academhack

I have been increasingly interested in the way YouTube changes the public sphere. Over at Emerging Media and Communications (website for my department here at UTD) I wrote about a teacher who is exploring these issues in the classroom and at Media Commons I raised the question about how the Youtube Debates might change our [...]

Two weeks ago I mentioned a report titled “The Cost of Copyright and Media Confusion.” One of the papers principle claims is that ignorance of copyright law is damaging education. To help clear up these matters you can read the copyright crash course an excellent primer on things copyright and academe. This resource is [...]

Today I received an email promoting The University of Toronto’s online writing workshop. Less than a workshop this site is really more of a series of guidelines for composing college papers. While not as extensive as Purdue’s Owl (one of the best around), the Toronto site has some useful information, and appreciate the way it [...]

Stanford University has launched a blog directory, a list of students, faculty, alumni, and student groups with blogs. While the list is pretty short (I imagine there are many more Stanford “community members” who blog than this) a couple of things about the list strike me as interesting. First, that it is conceived not just [...]

Let’s say you have a bunch of content on a Blackboard system, and have decided that their copyright policies are bad, or that it is a clunky, inadequate CMS, but you don’t want to leave all your hard work behind. Never fear. The University of North Carolina has come to the rescue with the Blackboard [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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: [...]

The other day when I wrote a post about free software, Charles left in the comment section a link to a list of programs for academics which he wrote. Charles’s list is even better than the aforementioned wiki, and contains references to audio, reference, RSS readers, . . .well the list goes on and on. [...]

Looking for a Word Processor? Zaine Ridling at Donation Coder has written a thorough review, and by thorough I mean over 15,000 words, covering various word processors. Not only does he review major and minor desktop word processors, but he also has a rundown of online ones. With each Word Processor he presents [...]