• Software,  Technology

    Removing notes from PowerPoint: a game changer for Mac

    I have been juggling a significant teaching load this year. I generally use PowerPoint as a visual aid for teaching; and, for my own purposes, often use the ‘notes’ function in PowerPoint. For accessibility, I distribute PowerPoints as an editable file – not a PDF – on the learning management system, but this often means my notes need to be removed before the PowerPoints are distributed. Deleting notes across PowerPoints is time-consuming and repetitive – there has to be a better way. There is – and it is a game changer. For those using a PC, there is a fairly simple solution to delete all notes: https://www.howtogeek.com/730732/how-to-delete-all-presentation-notes-at-once-in-microsoft-powerpoint/ On a Mac,…

  • Research,  Software

    Tracking impact

    Universities are increasingly attuned to the ‘impact’ agenda – seeking to measure and quantify the impact of our work on society. The Australian Research Council defines ‘research impact’ as ‘the contribution that research makes to the economy, society, environment or culture, beyond the contribution to academic research.’ In many fields, ‘impact’ is measured through citation counts. This is problematic for multiple reasons: self-citations can ‘game’ citation counts (and are included in most citation measures); and a highly cited article could be cited a lot because it is so bad! So use citation data with caution. Also, we need to contextualise any impact data in the context of our field; so…