A note on Crooked Timber - always good, some fine commentary up today... An interesting comment on graduate students and technology: what should they know? Brian weatherson suggests:

Here’s some suggestions for skills graduate students should have.

How to use Powerpoint in lectures

How to manage a large course website, including interactive features

How to setup maintain a large database for administrative tasks

That makes sense. There are some interesting remarks in the comments about not using Powerpoint - whether not using it at all, or what not to do with it, depending... The art class I am taking now is an examplary use of powerpoint - though of course it's kind of invented for showing slides of art works. And for oversimplifying things, which is how it is used in the corporate world. Most powerpoint presentations are second best to writing stuff on a blackboard. They aren't interactive, for one thing - you can't add anything in the middle of a lecture. This may save some people from themselves, but it stops good teachers in their tracks. Or would, except the best teachers I've known have never worked from things like powerpoint...