Whiteboard HD, by Avici, is an app that does exactly what its name promises: It captures the experience of writing on a whiteboard--even better, the results are legible! The app can also be used to create flowcharts.

Whiteboard HD offers flexible and precise drawing tools, and the ability to import images and diagrams from iPhoto. It supports freehand drawing, but it also gives you the ability to manipulate text and standard flowchart-type objects with the iPad's multitouch interface. Here's a sample screenshot:

You can also do quicker, ad hoc images:

(I actually use Whiteboard HD this way all the time, sketching out drills and formations for my Little League and U-10 soccer teams. (Um, at home—I'm not demented enough to break it out for this purpose at practice. The only time I've ever taken the iPad to practice was to show Landon Donovan's goal [YouTube] to the soccer team, ...

More or less every night for the last seven years, I've sung "The Star-Spangled Banner" to our kid as he drifts off to sleep. He looks forward to it, and sings along about half the time. It's a sweet, patriotic moment—except for all the times I blank on the words.

It's not that I hate America, or somehow don't really know the lyrics: I've sung the anthem more than 2500 times over the past seven years—it's engraved in my mind. Every six months or so, though, I lose all recollection of three or fourlines for several nights in a row. (Like these poor souls [YouTube], except with less talent.) After about three nights, the lyrics come back, and everything's back to normal.

While I haven't started forgetting names yet—yet—this lyrical blackout has always felt like an harbinger of middle age, or of absentminded professordom, and so it was with great interest that I picked up Barbara...

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...

I've long been interested in systems of personality or temperament typing, ranging from the Keirsey Temperament Sorter to the Ayurvedic doshas to any number of magazine or Facebook quizzes. As I've mentioned before, I've found the Myers-Briggs system very helpful in my personal and professional life—much more so than the quiz I took about which kind of pirate I would be. But all such quizzes and systems offer maps of difference. For instance: in learning that my dosha is pitta-kapha, I also realize that I have no vata traits—which are in fact the very physical and temperamental traits that characterize one of my best friends. The system of doshas offers a way of understanding the differences between us and why we prefer very different kinds of food and activity. The utility of any such system depends upon how detailed its maps of difference are and upon the context in which you're us...

Laura Vanderkam's 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (Penguin) has two genuine insights to offer. The first is right there in the subtitle: Many of us—especially those of us who claim to be insanely busy—probably aren't quite as overworked as we claim, and that it is in fact possible to fit in most of what you actually want to do during the typical week. The second follows more or less directly from the first: Become more self-conscious about how you use your time, and you will both accomplish more and be happier about it.

168 hours is, of course, the number of hours in a week. To show that we have more time than we think, Vanderkam relies on the American Time Use Survey and related time diaries, which peg our typical workweek at closer to 40 hours (or less!), rather than the 70+ workweeks that one hears so much of in the media. Time-diary surveys in particular suggest...

Not everyone is in the market for a smartphone, and there's some good discussion of some important considerations in the comments following Julie's post, Using Super Smartphones for Productivity.

For those who are considering such a device, the two big players right now are the iPhone and a slew of Android phones. (There are smaller players such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and WebOS, but they seem not to get much attention these days. Yes, I'm aware that Blackberry is actually a pretty big player in terms of sheer numbers, but they seem to get more attention in the corporate world than among average end users. At least that's my impression.)

Lifehacker recently ran two posts on the iPhone and Android operating systems: Which Do You Prefer: iPhone or Android? and iPhone vs. Android Showdown: Which Phone is Best for Power Users?. Their conclusion in the second of those posts? Android ...

One of the only explicitly teaching-related iOS apps that I use is Attendance, a straightforward program by David Reed, a computer science professor at Capital University. I reviewed the app for Macworld.com upon its first release, and have used it religiously over the intervening 18 months.

Attendance has such a straightforward purpose that, frankly, I haven't paid much attention to the features added in recent updates. It turns out that Attendance is a universal app, in that it runs on iPhones, iPod Touches, and the iPad. While re-installing a copy on my iPad to get ready for summer teaching next week, and with a new version available in iTunes, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a fresh look at the app.

I liked the app because, with a 4/4 teaching load, I need things to be simple and convenient. Once you have the student names entered (more on this in a second),...

Belcher, Wendy Laura. Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, Sage Pub, 2009. $49.95. ISBN 978-1-4129-5701-4.
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Over the past several months, we at ProfHacker have offered a number of posts about academic writing, our Writer's Bootcamp series. These posts deal with (among many other things) writing tools, creative ways to keep writing, and writer's block.

Today, however, our Writer's Bootcamp series offers a review of Wendy Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (2009). This review supports the aims of our Bootcamp series, but it also targets a specific subset of our ProfHacker audience.

Here at ProfHacker, we write articles that are helpful to a very wide range of people who work in or around higher education. A significant number of our readers are junior faculty members or...

Given the historical associations between universities and the church, it's probably not surprising that a book on acedia, "spiritual sloth," or the inability to care, might resonate with academics. Or, as Kathleen Norris put it in her recent book on the topic, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, "Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value" (43).

Acedia is that feeling that afflicts almost anyone who is forced to commit to a certain kind of repetitive, undervalued work. Her three great examples are married life, and the commitment to another it requires; monastic life; and writing, especially poetry. Teaching certainly would count, and it's also not hard to imagine academic service as cognate in important ways with monastic life. (Especially for faculty with tenure! ...

Hello. My name is Kathleen, and I'm an early adopter.

Hi, Kathleen!

I picked up my iPad from my campus bookstore on the morning it arrived. I'm pretty sure I was the first person to do so, in part because I'd beaten the delivery truck on my first trip to the store that morning, and in part because, when I came back after breakfast, the staff were just getting started unpacking the demo models.

Anyhow, I've lived and traveled and worked and played with the iPad for a little over two months now, and while I'm still completely head over heels for it, I've got a few ideas about how to make it better.

First, the obligatory fangirl gushing: I love having a device that provides such a flexible multi-channel personal media consumption environment. I read a lot on the iPad, in a range of book and document reading applications (including, as Jason described last week, the fantastic iAnnotate...