Maybe I’ve been reading Courtney’s “The Academic Wardrobe” series (one, two, three) too closely, but when I first learned about Tweedact, the latest tool by my poet-hacker friend Johnathon Williams (who previously brought us the online journal Linebreak and the poetry aggregator Swindle), I thought it was a way to eliminate the tweed jacket from academic fashion.

But no!

Tweedact is a bookmarklet that lets you ban words from your Twitter feed.   (Johnathon says he got the idea during the Super Bowl, when he would’ve been grateful for a way to filter out all the “who dat!” tweets. You might use it to avoid spoilers for a tv show, or if you don’t want to hear any more about the iPad until it ships, or if the thought of hearing about John Mayer’s Playboy interview one more time is enough to make you frenzied . . . the possibilities are endless.

Two caveats:

1. It ...

There’s something appealing about writing out one’s to-do list on a post-it note.  This can take different forms, whether it’s Aimee’s single post-it for the week (a sort of meta-commentary on, or abstract representation of, her daily planner), or Julie’s daily exercise of closure and focus.

TeuxDeux is a free online service that provides something quite close to that aesthetic.  It doesn’t have a lot of the flexibility or power of apps such as Things or Remember The Milk (post coming Friday).  It does, however, offer an incredibly simple interface, with a ton of visual appeal.  Like that post-it note, the interface forces you to commit to a specific date to accomplish a task, though it’s totally easy to drag an item from day to day. (Much as the post-it note can be lifted up and moved to another day in your planner.)

Here’s the video:

TeuxDeux Demo...

This month featured the launch of an amazing new service that, potentially, could change the way you interact with your phone, with data, and with the world at large.  (No, not Buzz.  Julie will talk about that tomorrow.) 

Siri is an iPhone app that works on the following model: You tell it what you want, and it makes it so.  It can locate nearby businesses, make reservations, buy tickets, and more, all with a context-aware voice recognition interface.

Here’s the pitch (it’s worth sticking around until the end):

Now, it is a brand-new release, so it’s still learning. (I mean to say, new sources of information are being added to its service.)  And, like any such service, it’s only as good as the data it draws on.  When I asked for a nearby grocery store, it couldn’t find the Stop&Shop right down the street, although it *did* find the florist division within...

The week that was at ProfHacker:

• In a guest post, Dave Parry speculated about “The iPad and Higher Education.” Guest author Amanda Watson–an actual librarian!–explained “Hacking Your Home Library with LibraryThing.” And don’t say ProfHacker never gave you anything: guest Cory Bohon offered the “Profhacker Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X.” George wondered, as part of the “Scheduling 101″ series, what “The Ideal Academic App” would look like. (Notice actual interaction from the CEO of Tungle!)  I asked for feedback on “Re-Imagining the Student Computer Lab.” Amy promoted filters, the under-used tool within Gmail: “Using Filters to Manage Your Inbox.”
• Ethan offered “Five Easy Steps (and One Completely Crazy Step) for Surviving a Grant Proposal.” Billie gets to the point of most writing advice: “Just Do It.” Phone interviews are notoriously...

This is quite a weekend: the Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and the kickoff of the Olympics. (Alas, plans for a ProfHacker medal pool fell by the wayside.)  You may well need respite from all the forced merriment, or even just a break from grading or writing or meetings, so, as always, here are 5 links and a video for your delectation.

• Anne-Marie Deitering (The Info-Fetishist) has an outstanding post about the challenges involved in building tutorials that lots of people will find useful: Not that teachers don’t want to borrow and adapt and take advantage of other people’s cool ideas and good work, but to really feel comfortable going into a classroom and teaching a group of students something, a lot of us need to feel like we’ve made the stuff we’re teaching ours.  And the only way to do that is to adapt, and reshape, and refine.
• Melanie...

This semester I’m on a new committee*: An ad-hoc one that’s looking to re-design the student computer lab.  In fact, by the time this post goes live I think we’ll even have had an organizational meeting.  I expect that our goals will be to maximize access for students who don’t have their own computers; facilitate students’ work, new-fangled and otherwise; and also to design a space that gets used enough to warrant the expense, at times beyond the final exam period.

The committee has students on it, who aren’t shy about advocating for their peers (one of ‘em’s ProfHacker’s own Alex Jarvis), and obviously I plan to let them take the lead a bit, since it’ll be their space. But what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t ask your readers about it?

If you were given the opportunity to design an up-to-date computer lab, what would be important to you? ...

I’m cranky today about copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  As folks probably know, I post regularly at Wired.com’s excellent GeekDad blog.  Over the past year, I’ve posted a lot about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, mostly because it’s my 6-yr-old’s favorite show.  Helping me in that task is LucasFilm, which a few months back added me to their PR list, and so I get clips and stills from each episode, which I’m allowed (like many other folks) to post to Flickr and YouTube.

Over the weekend, apparently an overzealous lawyer from The Cartoon Network noticed that one of the clips had gotten over 4,000 views, and sent YouTube a takedown notice.  (Even though I had gotten the clip from LucasFilm, and even though I included their copyright statement.  A classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing.)  YouTube’s default policy on these ...

Before you settle into Doritos with cheese dip* in front of the tv, a quick roundup of the week that was at ProfHacker:

• George continued to give his heart to cool scheduling tools–this time, Tungle.me! I offered an update on Rubrick, the ProfHacker-organized Firefox extension for online grading. (Another update: Rubrick has been selected as a finalist, and Patrick MurrayJohn will represent us at SXSW!)  Alex Jarvis took a look at the Googlephone. George updated us on the comments policy.
• Erin braced for student tears, while Billie offered tips on handling that one student who dominates class discussion–in a bad way. Erin describes what’s like to have Kindles in the classroom. Jeff McClurken reported on EduCon 2.2, addressing information technology in K-12.
• Nels suggested that your next article might be closer than you think. Guest author Courtney Danforth returns to explain ...

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m ready for Saturday!  Even if I do have 3 hours of meetings tomorrow, I can at least be glad *I’m* not shoveling snow this weekend . . .

• How to set up explicit guidelines for using a backchannel (possibly useful for students, too) (via @mathplourde)
• Gordon Gee wants tenure decisions to rest on more than research.  The article quotes a faculty member as saying that good teachers are “a dime a dozen,” which I don’t believe is accurate–though I’m not sure reforming tenure ought to be on any college *president*’s agenda.  (Via Elizabeth Kissling)
• Is it ethical to create a Facebook profile for a Holocaust victim? (via hmprescott)
• Research by Ahmed Hassan, Rosie Jones, and Kristina Lisa Klinkner suggests that patterns of user behavior more accurately predict successful searches (pdf) than abstract models of “document relevance.” (...

[Note: This guest post is the third in a series on The Academic Wardrobe by Courtney S. Danforth, an assistant professor of English at Darton College. -- JBJ, who desperately needs this post]

If you haven’t seen it yet, get a load of Cornell’s Pi Phi chapter’s dress code and be glad your campus isn’t so strict on faculty!

Previously on the topic of academic wardrobe, I’ve written about finding a style and stocking your closet and many of you have joined the conversation with good questions and good suggestions, many of which pertain to this post’s topic–getting dressed. Getting dressed is part part style, part stewardship and part stagecraft.

As Nels indicates in his earlier comments, the concern over style and clothing repetition do seem to have locally defined expectations. My campus takes a very dim view of denim and open-toed shoes for faculty while jeans and Crocs are fine ...