This past semester I had a rather distressing issue with a student that I had never experienced before. The long and short of it is that the student was extremely unhappy with the grade I had given them, and wasn't content to accept said grade even after much discussion, explanation, and pointing to the pertinent assignment guidelines on the course website (which they had neglected to follow). Unfortunately, the situation became incredibly complex, and eventually escalated up to the office of the President.

One of the many issues in play was the disclosure of the student's records. One of the student's parents called me requesting information about the student's performance in the class. I repeatedly refused to give the requested information, saying that under FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), I was prohibited from disclosing student educational records (even to a...

In 2001, MIT announced that it would be launching an initiative to make large amounts of its curriculum materials freely available online. By 2002, the MIT Open Courseware initiative (OCW) had launched its first pilot website, complete with the course material from 50 classes. At this stage of the game, MIT has materials from almost 2000 of its courses available online. MIT also isn't the only university jumping on the Open Courseware bandwagon. The Open Courseware Consortium lists about 200 or so member institutions around the world. This number doesn't include universities that aren't officially part of the Open Courseware consortium (but have some sort of institutional effort to put course material online) and individual faculty who are putting their own course material online without any institutional support. In the United States alone, some fairly significant institutions such ...

As scholars, we are always involved in one project or another. Whether it is a funded grant project, a writing project, development (as in web/game/interactive/software/etc), or even curriculum/teaching work, it often becomes quite a challenge to manage things (especially if many collaborators are involved).

In situations such as these, many of us turn to tools that can keep our projects well managed and under control—some tools are online, some desktop, some tools are open source, and some are proprietary. All are different, with strengths and weaknesses which will ultimately determine their value to your particular scholarly project. Among the vast cornucopia of collaboratively inclined options, I would like to suggest that people have a look at Open Atrium.

The brainchild of Development Seed, Open Atrium is essentially an intranet in a box. It allows for the creation of...

While the term "unconference" has been applied (or self-applied) to a wide variety of events, it usually refers to a lightly organized conference in which the attendees themselves determine the schedule. In most cases, unconferences attempt to avoid the traditional unidirectional paper model in favor of meaningful and productive conversations around democratically agreed upon topics (organized into sessions). Unconferences traditionally have low registration fees, and therefore run on a much more conservative budget (compared to more traditional meetings or conferences). The other thing that sets unconferences apart from traditional conferences is that they usually have far fewer attendees. It is not uncommon for unconferences to be attended by no more than 75 to 100 people.

Despite the fact that the unconference idea got its start (and is still going very strong) in the tech sphere ...

I'm just going to come out and say it: this semester was a doozy. And by "doozy," I mean I barely hung on by my finger tips. A lot of this had to do with the sheer number of students I had, and the sheer number of assignments (written and otherwise) they had—all of which equated to an an almost daily torrent of of emails which not only took far more time than I would have liked to sort out (thereby taking precious time away from other things—both academic and personal), but became a source of incredibly irrational stress (one night a couple of weeks back I actually dreamt that every time I answered one email, three more spawned in its place.).

The end result is that, for the first time ever, I'm very seriously considering developing a formal electronic communication policy. When I say "electronic communication," I'm not only talking about email, but other channels like IM and Twitter...

It's the Christmahanukwanzaakah season around the ProfHacker offices, and visions of sugar plums are dancing in the heads off all the good little ProfHacker girls and boys.

We're writing our letters and baking our cookies in the hopes that someone (enter the name of your favorite holiday gift bringing entity here) will leave a shiny present under the tree (or your festive holiday object of choice) to set our little hearts a flutter with holiday joy.

What a perfect time of year for us each to share an item or two (or three or four) off of our own holiday wish lists (or one or two items that we already own and get a lot of use out of) in the hopes that they might help all of you, our loyal readers, in your profhacking endeavors of 2010 (and beyond)

Ethan

I've been doing a lot of audio recording and editing (mostly lectures). While I use a wireless lapel mic for recording the actual...