The Best Place to Study On Campus

This girl's got the right idea. Photo courtesy of malias. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.

Everyone likes to have a different study environment. Some like pure silence, others like white noise, some like the soft vocal stylings of Neil Diamond or James Taylor, and even more will love to rock out to bands like Metallica. Some like to sit up in a rigid chair and desk, others like to find the library, and some have mastered the art of sleeping...I mean, studying in bed.

It's worth noting that there is no definitive, end-all-to-be-all, alpha and omega answer to the best place to study. It depends on your personal wiring and how you work.

But, for me, I've found the best location, and it's probably one of the loudest locations on campus too. No, not the football stadium (though those are usually pretty quiet during the week, and mine's open for students to wander), but your residence hall or apartment's laundry room.

I'm not kidding. You're forced to wait an hour or more for your clothes to finish their spin cycles, and what else could you do? Don't answer that - I know Facebook and Twitter are on your top 2, but I encourage you to leave the computer in the room unless you absolutely need it. Grab a good book or textbook and get cracking. The washers and dryers don't have the be only ones being productive during laundry cycles.

The Current State of eTextbook Apps on the iPad

Image courtesy of Flickr user quinnanya. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC-SA.With the release of the Apple’s iPad last April, students around the globe dreamed of purchasing and reading their textbooks on the beautiful 10” color screen. Five months later, with the start of the new semester only days away, the quantity and quality of iPad eTextbook readers is scarce and poor. Among the contenders are Amazon’s Kindle App, CourseSmart’s eTextbooks and the newly release Inkling.

Pricing

Behind each application is a digital book store, interestingly enough, all three distribute their content through different pricing schemes. Amazon treats an eTextbook the same as a regular Kindle Book, the digital textbook is DRM protected but is yours to keep. Amazon distributed eTextbooks are roughly the same price as a regular print book. CourseSmart offers online and offline 180 day eTextbook rentals at about half the price of print book. Note that you must have a connection to read CourseSmart online textbooks. Finally, Inkling distributes content by the chapter, allowing you to pay for only the sections you actually need. This translates into huge savings for courses that only cover certain chapters of the textbook. Inkling chapters are yours to keep and go for $3.

Selection

Finding a digital version of the book you’re trying to obtain can be a real crapshoot. Amazon stocks a good number of textbooks, however none of the required texts were available for my courses next semester. CourseSmart faired a little better, stocking 2 out of 5 of my required texts. Strangely, they only carried the previous editions of these books. Inkling only offers a handful of textbooks, but this will surely improve as they mature. 

Usability

Although the user interfaces are different on all three applications, they are all beautifully designed and provide useful tools when reading. The two most appreciated features present across the board are text highlighting and search. It may seem like fairly basic feature, but if you’ve ever used an index too look for a specific keyword you’ll understand the convenience search provides. Text highlighting allows you to mark specific passages and key phrases, when it comes to studying for an exam you can pull up a list of all your highlighted passages to quickly jump to the important stuff. For those concerned about reading on the iPad screen, well,  in my opinion it’s a non-issue. 

Final Verdict

Amazon, CourseSmart and Inkling all show great promise in becoming the premiere iPad eTextbook reader app. Unfortunately, at this time they are still very immature and thin on selection. If you’re lucky enough to find your required text on one of these services, you may as well give it a shot. To those who dreamed of replacing their heavy book bag with a slim iPad this fall, we’re not quite there yet. 

HackCollege Podcast: Episode 2

In this week's episode, we discuss an awesome infographic, what we keep on our desks, and some of our tech horror stories from the first weeks of school.

Note: we're using the html5 <audio>  tag for the media player this week, and it should work fine in Chrome and Safari. If your browser isn't supported, go ahead and download the .mp3 file here, or subscribe on iTunes.  

Show Notes:
Lifehacking Infographic
Shep's Desk
Griffin Elevator 

Consider Our Spammers Banished

The Disqus system is cleaner and has much better spam control.A lot of you guys may have noticed that the site has recently fallen victim to a huge influx of spam comments. With apologies to readers who want to click links to buy fake Louis Vuitton purses and replica watches, we decided it was time to take action.  You'll notice that we've installed the excellent (and amazingly, free) Disqus commenting system at the bottom of our posts, which should provide you with a better experience, and us with better tools to fight spam.

Unfortunately, this change effectively deletes all of our previous comments on every post, but this inconvenience is worth it for the fresh start.  Now go read some old articles and try it out :)

Curing Dorm-Induced Insomnia

Don't let living in a dorm keep you from falling asleep on your textbooks. Image courtesy of Flickr user quinnanya. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC-SA.There are three basic things that college students need and spend most of their time trying to get: Food, sleep, and sex. It’s true. We’re just as predictable as Maslow said we are. Sure, grades and homework, those things are important too. But I’m talking basic needs here. If you haven’t eaten all day, there’s just no way that chapter in your chemistry book is going matter until you get some food in your stomach. And if you haven’t had any kind of release for your pent up, college-hormone, unruly horniness, it gets a little difficult to concentrate on anything, even that short three page paper (y’all know exactly what I am talking about, don’t pretend you don’t).

