Crooked Timber: Graduate Students and Technology

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


And by ‘skills’ here I don’t mean the basic ability to do these things without looking really stupid, but the ability to efficiently integrate them into your daily routine when they are needed. Future faculty who can do these things will be better academics. At the very least they will be better teachers and better at running things like job searches and graduate admissions, and of course they can do much more than that. If the academic job search market were efficient, these skills would be rewarded. Even in the real world, departments would be doing the profession a service by turning out colleagues-to-be with these technical skills.