This weekend, the AAUP has its Summer Institute at San Diego State University. It's a training session, mostly for collective bargaining units. This year's highlight: an epic workshop on "understanding university financial statements."

First rule: Ignore budgets. (Second rule: When looking for money, no need to check under "instruction.") Focus on audited financial reports. Hey...is that coffee?

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Daniel Paul O'Donnell explains the urgency of technological education for humanities scholars: If the scholar who hires a student or asks for advice from their university's technical services does not know in broad terms what they want or what the minimum technological standards of their discipline are, they are likely to receive advice and help that is at best substandard and perhaps even counter-productive.
• Mike Caulfield offers...

Revealing the sometimes inelegant process by which research takes place is the subject of the various chapters found in Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have (U Michigan Press, 2009 | Amazon, Google Books). The book is edited by Eszter Hargittai, associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Hargittai leads the "Web Use Project" research group at Northwestern, writes a career advice column for Inside Higher Ed, and contributes to the group blog Crooked Timber.

How would you describe the intended audience of this book?

The book targets mainly junior people — graduate students, general faculty — at a certain level anyone who is interested in understanding at a deeper level than is usually possible for methods...

In this week's installment of my "5 Things" series, I'm going to tackle lecturecasting tools. As many regular readers of ProfHacker know, I'm heavily invested in lecturecasting. I teach several online and blended classes where lecturecasting (either audio or video) is a vital part (check out my History of the Digital Age class by way of example). I've also integrated lecturecasting (both audio and video) into my regular, face-to-face classes (my History of the Modern Comic Book class has full lecture audio recordings available for download). As such, I've got a go-to box of tools that I turn to regularly when building and deploying lecturecasts.

As is customary, some caveats. First, these are the tools that I use. There are lots of other tools out there that other people use (and I will mention a few here and there). Second, I'm going to diverge slightly from the previous posts...

Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, can be powerful platforms for discovering new, interesting, and relevant information from people with whom you share interests. (If you're not yet on Twitter, wait: There's a "how to use Twitter productively" post coming up at ProfHacker in a few weeks.) In addition to simple status updates, which can obviously turn into conversations, Twitter makes it easy to share links with your friends and followers. (For a provocative example of how this link-sharing acts as a kind of collective realtime editorial screening process, see Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Now.)

The problem with Twitter is one of scale. I mutually follow around 900 folks, because I write online for three sites, each of which have their own communities (this one, GeekDad, and Blog of a Bookslut. You should follow me, too.) Even if I were on Twitter all the time, which I'm not...

[This is a guest post by Aimee L. Pozorski, an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. She is also the president of the Philip Roth Society, and is completing a book on trauma in Roth's later works. Previously, she posted at ProfHacker on "The Secret Link Between Refinishing Furniture and Academic Research."]

Last year, for the first time, I was invited to teach a two-part course to juniors in our university's Honors Program that would help them with their honors thesis, the program's capstone project. The sequence is numbered Honors 440 (Thesis Preparation) and Honors 442 (Thesis Workshop); the former is offered in the fall, and the latter is offered in the spring, along with Honors 441 (Honors Thesis): a one-credit course all students take with an advisor in their academic major. My bit, then, involved supporting students through the process of...

A few weeks ago, a reader asked for some tips about a problem familiar to many instructors and faculty:

I'm only 2 years into 4-4 teaching and I'm drowning in course-related papers: binders of course materials, files, leftover student tests and final papers never picked up. I'm not sure what to save, and for how long, but I'm having nightmares of accumulating this much after 10 or 15 years. There wouldn't be enough room in my office for anything else. I know, I know, everything can go paperless...yet I can't seem to bring myself to throw out the paper entirely...

This reader's feeling of being overwhelmed by the ever-increasing amount of course-related documents is not unusual. Even if your students submit their work in digital format and you grade and return it the same way, you still need to make decisions about how you're going to organize and archive those files.

What do you need ...

[This is a guest post by Meagan Timney, a postdoctoral fellow at the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria. She is also an avid triathlete and has competed both at the national and international level. If she's not at the lab being a computer geek, you'll probably find her in the pool doing laps, on the roads riding her bike, or running on the trails in and around Victoria. You can email her at mbtimney.etcl@gmail.com or follow her @mbtimney.]

"To keep the body in good health is a duty, for otherwise we shall not be able to trim the lamp of wisdom, and keep our minds strong and clear."—Buddha, His Life and Teachings

I've always felt as though I had a split personality. On the one hand, I identify as ascholar, but on the other, I see myself as an athlete. My sporting life has seen variousincarnations: a competitive gymnast, runner, swimmer, and...

[Each week at ProfHacker, George Williams hosts "Open Thread Wednesday," which is a space for readers to ask questions and also to suggest topics for future ProfHacker posts. The Commenting and Community Guidelines still apply.—Ed.]

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Let us hear from you in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by thivierr]

[Each week at ProfHacker, Billie Hara (and friends) offer "What's For Lunch?"—health-conscious recipe suggestions and a discussion space for readers to pick up some tips and share their own. At ProfHacker, we recognize that sometimes lunch is a lifehack.—Ed.]

One of the benefits of online conversations&mdashconvos here at ProfHacker, for example, those in forums, on blogs and on Twitter&mdashis that we get to know the folks we "friend." Our "friends," then, become more than just names on a screen. They can become a part of our personal and professional lives. We share information. We collaborate. Today's recipe stems from one of those conversations.

Fish in foil packets has been a summer-time staple in my home for years. It's fast, easy, and very very good. It's versatile enough that you can use various types of fish and whatever type of vegetables you might have one...

[This is a guest post by Jason Mittell, Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College. Jason blogs at Just TV.]

This week saw the release of a seemingly minor bit of legal policy that has a major impact on academic uses of technology, expanding the scope of legal ways to extract video clips from DVDs for purposes of criticism and commentary. (An earlier post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick provided additional information on this ruling with regards to jailbreaking phones and accessing eBooks.) This ruling on DVD circumvention has a potentially transformative impact on faculty and students across a range of disciplines, and can hopefully help spur innovative scholarship and pedagogy. In this post, I'll detail the policy shift and consider some of the ways it can be applied in teaching and research; in a follow-up post in a few weeks, I'll offer a more...