While the other two necessities are pretty important, I’d have to say that one need that is hardest to come by is sleep. I’ll go ahead and state the obvious: sleeping in dorms sucks. It sucks a lot. We’ve got to deal with roommates, suitemates, wallmates, hallmates, and all the other kind of mates that sometimes just make it impossible to sleep. Dorms are noisy. They can be uncomfortable. They’re shared by hundreds of students who are pretty much guaranteed not to have the same sleeping schedule as you. When you’re ready to call it a night, the obnoxious sorority sisters across the hall might not agree with you. So while sleeping in dorms sucks, there are some things you can do to make sure you get your beauty rest while living on campus.

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Stay Focused with an iPad and GoodReader

GoodReader will save all of your class files locally, so you can access them even when you're offline.Well, I'm only a few days into classes this year and am already starting to consider my iPad as indispensable as my laptop.  I've been at this long enough to realize that schoolwork is split fairly evenly into consumption and creation.  You consume books, readings, and notes, while you create papers, projects and tests.  My MacBook Pro is terrific for creating things, and I always thought it was just as ideal for consuming the PDF readings Trinity professors kindly assign us in lieu of extra textbooks.  Boy was I wrong.  One day of using GoodReader ($0.99) on my iPad has completely changed the way I study.

GoodReader is basically that; a really good reader app for the iPad.  You can open PDF's from mail attachments in the iPad's default email program, or download them from Blackboard (or your school's hopefully superior equivalent) via the app's built-in browser.  GoodReader will also read Word Documents, save web pages, or even open .zip folders, making it ideal for just about anything a professor can throw at you.  Once you open a file for the first time, you'll immediately understand why this is one of the best ways to organize and consume your class materials.  The reading screen gives you the obvious iOS pinch-to-zoom and swipe-to-flip pages, as well as the ability to rotate the file and change your viewing options. It's also boasts a surprisingly good text-recognition system, empowering you to search for keywords on any file, or even transform the a crappy scan of an old library book into a customizable, distraction-free, scrolling list of clean text.  

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Give Killer Public Presentations With These Public Speaking Tips

There's no reason to fear public speaking, even if you're talking to the future droids in this lecture hall. Image courtesy of Flickr user Squirmelia. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC-SA.Public speaking can be terrifying--an estimated 95% of people experience some anxiety when speaking in front of groups. Unfortunately for everyone except that lone 5%, college is full of public speaking requirements: speaking up as a member of a club, for example, or having to give the first of many class presentations. However, with these tips you can hopefully reduce your public-speaking stress and give killer presentations.

Be Prepared - Part of the terror of public speaking comes from a fear of screwing up publicly. You can reduce this chance (and as a result, the fear) by preparing beforehand: make a bullet-pointed outline for your speech, for instance. If you’re doing a powerpoint presentation in class, be sure not to have everything on the powerpoint--instead, put bullet-pointed cues on the slides and expand upon them while speaking (it’s okay to have personal notecards with the expanded information on them). This way you’ll look like you know what you’re talking about by giving the audience information that only comes from you, rather than your visual aids. In addition to looking competent, an outline or notecards will give you something to go back to should you get completely flustered.

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Featured Desk: Shep's Productivity Nook

Shep's desk makes him a lean, mean productivity-blogging machine.If there's any piece of furniture that college students are tied to, it's the desk. Where else can we convince ourselves to power through that 12-page final paper instead of taking a much-desired nap?

With that in mind, we're introducing a new feature where we highlight the most interesting desks that our readers send us. First up is not from a reader, but a writer: Shep McAllister, a student at Trinity University.

Shep was eager to submit his desk to the pool in part because this is the first year that he's had a real, organized space to use as a desk. To celebrate his swanky new space, he's hooked up dual monitors and purchased a nice desk chair from Ikea.

The above-desk shelf allows him to store a printer, spare paper, and his laptop case, while a below-desk trashcan ensures that he can toss his snacks once he's finished without having to stop working. Perhaps for inspiration, he's got a Dilbert strip taped up to the wall.

As you can see above the light, Shep's zip-tied his computer cables together so they're out of the way--an easy, cheap way to make a desk seem less cluttered so you can focus on writing rather than decluttering.

Click for more photos of the desk after the jump, and if you'd like to submit your own, email emily@hackcollege.com with photos and a description of how you've hacked your desk and why.

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