academhack

An editorial I wrote for Science Progress regarding digital literacy, education, and Wikipedia is now available. As those who read this blog are probably already aware I find the whole “ban Wikipedia” movement humorous. But, this article takes a slightly different track and claims banning it is actually irresponsible.

Those who have been reading this blog know that I like to poke fun at the anti-technology position. Seems to me that pen and paper are also a technology, so pining for a past when humans were free of machines and technology seems a bit ridiculous to me. Enter Lee Siegel’s new book Against the [...]

I am working on a follow up post to my recent scribe on using Twitter in Academia (for whatever reason this garnered a great deal of interest and I have received many questions which I am trying to address in one long post). At any rate in the meantime here are some places around the [...]

Hopefully more academics are willing to join Nick.
I was also thinking that those of us who are academics dealing with digital media have the chance now to determine whether we’re going to become one of those public-irrelevant fields where anti-publication is the norm and we speak only to ourselves, or whether we want to speak [...]

The short version: Yale now offers a range of course materials online free to the public. While currently the number of courses is rather limited, the scope of materials for each class is substantial and more thorough than current alternatives. The Yale Online Initiative isn’t perfect, but it is a huge step in the right [...]

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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Apparently many people (and by people I mean ill-informed academics) still think Wikipedia is a horrible, awful, very bad, terrible, no-good thing. The Warren Hills Regional School District has decided to block access to Wikipedia from school computers. Kairosnews asks the crucial question: Isn’t the problem poor teaching not Wikipedia? For a more engaged analysis [...]

I think one of the most brutal experiences I have had is being on the academic job market. Another faculty I know equated it with being audited by the IRS for 18 months straight . . . which I think pretty much captures the mental anguish involved. If you are going on the job market, [...]

According to the Harvard Crimson newspaper, students are being prohibited by the bookstore from copying down textbook information. Why would a bookstore want to prevent this? Because students then use this information to purchase the books for cheaper online. Sounds like good business/financial smarts to me?
Seriously the textbook market is such a racket of copyright/intellectual [...]

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 [...]