academhack

If you are new to the world of Web 2.0 and are looking for a good introduction you might want to check out Mark Marino’s talk. Mark recently did a presentation at USC which covered a range of internet tools that one might consider for teaching and research. The link is to his write up [...]

Please on behalf of those who will listen to you, stop using PowerPoint, or at least stop using PowerPoint the way that it is commonly used.

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I just got back from a conference in Portland (Maine not Oregon). Honestly one of the more interesting/produtive academic conferences I have attended (the annual SLSA conference for those who are interested). While the quality of the presentations were high, it struck me that many a presenter could have benefited from a little free application [...]

I have blogged here before about how I design a presentation, or why I think Power Point is a bad idea. But, now for the more scientifically minded 43 Folders has a post (and useful discussion) about improving academic presentations. The general thrust of the post is towards how to present data, and information, but [...]

I posted on the EMAC blog (Emerging Media and Communications here at UTD) about a class on YouTube, and now it seems that YouTube is taking an ever more academic turn. As I learned from Open Culture, Berkley and USC both have dedicated YouTube channels. Right now there offerings are sparse but they do cover [...]

Over the past couple of years Google has been working hard to chip away at the empire of Microsoft, particularly by creating online alternatives to Microsoft Word. Googledocs, and Googlespreadsheets offer good alternatives to Microsoft, with several advantages: primarily cost (Google is free), but also you can edit your files from any computer, and have [...]

I was wondering when something like this was going to become available: an online white-board. You can sign up for a free account, send people the url and anyone with access to a web browser can watch as you update the space. Think of it as the web’s virtual chalkboard. The interface [...]

Last week Dan Cohen had this to say about textual visualization. Basically Dan argues that textual visualization often gives you the obvious answers, and hides more nuanced analysis, like saying War and Peace is about Russia, or the Bible is about Jesus. Indeed if you run textual analysis on the New Testament, Jesus [...]

Weblogged points to this site which mobilizes Google Earth to track places in relation to literary works. Want to show your students the places in the Odyssey? Use this. (They have more than just the Odyssey, but I always had trouble keeping track of those place names so this seems like the most useful [...]

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 [...]