academhack

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 [...]

Somebody recently accused me of being too technological. I am not actually sure how this is possible, since my dissertation is about how we are always technological. . . like the school someone was telling me about recently that was having an “anti-technology meeting.” Seriously? Are they going to ban paper and pencils? Those are [...]

I was talking to a couple of professors yesterday who were teaching online classes this summer in a pilot program. To say the least, they were having a great deal of trouble using the technology. Now I didn’t look at it a long time, but it struck me how clunky, un-userfriendly, and awkward [...]

My favorite post of the week goes to William at Digital History Hacks:
Luddism is a Luxury You Can’t Afford

This photo makes me happy. Good things can get done in the world.

Seriously which Negroponte would you rather have over for dinner, the one responsible for the One Laptop per Child, or this one?
Via Weblogg-ed.
See an article about the launch on CNET.
Update: Thanks Drew, I fixed the link.

Which school do you think is better preparing its students to be educated readers of media, this one or this one?

This has to be the worst proposed academic legislation ever. I am not kidding either . . .

Dan Cohen (of Zotero and Digital History fame) writes on his blog about the increasing privatization of the public archive. I ordered on Interlibrary Loan Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, a book about the issues related to letting google have control over digitizing the archive. But, a bigger concern to me, [...]