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It’s about how you use the technology. I recently read author and commercial pilot Patrick Smith’s book, Cockpit Confidential. His pet peeve: When people say “Planes can practically fly themselves.” He assures us that they cannot. He notes that the claim that technology is all that and a bag of chips is not unique to aviation. Smith quotes author and surgeon Atul Gawande from a New Yorker essay, “Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology… But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well peopleRead More →

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My favorite email reminder service, FollowUp.cc (see this blog post), has just added a new tool to their arsenal. For those not familiar with the service, you send an email to, say, Tuesday@followup.cc, and Tuesday morning, you will receive that email. Jan12@followup.cc would return that email to you on January 12th. This is my “tickler” file. Anything I want to follow up on later gets sent to FollowUp.cc. I use this, for example, to remind me of conference registration deadlines. If early bird registration ends on October 30th, I’ll send a FollowUp email to Oct20@followup.cc with the body of the email containing the link toRead More →

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With evolving modes of communication comes evolving means of citation. Tweet2Cite is a handy tool. Enter the URL for a tweet, and get the citation, in MLA or APA style. Getting a URL for a tweet This took a little effort to figure out. It’s not obvious. In Twitter, under the tweet you would like to cite, click “Expand.” Directly under the blue-fonted options, the time and date the tweet was sent will appear. To the right of that, click on “Details.” This will open the tweet on its own webpage. Copy the URL from the browser’s address bar. [Keyboard shortcut: CTRL+L will move yourRead More →

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You like to show the occasional video in your class. Your favorite ones are online. And sometimes, just often enough, your classroom loses its internet connection. Or maybe one too many of your favorite videos have suddenly disappeared from the internet. To be on the safe side, you want to download the video to your own computer or flash drive so you can show it without needing internet access. KeepVid is the tool for you. Visit the website, enter the web address for the video, and click “Download.” When this service runs, your browser will warn you that you may be doing something dangerous. AssureRead More →

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The VLC Media Player is arguably the best video player out there. All the cool kids use it. And it’s free. It’s cross-platform. That means that whatever you’re running, e.g., Windows, Mac, Linus, Android, iOS, VLC Media Player will play. While this media player has many more features than the average user will ever need, it has a few that are especially noteworthy. Custom bookmarks On the playback menu, you can add custom bookmarks to your video file. If you’re a keyboard shortcuts sort of person, CTRL+B. The “Edit Bookmarks” window will open. Go to the spot in the video you want to bookmark, andRead More →

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CloudConvert “supports the conversion between more than 100 different audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet and presentation formats.” Navigate through your folder system to the file you want to covert. Click once on the file’s icon and drag it onto the CloudConvert webpage. Or if your file lives in Dropbox or Google Drive, click the “Select files” button to find the file you want to convert. When you click “Select format” CloudConvert detects what kind of file it is to determine your options for what kind of file you can convert it to. Here I uploaded a docx file, so CloudConvert has given meRead More →

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“So find something new to try, something to change. Count how often you succeed and how often you fail. Write about it. Ask people what they think. See if you can keep the conversation going.” This is the final paragraph in Atul Gawande’s 2007 book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. While his advice is directed at newly-minted physicians, it’s more broadly applicable. In our case, let’s talk higher education. 1. “Find something new to try, something to change.” You’re reading this blog. That puts you solidly in the camp of people who are interested in trying new things. Not all new things are better,Read More →

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It’s time to clean up the graphics you use in your presentations or on your website/course management system. Remove the content you don’t want; only keep what you do want. Clipping Magic makes it about as easy as you can imagine for removing content, say, the background, from photos. Drag and drop the photo you want to edit. Mark green for what you want to keep. Mark red for what you want deleted. Zoom in or use a smaller brush size to get in the corners. You can change the background. I’ve chosen transparent for my example, but you can choose from a small paletteRead More →

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So now you’re using an RSS feed reader, such as Feedly, to keep up with what’s new, right? (If not, see this blog post.) SubToMe is a browser tool that will make subscribing to new feeds a breeze. With a few mouse clicks, you can start getting content sent to you from your new source. On the SubToMe webpage, click on “Settings”. There are two ways you can use SubToMe to subscribe to a new feed. 1.) Drag the “Subscribe” button to your browser’s bookmark bar. Any time you want to start getting content from a site you’re visiting, click the button in your bookmarkRead More →

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I have been a LastPass advocate for some time, however I’ve been remiss in not dedicating an entire blog post to it. It’s time to remedy that. I have usernames and passwords to over 400 websites. Each of those passwords should be complex and unique. How often do you reuse your passwords? LastPass is a password manager – and a vault for saving other kinds of data, like credit card information. Use it for free, or pay them $12 a year for the mobile app; if you have a smartphone, it’s well worth the price. By letting LastPass manage your passwords, you can get ridRead More →