academhack

Just yesterday I was talking with a fellow academic, who frustrated by Endnotes was wondering what other options exist for managing references. My no think response was Zotero. Which caused me to think about doing another plug for Zotero here on Academhack, but fortunately for me, another scholar has already done this work. Scott McLemee [...]

SmileonmyMac is offering back to school discounts for educators and students. Normally I wouldn’t mention a software companies sale offers here, but SmileonmyMac has two programs that are useful for academics. The first is Textexpander one of my favorites, and the other is PDFPen which some educators use to grade papers. If you are an [...]

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: [...]

Increasingly I find students success, and ability to be media literate, is tied to their ability to use the internet. The problem with this is that reading through a browser posses a different set of problems then reading in print. I imagine something like this occurred in the technological change from scrolls to [...]

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 [...]

I am working on a couple of longer things for the near future (tools for syllabus, some Devon notes, and writing a dissertation), but in the short span here are some useful links from around the web.
Two links on the Apple Mailing list. The first is a short review of information management software. The [...]

I received the following email from an Academhack reader.
Here’s my situation: I work in education policy, which means I spend a lot of time reading long-ish reports and writing syntheses, papers, policy briefings, etc. What I often find is that Report A will contain potentially useful info about a variety of topics (we’ll call those [...]

As much as I love Mellel I never thought I would say this, but, I have started using another Word Processing program. Never fear Mellel faithful, I have not abandoned Mellel, I have just added another tool to my word processing repitoire.
Meta-Explanation(feel free to skip if you want)
I have been thinking a lot lately [...]

As if the .doc problem wasn’t bad enough, now we have to worry about .docx.
So as many are probably aware, Microsoft released its new operating system, and along with that release comes an updated version of Microsoft Office. The problem here is that the new Microsoft Office saves files in a different format than [...]