Ryan recently wrote about the dilemma of whether to adopt the technology choices made by your campus or continue using the applications you personally prefer. Sometimes, it's possible to do both. In this post, I'll take a look at using GMail in conjunction with a campus email system, and backing up the backup that GMail creates. Assuming that you choose to leave copies of your messages on the campus servers, the steps I outline below let you use your campus system while using GMail and a desktop application to create a double backup of your messages. Alternatively, you can simply use GMail to access your campus email account.

The initial backup: Getting your campus email into your GMail account

I personally prefer the organizational and storage capabilities of GMail over the standard email system at my campus. Last fall, Brian and I wrote about using GMail to check campus email....

Let me start this post with a disclaimer: I'm not doing away entirely with textbooks for my courses, so the image in this post is somewhat misleading. There are some really worthwhile texts out there, and some of them work well for what I want to do with my students.

But back in May, I indicated that I'd be dropping a textbook from my Political Issues course this fall. My primary reason is that the two books I've alternated between in the past (You Decide! Current Debates in American Politics and Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Political Issues) present issues in a more binary fashion than I'd like. I want my students to realize that there are seldom only two sides where important political issues are concerned.

In the two sections of the course that I'll be teaching, I'll still be using two traditional textbooks: Glenn Tinder's Political Thinking and (for the writing-intensive section...

Last week, I provided a quick overview of my impressions of the iPhone and Android operating systems. This week, I have a few thoughts on rooting or jailbreaking your device. This won't be a how-to; there are plenty of those available on the internet (and I'll provide some links at the end of this post). Ethan will have some things to say later this morning about his experience with jailbreaking the iPad. What I'd like to do here is look at a few reasons why rooting or jailbreaking a device is worth thinking about.

What is rooting/jailbreaking, and why think about it?

Rooting (the term used in the Android world) and jailbreaking (the term used with respect to the iPhone and other Apple devices) both do the same thing: they give you administrator access to your device's file system. Why would you want such access?

The major reason(s) you might want administrator access involve (a)...

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...

Like many other members of Team ProfHacker, I make frequent use of class blogs. I've written before about tools that can be useful for managing multiple class blogs, including various blogging clients.

This post isn't another rundown of those editors. Instead, it's a quick update that might be of interest to those considering using a blog editor to work with multiple blogs on a WPMU installation (I wrote about why one might want to consider WPMU back in December; there's some good discussion in the comments section there.)

About midway through the spring semester, though, I ran into some difficulty. I'd been using Ecto, which I liked very much, as my editor. It had support for WordPress pages (WordPress allows you to have a main blog page plus as many other pages as you like, which makes it very handy for running a small website, not just a blog), which put it ahead of some of its...

Last week, I wrote a short post about preventing plagiarism. This week, I'd like to say a few things about how I respond to plagiarism.

No matter what steps we take to try to prevent it, odds are that we'll all encounter some instances of plagiarism (hopefully rarely!).

Here's a brief summary of the policy I use for all my courses:

• In the spirit of trying to draw out the best in my students, I point out that plagiarism is a form of theft (something I assume they wouldn't want to be guilty of) and that engaging in plagiarism shows a lack of self-respect (i.e., plagiarism is beneath them). I also note that it's not only students who sometimes plagiarize; faculty can be guilty, too.
• I go on to spell out consequences. If I discover plagiarism, the minimum consequence will be that the student fails the assignment. If the offense is serious enough, the student may fail the course even for a ...

In the ideal world, none of us would ever have to write a note on a student's paper like the one in this photo. Since this isn't the ideal world, we're likely to have to deal with plagiarism every now and again. Dealing with instances of plagiarism will be the topic of my post for next week.

This week, I'd like to float a few ideas on preventing plagiarism.

The way we approach writing assignments can certainly make a difference. Most faculty are well aware that reusing the same essay prompts from one year to another is a bad idea, and asking students to submit longer papers in stages is useful for catching potential problems before they get a student into real trouble. (Incremental due dates may also reduce the temptation for students to plagiarize, since they force students to get started earlier.)

There are some good suggestions for instructors at pages maintained by the The University...

In my post last week, just in passing, I noted that I like to know how things work. What can I say? I'm an amateur techie. That said, I think there's genuine pedagogical value in teaching students some technical skills, as I wrote back in September.

Though I'm convinced of the value of making sure my students learn some skills in using digital tools, I encounter two difficulties. First, students don't always see the value. Second, they often lack confidence both in their skills, and in their ability to solve any technical problems they might encounter.

My own approach to solving problems using digital tools can best be illustrated by my experience with WordPress. Having had to do some upgrades that involved editing files and uploading them via FTP, I was thrilled when it became possible to upgrade a WordPress installation with just one click. That is, I was thrilled until I actually...

Why on earth would a scholar in the humanities or social sciences want to write HTML? Isn't that just for truly serious geeks? (Not that social science and humanities scholars can't be geeks, but it's not usually the first adjective one thinks of to describe people in those disciplines.)

Well, no. Plenty of people in non-technical fields might have good reasons for needing or wanting to write HTML. In my own case, for instance, it's helpful to know some HTML in order to make writing posts here at ProfHacker a little easier. Besides, I just like to know how things work. Getting to know HTML helps me better understand why a post (or any other web page) looks the way it does. (Thus far, I've found that HTML is kind of like a language--and I think languages are pretty cool, too.)

Here's the catch: I really don't (yet) know HTML, though I'm in the process of learning. What's helping me...

A few days ago, Nels wrote a post titled "Leading Effective Classroom Discussions on Controversial Issues." In this post, I'd like to talk about some of the same kinds of concerns, from the perspective of someone who teaches Political Science and writing.

Each fall, I teach two sections (one a four-credit, writing intensive section, the other a standard three-credit, non-writing-intensive section) of a 100-level course titled "Political Issues." We cover a wide range of topics, from the use of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, to the medical use of marijuana, to presidential war powers, to immigration. Getting students to talk about these sorts of issues usually isn't a problem, but as you might imagine, keeping discussions productive--especially in sections populated primarily with first-year students--can be quite a challenge.

For both sections, among the goals that...