academhack

• My favorite academic article last week appeared in The Chronicle, a defense of academic blogging.
• The more complicated questions I get, that I usually cannot answer, revolve around copyright. Now I happen to be lucky and have an older brother who works in intellectual property law, so I can seek advice from him. But, for those who don’t have such a family member, or who cannot wade through a longish phone conversation of legal speak that often ends in an ambiguous answer I recommend the Center for Social Media’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Media Literacy. The Center has released a full length report (20 pages) which you can download along with a short introductory video (5 minutes).
• And, to put your new found sense of copyright freedom to good use, watch this video at Tinkernut, which explains five different ways to get more out of YouTube. All of them are useful, but the two which are perhaps most relevant for education are playing videos in high quality, and cropping videos (so you can point the students to the important parts).

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, that I had no idea about this handy tip from the Google Blog and finding versions of articles which initially appear to be behind a paid subscription database. Now usually I am within the campus network so getting to a paid article database is not a problem. But this is clearly faster and useful for those who do not have access to the resources of a large university. (via Lifehacker)

Now that the election is over, and my digital politics class will require less time, hopefully I can return to blogging here more. So to start here is a list of things I have been collecting over the last few weeks that just got placed in the “to blog about” pile. (Incidentally, if the local news here covered my digital politics class, so if you would like to see the short piece on them you can view the video on the news stations website.)

• First up is an article by Michael Wesch, A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do). The article appears on the Britannica Blog, an institution I do not always associate with progressively thinking about how technology changes knowledge production. Nevertheless Wesch’s piece is worth a read for he navigates the precarious but important middle ground between being a luddite and being techno-utopian, instead claiming that there is nothing new about the notion of playing the “getting by game,” even if the means by which this game is played is different. Ultimately he suggests a rather simple solution: Public Academia.
• Group Table: Group Table is another web application in the list of online collaboration/group organization tools. While there are many out there, most people I know prefer Bassecamp and Backpack, Group Table is focused on specifically serving the student population.
• Open Huddle: When I was searching for free online tools for hosting my virtual grad class, I looked into many (way too many) options. (I just needed chat function, so in the end ended up using a chat program but I digress.) But, Open Huddle was one of the better ones people sent me. Unlike Group Table (above) which is focused on organizing the group, Open Huddle’s purpose is to provide a set of tools for collaborating in real time. Open Huddle has video chat and a drawing board (think virtual white board) as well as allowing messaging and file sharing. My guess is in the future we will see a lot more of these types of sites for robust online learning and collaboration.
• Last but not least, watch Antonio’s presentation on using YouTube as a Classroom Resource.

For those looking for a job in Digital Humanities, this list might be useful. (Thanks to Gregory for sending it.) And, we are also hiring here at UTD (my institution).

I like many of you perhaps, hate taking stupid online quizzes. But when you can take a not so stupid one, and help out fellow researchers it is worth a few moments of your time. I can say I took the few moments it took to take this quiz and I do not at all feel as if I want a refund on my time. I can’t say much more without spoiling it, as it is a research project, save to say the questions are about a series of moral dilemmas.

Eric Schwitzgebel (a philosopher at U.C. Riverside) and Fiery Cushman (a psychologist at Harvard) have designed a “Moral Sense Test” that asks respondents for their takes on various moral dilemmas. They’re looking to compare the responses of philosophers and non-philosophers, so they’ve asked me to post a link to their test from this blog. They say that people who have taken other versions of this test have found it interesting to ponder the moral dilemmas they ask about. The test should take about 15-20 minutes and can be found at
http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/eric1/test/testN.html

A reader is looking for a software application to help her read digital documents, any suggestions on something which can do the following:

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?

Holding on until election season is over. In the meantime here is a new site to keep you occupied:

• lumifi is a online research tool for helping you to search and organize information from the web (sort of like a web based DevonAgent, DevonThink). You can watch the introductory video here.

The start of a semester, plus the height of a political season has severly trimmed down my academic-tech blogging, but, I couldn’t let the following announcement go unnoticed. Profcast is now available for Windows. Profcast is simply one of the best ways to record lectures and presentations and make them available for students and audiences outside of your classroom.

File this under bad pedagogy and irony, a bit like teaching a statistics class but not letting the students use any numbers.

The future of the book?