learning competition is now open. This year the competition is focused on participatory learning, with grants of up to $250,000. Of particular interest though is the young innovator awards (with grants of up to $30,000) focused on getting young scholars age 18-25 to propose what comes next.

Quick note to say that for those who are Mac users and looking for a Word Processor that doesn’t suck (yes MS Word I am talking about you), Maczot is selling Mellel at a discounted price. Mellel is by far my favorite word processor, a program designed specifically for the ways academics write. Normally $35 [...]

I realize I am a Devon Think groupie, but the news that a new version is in the work for this year has me anxiously awaiting the release. In my opinion it is the best, “brain in a box” software out there. My largest complaint with Devon is the interface (it is rather dated an [...]