A rather mundane question I have for you. . . have you encountered something that could help make the reading process easier for digital documents? Something akin to dragging a colored index card along a page quickly as you read? I am a very fast reader with paper, but find my eyes wandering when looking at a screen. . . . My admittedly uninspired work-around is creating a word document, restoring down the screen, and using the little blue header to pull down on top of the digital document as I read. . . but a better solution would be just a colored floating bar that you could pull from your desktop and use as you are reading.

Anyone know of something that would work? Mac and/or PC?

No, that is not a screen shot of Keynote, it is from an online slide creation tool called 280Slides. The interface though is so similar to Keynote that one might accuse them of just ripping off Keynote, stripping it down and turning it into a web application. Indeed in reading thru the few blog posts it seems that the developers have a Mac bend. Given my preference for Keynote over PowerPoint (“Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely“) one might guess that I like the interface of 280Slides. Like Keynote it is designed more towards a visual presentation and less towards putting text on slides.

280Slides is relatively easy to use, and comes with the advantage of other web applications, i.e. working from any computer, accessing your presentation from any browser, not worrying about file compatibility, etc. And, while I might prefer 280Slides to something like Google Presentation, this still finishes a distant second to SlideRocket (which I reviewed here).

Unfortunately LaTeX is rather complicated for the uninitiated. Fortunately though Arjun Muralidharan at The Productive Student has written a post about how he uses LaTeX as a Word Processor. As Arjun points out there are many advantages to using something like LaTeX, where content is separate from form, allowing you to concentrate on the text, leaving the format for an afterthought. Equally as important, is the way that LaTeX allows easy import of bibliographic data.

So, if you are interested in this type of word processing check out Arjun’s point, and perhaps this free users manual.

• I frequently make the argument that blogs are one of the most useful “tech tools” in education. In fact I now run a class blog for each of my classes, which becomes the primary means thru which students can access course information (cutting out WebCT and Blackboard all together). Even more importantly though in several of my classes I require students to blog as part of the coursework. So, I am always looking for ways to make the blog composing/maintaining process easier and smoother. Lifehacker’s recent post on the Top 10 Blogging Tools is worth a read, even for the most experienced bloggers. As usual, reading the comments to a Lifehacker post can be just as productive as reading the actual post (this is where I learned about Windows Life Writer which looks impressive for PC folks). Most of the tips here are for those who use Firefox and/or blog from their web browser, so not the most useful for those who use MarsEdit or Ecto, but well worth the read for those who don’t want to spend money on software for blogging.
• Powerset which has been in private Beta, recently went public. (Read the CNET article here). Powerset is one of the first stabs at creating a semantic web search (i.e. using natural English). You can watch the video demo to see how this works. Right now it only works as an interface for Wikipedia, but for me this is what makes it really interesting. One of the shortcomings of Wikipedia has been the interface, layout, and search function, Powerset improves all of this.
• Following up on last weeks post about online presentation software, Omnisio has also launched. Omnisio solves one of the problems with making your presentation available online. Before you had to either sink your audio to the slides, and not show yourself talking, or show the video of your presentation at the expense of not always being able to see the slides. No longer. Omnisio allows you to synchronize the video with the slides and show both.
• A reader sent me a link to jygy a mobile social networking site. Despite my interest in twitter mobile computing is not really my thing, so I have not really checked it out, but it does let you create texting “micro apps” which might be useful for teachers mobilizing the mobile space.
• The above not withstanding I do own an iPhone, which I might add is totally worth it, changed my life. As of now I have not yet jailbroken it (in other words I can’t install applications on it). For me though, the “killer app” so far has been anywhere access to Wikipedia (instant knowledge). I was using Wapedia for this, but have recently switched to Comoki which rather than splitting the information into several pages (like Wapedia) presents it in a collapsable outline (see below).

• Keeping Citations Straight: Inside Higher Ed covers one of (if not the best) online citation meets social bookmarking website.
• Quicksilver for PCs: The most important application on my computer is Quicksilver. More than any other application it saves me time, and makes working at a computer far more pleasant. When I sit down at a Mac without Quicksilver I feel lost. Until recently nothing on the PC came close to mirroring its effects. This lifehacker post covers the now emerging PC versions of Quicksilver. (But I am still not switching . . . I love my Mac . . . in a wholesome way).
• Revisioning Students Today: This video response to Wesch’s popular video on Writer Response Theory is a thoughtful and timely provocation, especially for those of us who teach Digital Literacy and Digital Rhetoric.

