Category: Hardware
September 30, 2010, 03:00 PM ET
Hacking Multiple Campus Offices
I have the dubious honor of
having two offices. Yes, dubious. As of the beginning of this year,
I've got an office at MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and
Social Sciences (where I serve as as Associate Director) and an
office in the Consortium for Archaeological Research (where
the archaeology faculty in the Department of Anthropology live).
While this setup is absolutely necessary, it can be challenging at
times. Don't get me wrong, having two offices can also be
rewarding. I'm very fortunate in that both office locations are
filled with great colleagues who I like being around. I also
recognize that I'm probably in the minority in this whole
multi-office setup thing. Most scholars only have a single office.
It's also a rather sad fact that many scholars (especially at the
lower end of the academic food chain) don't even have an office of
their own. This having been said...
September 10, 2010, 08:00 AM ET
Considering a BlackBerry for a No-Frills Communication Device
There have been many ProfHacker posts dedicated to
helping our readers choose a Smartphone, but all of them focus on
one particular choice: Droid v. iPhone. Amy has offered the
pros
and cons of these devices, while Julie has written exclusively
about Droids in "Using
Super Smartphones for Productivity" and "Update
on My Productivity with a Super Smartphone." Alex, too, has
weighed in on the subject and offered his thoughts on the Android
OS. I'd like to offer a different perspective: RIM and
BlackBerry. In the high-tech world of super Smartphone apps and
operating systems, BlackBerry is often an afterthought, but for
many consumers, they can be very a good choice.
Almost three years ago, I was all set to buy an iPhone. I love Apple products. I find them intuitive and sleek, and it's not at all hyperbole to say that the iPod changed my life when I first bought one in 2001. Not only did ...
Read MoreSeptember 8, 2010, 08:00 AM ET
Recording Lectures with an iPod Touch
Have you considered
recording your lectures? Why would you want to do so? And if you do
decide to record, how do you do it?
Recordings of your lectures can be used to improve your teaching, if you review the sound files later on. It can be less painful than watching video but still helpful. You might also post the recordings of your class to your CMS (course management system) for student reference. The recording of lectures also brings up some important intellectual property issues, as discussed in a recent Chronicle article. Some schools, such as UC Berkeley, have created detailed policies on the protection of faculty intellectual property in the classroom. Most have not, but by recording your lectures and editing them yourself, you can offer your students the benefits of student recordings while still having a say in what exactly gets pushed out to the masses. So if you do decide to ...
Read MoreAugust 30, 2010, 08:00 AM ET
iPad: Traveling Cold Turkey
[This is a guest post by Louisa
A. Burnham, Associate Professor of History at Middlebury
College.]
I am an academic medievalist, and I have spent six weeks traveling this summer with no other computer than my iPad. Here are some thoughts about my experience. First off, the technical details: I have the 64g WiFi iPad, and I traveled in Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, Spain and Andorra. I was mostly on the road for two weeks (Israel, Jordan and Cyprus), and mostly in one place (Barcelona) for a month.
Connectivity
I had to rely on WiFi, and mostly did just fine on the road, with the usual "this hotel's WiFi sucks" kinds of problems.
For Barcelona, however, I brought along a travel router, since I knew that I could get an ethernet connection in my room but not WiFi. This was brilliant. I had my own little WiFi zone just for me! Email, internet, no problem. I didn't Skype at all, so I can't tell you...
Read MoreAugust 26, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
Reader Poll Results: New Tech Tools in the Classroom
Two weeks ago I asked readers to talk
about the tech tools they were most excited to take into the
classroom this semester.
The impetus behind this question was a request for participants in a poll by ReadWriteWeb author Audrey Watters; her follow-up post on August 15th, "Teachers Pick Their Top 5 Back-To-School Tech Tools", discussed her poll results. Specifically, her poll found educators most excited to integrate the following tools in their classrooms:
- iPad/mobile learning devices (including netbooks)
- Google Apps for Education
- student blogs
- Sharing and Collaboration Tools (including wikis)
I thought the responses Audrey gathered would differ from those gathered in the comments to my original post, given the difference in audience between ReadWriteWeb and ProfHacker—I expected answers from ProfHacker readers would show more curiosity about technology than...
Read MoreAugust 17, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
Check Your Backups
There you are, minding your own business, when
your hard drive starts to make that suspicious grinding sound. Or
you discover that your laptop is not where you left it. Or your web
hosting provider suffers a catastrophic data loss.
No sweat, you say. I'm a ProfHacker reader, and so I'm all about the backups. (If you're not yet all about the backups, you might take a moment to check out some of our posts on backing up your stuff, including Annual Reminders--Backup, Back Up Your Essential Files Using Dropbox, How to Back Up Your Cloud, Backing Up a Campus Email Account, A Few Ways to Back Up Your Website, and Backing Up Your Social Network, among others.)
Suffice it to say that this is not the moment at which you want to discover that your carefully laid backup plan isn't working.
A while back, I wrote about the importance of backing up your WordPress blog, an issue I'd mostly been...
Read MoreJuly 30, 2010, 08:00 AM ET
5 Lecturecasting Tools That I Can't Live Without (and Why)
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...
Read MoreJuly 27, 2010, 03:00 PM ET
Letting Us Rip: Our New Right to Fair Use of DVDs
[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...
Read MoreJuly 27, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
Information on the New DMCA Exemptions
Yesterday, the Library of Congress issued its triennial statement of
exemptions to the portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act that forbid the circumvention of digital rights management
(DRM) and other technological measures intended to prevent access
to or copying of digital materials. Three years ago, the announced
exemptions
allowed film and media studies professors to crack the content
scrambling system (a.k.a. CSS) on DVDs in order to rip short clips
to make compilations for classroom use. This seemed at the time
like an awfully restricted exemption — literally only film and
media studies profs (no profs in other fields, and no students),
literally only in order to create compilations of clips for use in
the classroom (not for use in critical writing) — but it appeared
then that the statement might be the thin end of the wedge.
And so it turns out to have been. The...
Read MoreJuly 22, 2010, 03:00 PM ET
Whatever Happened to PDAs?
Here at ProfHacker, we've written
about many different digital tools that help you keep track of a
great deal of information. Many of those tools synchronize across
devices: desktop to laptop to smartphone.
Recognizing that smartphones are becoming more and more common, Amy asked if you prefer iPhone or Android for your OS. Julie upped the ante by writing about "using super smartphones for productivity." Of course, a paper-based planner is still fine for some people, as Jason has acknowledged, and not everybody necessarily needs to maintain an online calendar. I'm curious, however, about that space in between the smart phone user and the pen-and-paper devotee. For me, the holy trinity of digital productivity tools — the three functions I could not do without — are probably an email client, a calendar, and a to-do list app. I love the convenience of being able to access the information...
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