Readability

As we browse the internet, often pages come up that are cluttered with advertisements, links, and other unnecessary items.  This can make it difficult and distracting to read the content you wanted in the first place.

This is where Readability comes in.  Readability is a web site that will let you easily strip down the information on any web page to just show the basic content.  You first choose the options you prefer: style, size, and margin.  It then creates a custom bookmarklet that you can easily add to your bookmarks or bookmarks toolbar.  Once the bookmarklet has been installed, just click it on any web page.  It will get rid of the clutter and allow easier reading.  Those with poor eye sight can also use this tool to enlarge the displayed text.

It’s free of charge so I recommend checking it out!

Photoshop CS5 Preview: Content-Aware Fill

From the official Adobe Photoshop YouTube Channel:

One of the biggest requests we get of Photoshop is to make adding, removing, moving or repairing items faster and more seamless. From retouching to completely reimagining an image, heres an early glimpse of what could happen in the future when you press the delete key. How might you use this new capability in your workflow?

I’m a Mac…Workshop

Recently converted to Mac or thinking about doing so? Been using a Mac for a long time but aren’t sure you’re using the operating system to its fullest? This discussion-driven, question-and-answer session may be just the thing for you. We’ll cover some Mac-specific basics, show you shortcuts and neat tricks and answer any questions you have about using a Macintosh computer.

The workshop is Friday, March 19 from 10am-11:30 in the LRC Mac Classroom.  Click here to register!

Twitter in the Classroom?

To further the conversation on social tools like Twitter and their involvement in academia, here is an interesting little article from Mashable.com that details how a couple of courses at the University of Texas at Dallas and Purdue University have incorporated Twitter as a means of interacting with students despite the large enrollment numbers.  While audience response systems are very effective for receiving feedback from students on what they may or may not know, they generally lack the ability for participants to submit questions of their own, and often students are too nervous to raise their hand and ask.

What I found most interesting about this article was the following blurb:

The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class,” [David Parry, Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texa] wrote. “Once students started Twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half.” As a result, classroom conversation became more productive as “people were more willing to talk, and [be] more respectful of others.”

I think that being able to engage students about a particular subject long after they’ve left the classroom is extremely important and often very difficult to do and that, combined with the increased sense of community that is developed, makes this particular approach worth considering.

Read the full article here on Mashable.