Academic Computing & Technology

"With Academic Commons, we seek to form a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals who will help create a comprehensive web resource focused on liberal arts education. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. If successful, this site will advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources."

For those who still have an old "beige" computer that is no longer the clean color it once was, this is for you.

Many of those old computers were treated with flame retardant and with exposure to UV light, changed the color to that wonderful yellow that we see today. Well, a group of chemists, plastics engineers, and few Amiga fans have created a open-source "Oxy" cleaner for those yellow computers.

You can find out more at http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/

"Welcome to Academhack.org. The goal of this site is to serve as a resource for academics trying to navigate the world of computing and technology. There are many sites that do a good job of exploring and theorizing how the growing digital presence is changing the world of academia, and there are also a host of sites that catalog ways to use technology effective, there certainly seems to be a lack of sites dedicated to bridging this gap. That is, outlining the more concrete ways technology and computers can be used to improve both teaching (how to get beyond the use of Power Point) and scholarship (did you know there are more effective, cheaper, alternatives to MS Word-how does a $30 word processor designed by academics sound?). To that end, this blog is going to try to chronicle how I use technology in an effort to teach and write more effectively."

Recently, at the ConnectED summit, someone at Northwest College of Agriculture captured a demonstration of the upcoming Blackboard application for iPhone and iPod touch. The Blackboard rep explains the application will allow you to connect to your schools Blackboard server and get important information from your account and will not save your password on the device, but uses a single sign-on token. Also, the representative mentions the application will be free when it launches. Northwest College Agriculture also has a sharper photo of the layout on their Flickr page.

To watch YouTube videos without the comments and crap, just drag the button below to your browser's bookmarks bar. On any YouTube page, click the bookmark button to watch in peace.

This from Lifehacker:

Photovisi Creates Advanced Collages
By Jason Fitzpatrick, 4:00 PM on Sat Mar 21 2009, 12,082 views

Photovisi is a surprisingly sophisticated collage maker with an assortment of options for tweaking your collage to your liking.

Photovisi has eighteen collage templates for groupings of pictures ranging from only a couple up to 30 pictures. Once you select the pictures you can shuffle their order and crop them. On templates where there is some order to the photos, like a ring around primary photo as seen in the screenshot here, Photovisi lets you select which one will be the focus. You can bulk upload images from your computer or pull photos from Flickr.

Photovisi

This in from CNet Download.com

There are several well-regarded, free ways to take advantage of the Print function to transform just about any file to a PDF. PrimoPDF and doPDF sit at the top of the list, but what about reverse engineering that conversion? Converting in the other direction, from a PDF to a Microsoft Word-compatible format like DOC or RTF is trickier.

For one thing, there's a lot of crap out there. Many PDF-to-DOC converters have similar or even identical names, differentiated sometimes by nothing more than a cunning tap of the space bar. Many offer features that are hamstrung in various ways unless you pay for an upgrade, and just about all of them offer imperfect conversions. Even with these problems, though, you can get a reasonable conversion from the four programs and three Web-based services listed below...

See the list here.

A Closer Look at YouTube EDU

On Thursday, we announced the launch of YouTube EDU. Now, as promised, it???s time to give you some more details about the new university video hub.

I had a chance to chat with Obadiah Greenberg, a key Googler behind the launch. And he gave me some insight into the genesis of the project. As you can imagine, YouTube EDU wasn???t built overnight. It took about a year to move from concept to launch. The work was driven along by a team of five, and they did it using Google???s famous 20% time policy. That is, they each committed essentially one day per week to bringing this project to fruition...

Read the entire post at Open Culture

Audio file from NPR's Futuretense