Amy

[October's Teaching Carnival is from Traci Gardner, a blogger and social media educator. She blogs on Teaching in the 21st Century for Bedford/St. Martin's Bits and publishes educational resources on ReadWriteThink. You can email her at tengrrl@gmail.com or follow her updates on literacy and education in the news at @newsfromtengrrl.]

Did you notice the smell of deep-fried Twinkies in the air? That's right. It's time for another Teaching Carnival, the monthly round-up of blog posts on teaching and issues in higher ed.

Last month, Billie Hara hosted the carnival and showed us dozens of great links. As she explained then, ProfHacker has become the permanent home of the Teaching Carnival, so each month you can return for a snapshot of the most recent thoughts on teaching in college and university classrooms. You can find previous carnivals on Teaching Carnival's home site.

Now without...

[This is a guest post by Meagan Timney, a postdoctoral fellow at the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria. Previously at ProfHacker, Meagan wrote about Nurturing the Mind-Body Connection. You can email her at mbtimney.etcl@gmail.com or follow her @mbtimney.]

[Editor's note: Mailplane is a commercial application only available for Mac users. We now to return you to your regularly scheduled productivity post.]

I have a daily identity crisis. From the time I wake up until the time I go to bed, I have to manage, simultaneously, at least three (and probably more like five or six) separate people in my brain. The three most dominant, for me, are the athlete, the scholar, and the teacher. Among these identities alone, I have five Gmail accounts (one to filter emails from my local Crossfit Gym, my coach, training partners, race organizers, etc., one for all of my...

[This is a guest post by Eric Hansen, a part-time faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the College of Media and the iSchool at Syracuse University. He started the websites shiftlearning.com as a showcase of next-generation LMS technique, and tenprofs.com (@tenprofs) to rally gen-y/x professors in building an Information-Age successor to the death-by-PowerPoint model of higher education. Eric can be emailed, tweeted, poked, Googled and linkedIn.]

If you're looking for a quick, road-tested tip, here it is: integrate checklists into your communication of assignment requirements and for improving the submission process. I recommend the Google Docs "New Form" tool, Wufoo.com, or formspring.com. What follows is a quick case study and how-to.

In honor of the 2011 GRE giving the axe to its infamous analogy questions, how about one more for the road?:

Surgeon : ...

[This is a guest post by Courtney Danforth, an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Southern Nevada who tweets as @csdanforth. Courtney previously wrote The Academic Wardrobe: Planning for ProfHacker.]

What would you do if it was announced that your entire department was to be eliminated as a response to a campus budget crisis?

What if your significant other were suddenly incapacitated by a stroke and required your care?

What if you suffered a major head injury during the middle of a semester?

We've recently noted the anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 terrorist attack. We spent the summer watching or assisting with responses to the Gulf oil spill and recovery from Haiti's earthquake. We have little trouble recognizing that each of these four events, whether man-made or natural in origin, constitutes a disaster, but the disasters that we experience...

[This is a guest post by Amanda Watson, who works as a Research and Instruction Librarian at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. In her spare time, she tries not to let her yarn habit get out of control. You can find her on Twitter (@amndw2) or read her blog. In February, Amanda wrote Hacking Your Home Library with LibraryThing for ProfHacker.]

When I was a nervous, fidgety graduate student trying to quit smoking, a friend said "You should learn to knit. It gives you something to do with your hands so you won't wish you had a cigarette." The idea appealed, so I found a basic knitting book, a pair of needles, and some soft blue yarn, and launched my first project: a scarf. While I didn't manage to quit smoking until several years later, knitting helped me get out of the grad school sensory-deprivation trap I'd fallen into: instead of reading literary theory nonstop, I...