Thumbstacks.com - Live presentations on the web!

I'm not a fan of Powerpoint-style presentations as education's panacea. I don't, for example, post my own notes or Powerpoint presentations after a lecture because I believe that the act of note-taking is far superior to note-replicating. Simply put, writing something down reinforces memory, and memory allows us to think long and deeply about important matters.

Nonetheless, I use Powerpoint to deliver material when it suits me and when it suits the environment. And in an online course, for example, it suits both well. Thumbstacks provides a web-based Powerpoint-ish presentation format that is easy and quick, with some nifty options for delivery. You can view a sample presentation I made with Thumbstacks here.
Or you can go straight to the thumbstacks homepage to sign up
here.

Tags: thumbstacks, powerpoint, presentations, Blessinger, Hardcore Ambiguity, Tech, Technology, Education, Pedagogy

Wi-Fi to Go: The Hot Spot in a Box - New York Times

Several colleagues and I attended The Collaboration conference last week in Bloomington, Minnesota. One challenge we faced several times was the lack of reliable, free wireless access. The conference, like so many, was held in an attractive, upscale hotel, so internet access came at a price. It makes one wonder if Super 8 might not be a better venue for conferences than the Sheraton, but how often to I get to hobnob with the Quality up on the 20th floor? I mean, nobody ever calls me sir without adding "you're causing a scene."

But I digress. Our wireless woes would have been solved if only one of us had been a cellular intenet subscriber and owned a new Mobile Router (NYT subscription required). My favorite is the Kyocera KR1 (pictured), which seems the least narrowly focused on the corporate crowd.

Tags: wireless, mobile router, router, hot spot, internet, Blessinger, Hardcore Ambiguity, Tech, Technology, Education, Pedagogy

Learning to Share

I've posted a set of text-based instructions for sharing Pushbutton Macros on my university webpage. If you want to standardize departmental or university-wide language in grading writing, or simply give a new teacher a helping hand by sending him or her all your grading macros to use willy-nilly, these instructions tell you how.

-- the doctor is out.

Tags: pushbutton, macros, instructions, Blessinger, Hardcore Ambiguity, Tech, Technology, Education, Pedagogy

Online University Cracks Down On Rowdy Online Fraternity

Really, it was bound to happen, wasn't it? Read the full article here.

Literary Incarnations

One method that always seems to delight my literature students and get them to open up a little more during discussions is projecting a news article that echoes or even mimics some surreal element of our daily reading. For example, if your class is reading Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People", project this US News article while they're completing a reading quiz, or as you segue into a definition of the Southern Gothic, or save it until a student expresses skepticism about the plausibility of such a theft or comments that such things must only happen in the South.

When I recently taught Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," I used both this article from the Cincinnati Enquirer and this article from BBC News.

Finally, and to make this post accidentally chiastic, if I ever assign O'Connor's novella Wise Blood, here's an honest-to-goodness mummified monkey.

The full size original picture is available here.

PBwiki

Mainly because they're doubling space I'll likely never need in exchange for a mention on my blog, but also -- and not insignificantly -- because they're about the simplest wiki out there, I'm stumping for PBwiki.

If you have content to manage or want to foster more collaborative projects among your students or just want a shopping list you and your spouse can access and edit from work, you can learn a little more about the site by visiting their PBwiki tour.

So, yes. I'm a shill.

Protect Word Document Formatting

Occasionally when I send a Word file soliciting markup, I get more help than I ask for; the document comes back with changes to its format. Lockergnome has a handy tutorial detailing how to format-protect your Word document while still allowing for markup and commentary.

*Note: The Lockergnome site is congested with ads. He's got a lot of great content, but you've got some scrolling to do.

