It may seem a bit odd to welcome readers to a blog that’s already got more than 100 posts, or more than 20K page views, but today marks the official launch of ProfHacker, a site dedicated to pedagogy, productivity, technology, and especially the intersection of these, in higher education.  We interpret this mandate pretty broadly, and so you’ll find posts on everything from gearing up for a commute to learning student names to backing up your social network.  Basically, if there’s a fresh way to think about the daily work of university life, you can expect to find it here.  Publishing roughly three times a day (with some supplemental links on Twitter), ProfHacker offers reviews, tutorials, commentary, podcasts, screencasts, and more, in a style that aims to be casual yet informative, friendly and witty without being snarky.

Origin Story

ProfHacker started just after

Last week, I explained that wikis are, despite their unusual name, friendly and easy-to-use.  This week: Some pedagogical reasons for giving the software a try.  I think that there are a couple of different ways of thinking about this: designing a wiki-style course, and using a wiki to power a particular assignment.  A lot of wiki evangelism tends to focus on their transformative power, which can be both exhilarating and a bit scary.  I think it’s possible, though, to adopt wikis incrementally, and in the process can do some genuinely new things.

The thing to remember about wikis is that they’re platforms for super-easy collaboration, and that wikis in principle make all aspects of a site, including organization and navigation, user-editable.  This gives users a remarkable amount of power to shape material to suit their ends–which may/may not align with a class’s....

On Wednesday, September 9, ProfHacker.com will get its 1.0 facelift.  Stay tuned this week for a contest, for our first podcast (with a Very. Special. Guest), more new writers, and other goodies!

Last week, we welcomed Amy Cavender to the crew–see her first post here, on using Google Docs even when colleagues need paper.

George and I reflected on how to decide when change is necessary: by looking at the past, and by asking who will benefit.  Natalie Houston offered simple ways to improve your workflow: first, a timer, and then, using that timer, a 1-minute mental reboot. Other posts included a tribute to Dropbox, an intro to WordPress plug-ins, and a reminder that it always, always pays to have a plan B.

This week also featured three new entries in the ProfHacker 101 series: my basic introductions to RSS feeds and to wikis, and Julie Meloni’s gentle introduction to the use...

Yesterday, while talking with a former student who’s now enrolled in a ‘technology for [high school] teachers’ class, he pointed out that, while the syllabus said they’d cover wikis in the last week, the teacher said they probably wouldn’t bother.

I wasn’t surprised to hear this, because I talk about wikis a lot (mostly because of this assignment, which I’ll discuss more extensively in a follow-up next week).  Faculty and students alike often either glaze over or develop this slightly panicked look, as if I’m asking them to code an API request or something.

The irony is that wikis are now among the easiest online technologies to use: many have What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)-style editing, so users don’t have to remember any codes; pretty much all wikis include automagical versioning and restoration, so it’s  hard for users to permanently break things...

In any given semester, I need to access files on three to seven* computers pretty regularly, plus others on occasion.  Until last spring, I handled this in one of two ways: a flash drive, or self-e-mailing.  Flash drives are convenient enough: they don’t require internet access, plus there’s just the one copy of the file, so you don’t have to remember what’s the most current.  But, then again, you have to have it with you.  (I think George solves this problem with this key-shaped drive.) And, if you lose the drive, or dunk it in your coffee, or your bag’s run over by  a psycho driver, well, you’re in a world of hurt.  E-mail’s convenient, too: you don’t have to carry anything, it’s less likely to be obliterated by accident, and you have a reminder that you need to do something with the file.  Then again, I would start to proliferate copies of a file–I...

Most teachers think regularly about how to improve their classes: what could be tweaked, or streamlined, or in some cases outright scrapped and re-thought from the ground up.  Sometimes this is a syllabus, or an assignment, but people who use a lot of online assignments also need to think about things like workflow, clarity of instructions, graphics–there’s a pretty long list.

Wil Shipley has a really interesting post about software design (via Daring Fireball), that suggests a way of deciding on what upgrades are worth pursuing:

Life isn’t fair, and programming is even less fair. Programming is all about picking a certain class of users with a certain specific class of problems, and making their lives much MUCH better. Like, if I didn’t listen to music, I wouldn’t care about iTunes. If I didn’t take photos of my girlfriends naked, iPhoto would add nothing to my life… but that...

Profhacker.com takes as its domain pedagogy, productivity, and technology as they intersect in higher ed.  Last week featured interesting posts across all three categories:

• Julie explained how to host your own website, while Ethan showed how to spruce up your academic WordPress blogs.
• It’s increasingly hard to ignore, or to resist, the allure of mobile computing.  I’ve tried giving everyone in class an iPod Touch, while Julie loves her netbook.
• Ethan continues to explore alternatives to PowerPoint, this time taking up the   Bee Docs Timeline.  Alex points out that students can help drive the tech+pedagogy interface as well.
• The most controversial post of the week turned out to be Brian’s reflections about being yourself online, which elicited thoughtful dissent in the comments, particularly from Rana and Nels.  (As someone who was first drawn to academic blogs by the...

No blaming the victim in this week’s discussion of meetings!  If you’re in your first job, you might well be attending your first department meeting soon, and I wanted to offer some advice.  Some people will say that junior faculty should be seen and not heard; conversely, some junior faculty are paranoid enough about their tenure chances that they shy away from commenting publicly on anything more controversial than approving the minutes or adjourning.

I don’t agree with this advice–if you’ve got something to contribute, or if you don’t understand something, there’s no (lasting) harm in speaking up.  But keep in mind these discursive guidelines:

• Every department has at least one person who answers every question by saying, “When I was in grad school at [a fancy school], we addressed this problem in X, Y, Z ways.”  Don’t be that person. You’re not a grad student anymore; other ...

By flickr user angelic_shrek
(CC-Licensed)

In Open Thread Wednesday last week, Doug wrote that “It seems like [the site]’s for the hip faculty who have iPhones and despise Blackboard for being too corporate and controlling.”  That sound you just heard is the 1000-odd students I’ve taught over the years laughing at the notion of my being hip.  I do have an iPhone, though, and I do hate Blackboard–but for its lousy design, not because it’s too corporate.

That reminded me of a story: Once, at Georgia Tech, while I was being observed, the students read aloud from the text–almost a page at a time–and the faculty member commented that it was “cute” that I still used such old-timey pedagogy.  And it is true–for all the wiki-and-an-iPhone goodness, I’m also profoundly traditional in many ways, and so I thought we could talk about traditional pedagogical...