On academHack

First, some of the basics: academHack is a blog hosted by a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, although I had trouble finding out who academHack actually is. That's okay, though--standard practice, I'd say, for a lot of academic blogs. The author updates the site fairly regularly, about once a month, with thoughts and (periodically, it seems) arguments related to issues of technology and education. The "Brief Manifesto" in the right column reads, "Tech should make teaching easier and more effective, not harder and more frustrating." In "What's This All About?" academHack writes:

"That is, outlining the more concrete ways technology and computers can be used to improve both teaching (how to get beyond the use of Power Point) and scholarship (did you know there are more effective, cheaper, alternatives to MS Word-how does a $30 word processor designed by academics sound?). To that end, this blog is going to try to chronicle how I use technology in an effort to teach and write more effectively."

Of course, part of my interest is in uniting those last two things--that is, how do we use technology to teach writing more effectively, but nonetheless, academHack's point still holds. And so, the site features links to Top 10 Applications, as well as a list of tags that archive entries dealing with various topics (see, for example, the archive on Twitter).

At the moment I'm not sure what to say about academHack's actual writing--that is, it reads "academic," but not dense; it's more appropriately loose, for the kind of broad audience that blogs are intended for, rather than aimed toward the kind of specialized audience that an article published in an academic journal might. Without doing some fairly detailed rhetorical and linguistic textual analysis, though, this would be hard to gauge.

Perhaps more important to notice is extent to which academHack capitalizes on multimodality and the modular nature of new media. Posts include embedded Tweets, video, and of course ubquitous links, including a mid-length (from what I usually see) blogroll. We'll leave it at that for now, but perhaps return to do some more localized rhetorical work later.