Wednesday, October 10, 2007

AcademHack Inteview: Part I

Just last week I listed David Parry’s site AcademHack as the blog of the week.  In my experience, it is the best blog/site for academics interested in using tech in the classroom.  For someone like me, with limited tech skills, David’s site makes the gear and software more understandable and accessible.  As a new tenure tracker in Texas, David is swamped with work.  Fortunately for us, he agreed to an interview about useful classroom and professional applications for technology. 

What is the most useful Web 2.0 application in your academic toolbox? How do you use it?

By far the most important tool that I use for teaching are blogs; I use the term in the plural here because I am always using several at once (usually one per class, plus my own).  Blogs are the ideal platform for sharing information with students.  When I first started putting class material on the web for students to use I had to write and update my own website “by hand” (that is without a blog).  This was okay, as I learned a great deal about how web pages are made and designed (and learned how to write CSS and XHTML—the languages that creates web pages), but ultimately it was not very efficient.  The learning curve for this type of communication can …

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