Who Can Help Mildred Get Her Prezi On?

Can anyone else figure out how the frack to use Prezi? Occasionally I poke at it a bit, and then I go back to Powerpoint. Admittedly, these times happen most frequently when I am lying overwhelmed under a pile of marking.

But honestly? There does not seem to be an easy way to do, well, anything. Even though the swooshiness of the final presentation would be cool, if it took less than 12 hours to get there.

More generally: does anyone use anything but Powerpoint/Keynote, really? And if you do use anything else, what is it, and why do you like it?

N.B. if you're a purist who only uses a blackboard and chalk by choice, don't tell me. Just don't. I can't draw all those little pictures that fast.

The other scandal in Colorado

Less titillating than the Adler case, but ultimately at least as threatening to the effective functioning of universities.  I'll let the CSU-Pueblo AAUP chapter, via Jonathan Rees, describe the situation:

Image from Jonathan Rees' blog.

As many of you are no doubt aware, CSU-Pueblo has been tasked with cutting 3.3 million dollars in the 2014-2015 budget. What may be less clear to some of you, is that job cuts are not a “possibility”; they are a foregone conclusion. Faculty and staff alike have been told to expect as many 50 of our co-workers will lose their jobs. More troubling is that, though most faculty just learned the specifics of the cuts on Friday, names and positions have already been submitted to the deans, and deans have submitted proposed cuts to the provost. . . .What this means is that proposals have been put forward with minimal faculty input and without adequate time to communicate information to those on campus and off who will be most affected by the layoffs that are coming.

Aargh.  To some extent, this is just business as usual, and some might even say that the administrators are the ones who see the bigger picture, and so are qualified to make the best decisions in a difficult situation.  But I'll believe that line when I see substantial cuts in administration, rather than an ongoing trend of hiring more and more administrators (and staff to support them), a number of them apparently tasked with making the teaching side (including support to same) more "efficient." 

5 Tips to Help You Become a Better College Professor. From The Onion / HuffPo.

by Galanty Miller

The reason that college professors are socially incompetent is because it takes a socially incompetent person to become a college professor. Normal people with friends and healthy social lives don't want to sit in a classroom when they're thirty-one years old; they want to live adult lives.

Normal people want to have a job when they're twenty-nine years old; they don't want to sit at home doing research for their 300-page dissertation that nobody wants to read. If I'm Tom Hanks in Castaway, stranded on a desert island for years with nothing to do but read your doctoral thesis, I still wouldn't read your crappy, tedious dissertation. I might paint a face on it and befriend it, but I wouldn't read it. ("Wilson! Your bibliography is freakin' 16 pages long!")

More.