• 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 being interviewed on camera. Moby, Kurt Anderson, Jimmy Wales, Steven Pinker . . .This is probably a good resource to use as a discussion starter for your classes.
• I talk a great deal here about file formats (never send me a .doc). One of the frequent questions people have, particularly those on a PC, is how to manipulate a .pdf. Tinkernut has a fabulous, short, screen tutorial on manipulating pdfs. The tools he recommends are all PC based, but you can do similar things with a Mac.
• A couple of days ago Lifehacker ran a post on obscure Google tricks. There is a lot of hidden functionality built into Google of which even heavy internet users are often not aware. For example, converting currency for those overseas academic ventures, or using it to ID foreign words.
• Howard Rheingold of Smart Mobs fame, is teaching a course on social media. As part of the class he has collected an extensive list of RSS resources.
• Finally, for those in history, the Center for New Media and History out of George Mason University has launched a new project: Echo. Echo is an online directory for the collection of information on the history of science and technology.
]]> http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/a-list-of-interest/feed/ 0 http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/more-rss-goodness/ http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/more-rss-goodness/#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:59:30 +0000 dave http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/more-rss-goodness/ 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 with Bedford/St. Martin’s Adjunct Central on using RSS feeds in academia. It is mainly focused on organization and reading habits, but gives a more practical account of how I use RSS than I have ever covered at this blog.

]]> http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/more-rss-goodness/feed/ 0 http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2007/how-to-zotero/ http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2007/how-to-zotero/#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:47:10 +0000 dave http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/?p=201 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 has written and in depth review of Zotero for Inside Higher Ed. I won’t repeat what Scott has written, but rather tell you why you should go read it: Scott is not a “tech” person. That is, Scott gives a review from the perspective of someone who is not immersed in tech, and his conclusion: “Zotero does for research what word processing did for writing.” Scott’s article not only gives his impression of the software, but also highlights the places to go to learn how to use it. And my advice for those who don’t use a citation manager: start . . .it will save you lots of time.
]]> http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2007/how-to-zotero/feed/ 7 http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2007/working-with-pdfs/ http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2007/working-with-pdfs/#comments Mon, 23 Jul 2007 02:57:27 +0000 dave http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/?p=194 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: This one is easy. Any journal article etc. that I download as a PDF for future use I send straight to Devon Think. There are of course other choices, like Yojimbo and Yep. (Yep seems to be a good alternative to the brain in a box programs like Devon and Yojimbo, as it is simply meant to organize documents—worth a try if you are not already using one of the other applications.) (Sorry these are Mac only)

Manipulating PDFs: Many times I get a PDF that I want to split, or the reverse two separate ones that I want to combine into one. You can also use this to chop up a longer pdf and just save the small part that you want (like just one journal article as opposed to the whole thing.) My program of choice for this is PDFLab. PDFLab can be buggy, I have had it crash while I was working with it, but it is more powerful than a few of the other similar programs (I have never had it loose or “eat” a file, just had to restart the program.) If you don’t like PDFLab you can always give Combine PDFs. These are both Mac only applications, but if you need a PC version try PDF Split and Merge. Also you can use Foxit Page Organizer this is a more advanced version of their free Windows software program—Foxit Reader.

Converting to PDF: If you have a file you need to convert from another format to a PDF this can also be done relatively easy (say you have a Word document you need to be a PDF). If you have a Mac all you need to do is open the file and select Print. Now rather than hitting return to print the document select the button in the bottom left of the pop-up window called “PDF” and select “Save as PDF.” But what if you have a PC or a file your Mac cannot open and want to convert it to a pdf. No worries there are online tools which will convert most file formats into a pdf. I have use PDF Online although there are several others (as a side note this is also a good way to handle a microsoft windows document which you cannot open (say you don’t own microsoft, or have an olde version and someone sends you a new file). This is a good resource to show students so they can always send you their assignments in the proper format.

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