Multi-Touch Interaction Research

The scuttlebutt is that Mac is working on a Tablet PC. Aside from looking cooler and costing an extra grand, they're apparently looking at some recently patented technology for touch screens that supports Multi-Touch interaction. The beauty of MTI is that gestures become possible, which the video shows off wonderfully. Also becoming possible is your four-year-old's fingerprints immortilized in what you hope is apple butter, on your $4000 Tablet's touch screen. But it doesn't smell like apple butter. But let's just agree that it was apple butter.

Find Music You'll Love - Pandora

One of our hipster university libararians alerted me to this very impressive music machine named Pandora. Pandora asks you to enter the name of an artist you love, and it creates a personal, streamed radio station based on your favorite artist's profile. Best of all, they don't neglect the obvious: playing lots of music by your favorite artist. You can have many radio stations to suit your mood, or customize one radio station with as many favorite artists as you like.

There's a pay version in the works, but they say the free version will remain, but take on advertsiements at some point. For now, my station rocks.

Artrage 2.0

Ambient Design has released Artrage version 2.0 . I'm very fond of version 1.1; it makes even an amateur like me feel like an artist.

Before you skip this one as just another Windows Paintbrush knockoff, hear me out.

1)You have an astonishing array of paints and brushes.
2) Your brush runs out of paint as you move, creating the appropriate effect of thick paint where you start and near translucence where you finish a stroke.
3)Your colors smear and blend when you lay one color over or against another.
4)Your brushes leave brush-like trails in the paint.
5)You can change paper / canvas textures and load any image as tracing paper.

These are just a few of my favorite options. Oh, and below is a sample of some very bad art by yours truly (some detail was lost in the conversion to jpeg).

InkGestures Download

If you own a Tablet PC and do a lot of editing, I can see that InkGestures would be a great help. Since I do much more mark-up than editing, I'm still imagining uses other than editing my own or collaborative work. I'm all ears, though. Post a suggestion. The software works pretty well, though the delete function takes practice and still misreads my intent sometimes.

Pushbutton Macros

Essay graders of the world take note: I've finally finished my demo video detailing how to create toolbar buttons that activate macros, automating common feedback. I have about thirty buttons on my Word toolbar and each one types feedback for me when I see errors that are made frequently by students. Not only is this trick a great timesaver, it allows me to think through my feedback, insert hyperlinks to resources, and say more than I generally would if I had to start from scratch each time. There are thousands of possibilities.

You can watch the demo video here, and again I tip my hat to Instant-Demo software, the easiest and best demo construction software I've found.

- the doctor is out.

Tags: pushbutton, macros, instructions, how to make, pushbutton macros, Word, automated, grading, Blessinger, Hardcore Ambiguity, Tech, Technology, Education, Pedagogy

Opera Labs

No doubt spurred by Micrsoft's release of the new IE7 Beta, Opera 9 has released their own Beta 2 of their next generation browser, only they call a beta a "Technology Preview 2". I use IE and Firefox, too, but I've preferred Opera for many years. It's less a memory pig than any other browser I've used, and, true to their number one bragging point, they really are the fastest browser around. If you use dial-up, the difference is startling, but even on broadband, you can tell.

The biggest change in this browser is a button-bar launched Bittorrent protocol. If you need to download something big, Opera should be the fastest browser option available.

If you're not into crash testing software for companies, you can download the perfectly functional and very slick Opera 8.5 by clicking the button below.

Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2

IE is the browser everybody loves to hate, but the fact is, when a page doesn't load on one of the alternatives, odds are good it'll load on IE. Microsoft has taken some cues from Opera and Firefox in its latest iteration (the tabbed browsing is more like Opera's; the simplified toolbar has some stylistic flourishes similar to Firefox's "chubby" icons and customizable search field in the upper right.
The built-in RSS manager is a welcome addition, and it manages your feeds much more intelligently than Opera. Microsoft is hard pressed to deliver the kinds of tools Firefox can deliver, such as the "blog this" feature I use all the time, but it does know when to follow the leaders, and I bear them no ill will for doing it. Download the beta here.