Tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

Category Archives: Reviews

The Ethics of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

March 1, 2010 in Products, Reviews by George H. Williams

Last week, I described my experiences using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to transcribe audio recordings of oral histories I’ve collected. This week, I consider whether “Turkers,” as they’re sometimes called, are being exploited.

The Reliability, Efficiency, and Affordability of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

February 22, 2010 in Products, Reviews by George H. Williams

Recently I had reason to get some audio transcribed using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service. The results have been impressive, and in this post I describe my experience and consider other possible applications

Review of Organizing for the Creative Person

December 18, 2009 in Reviews by Nels P. Highberg

If traditional organizational books don’t ring true for you, I recommend Organizing for the Creative Person. It might show you a way of doing things that completely counters what works for others but that can revolutionize your sense of the world like it did mine.

In praise of ScreenSteps: a brief encomium based on limited experience

October 15, 2009 in Products, Reviews by George H. Williams

It’s pretty tedious to create online tutorials by first taking screenshots and then carefully pasting by hand the necessary tags for that particular image into the HTML of a tutorial. But that’s pretty much been the way I’ve always authored such tutorials. Holy moley is the affordably-priced ScreenSteps much, much easier!

Challenging the Presentation Paradigm: Bee Docs Timeline

August 27, 2009 in Pedagogy, ProfHacker 101, Reviews by Ethan Watrall

A couple of weeks ago, Prof. Hacker kicked off a series called “Challenging the Presentation Paradigm” with a look at Prezi. This week, we’re going to look at Bee Docs Timeline as an alternative (or a supplement) to presenting lecture content with a more traditional, linear slide program (such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote).

CloudBerry Online Backup desktop interface

Prof. Hacker Reviews: CloudBerry Online Backup

August 19, 2009 in Reviews by Julie Meloni

Previously on Prof. Hacker, Jason wrote “Backup for Back-to-School: 15% off Backblaze,” a post that offered some good points on backing up your data in the cloud as well as a service (and a current discount offer) to do so. As he noted, Backblaze is not the only backup service out there, and that’s true—there [...]

The Prezi menu/UI toolbox can be a little counter-intuitive

Challenging the Presentation Paradigm: Prezi

August 19, 2009 in Pedagogy, ProfHacker 101, Reviews by Ethan Watrall

With the semester creeping closer and closer and many of us frantically prepping new classes (or doing vital updates to existing classes), the topic of lecture slides invariably crops up.  Are my slides really that useful to my students, or are they just a crutch for me? Should I use my old slides (with necessary [...]

Five useful books for (new) faculty

August 3, 2009 in Pedagogy, Productivity, Reviews by Jason B. Jones

August is here, which means the start of the fall semester can’t be far away.  Whether you are starting a new job (someone must have one, right?), starting to think about tenure, or just looking to find a fresh way through the year, these books can help:

Donald Hall, The Academic Self: [...]