What if there was a book that explained how to write end comments on student papers or exams; why peer review processes often avoid, rather than facilitate, sound judgment; how to encourage meaningful group work; and why academic events feature so much ritual flattery? Clifford Nass's The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships doesn't restrict itself to academe—indeed, it claims to offer social rules for almost any situation—but it has a wealth of provocative experiments that any professor might want to reflect upon.

Clifford Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University; his home department is communications, but he has numerous courtesy appointments, and, crucially, is the founder of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. He has helped many companies design interactive elements—including, as he recounts here, ...

Two favorite ProfHacker applications are Things, which manages to-do items, and Evernote (see also here), which keeps track of everything else. And both have handy smartphone & iPad applications that extend the services' functionality in a variety of ways. Having separate apps for to-do lists and notes makes sense, but it can also be a little confusing--how, exactly, did I classify that bit of information? Did I put the book's call number in Things or in Evernote? (Hardly an earthshattering conundrum, of course, but everything really is a pebble.

Awesome Note (by BRID) is an iPhone app that addresses this problem. It offers easy ways to take and organize notes, to convert them into to-do lists, and then to process them to done. (It does everything you'd expect an iPhone notes app to do: you can incorporate photos and maps into notes, and can send things via SMS or e-mail.) You can...

Normally, I write about The Clone Wars at GeekDad, rather than here. But, in light of tonight's premiere of the show's third season, let me note a couple of points of ProfHacker-ish interest.

First, watching The Clone Wars with my son has provided an object lesson in how to share beloved cultural artifacts with others--how, that is, to let them appreciate something in their own way, rather than insisting that they copy me. For people my age, there's only one real Star Wars, and in it, Han shot first. But for my 7-year-old, Star Wars is as much about Captain Rex, Commander Cody, and the rest of the clones. (R2-D2 remains the same, of course.) And while I'll sometimes poke fun at Jar-Jar Binks or some of the other ways in which George Lucas has destroyed the meaning of the original three movies, or he'll complain about the weak Jedi of the original trilogy, in the main we can both...

I think it's time to propose new standards for seriousness in discussions of higher education. Consider, for example, the Wal-Mart Goldwater report on higher education, which simultaneously notes the shifting of resources away from instruction and proposes wholesale budget cuts as a way of weeding out inefficiency. As the AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congress explains, the report gets the causality backwards: lean budgets produce administrative bloat. Moreover, "efforts to generate monies from external grants, fundraising, auxiliary services, and other nonacademic activities increase administrative costs and can never fully replace state support for the core academic functions of the academy." If your solution would make the problem you diagnose worse, then you aren't serious. (Disclosure: I am on the CBC's executive committee.)

Meanwhile, the irony of a tenured professor writing a ...

At the AAUP summer institute this summer, I heard about a chapter that distributed water & brochures to students on move-in day. That's a clever way to make a friendly connection with students, reminding them, even before the semester starts, that faculty are interested in their success, and it's a good way to make common cause with students. While that kind of concerted effort might not play on all campuses, it is interesting to think about how it reframes your semester if your first encounter with students is at move-in, rather than in a genii ed class at 8m Monday or Tuesday morning. They can be more open about their excitement and nervousness; you can see them interacting with their family, etc. Especially for those of us who teach first-year experience courses, it might be worthwhile one fall to wander by campus when the students arrive. Inasmuch as those classes try to help...

Whiteboard HD, by Avici, is an app that does exactly what its name promises: It captures the experience of writing on a whiteboard--even better, the results are legible! The app can also be used to create flowcharts.

Whiteboard HD offers flexible and precise drawing tools, and the ability to import images and diagrams from iPhoto. It supports freehand drawing, but it also gives you the ability to manipulate text and standard flowchart-type objects with the iPad's multitouch interface.Here's a sample screenshot:

You can also do quicker, ad hoc images:

(I actually use Whiteboard HD this way all the time, sketching out drills and formations for my Little League and U-10 soccer teams. (Um, at home—I'm not demented enough to break it out for this purpose at practice. The only time I've ever taken the iPad to practice was to show Landon Donovan's goal [YouTube] to the soccer...

If Twitter is to be believed, we are now at DEFCON 1 for the fall semester: Either people are in it already, or will be incredibly soon.

In that spirit, I'll keep this short and just say good luck: I hope that everyone's classes are engaged and engaging. Don't get captured.

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Julian Dibbell has a thoughtful look at the radical opacity" of 4chan and its founder, Christopher Poole. In addition to the idea that "people deserve a place to be wrong," which has pedagogical implications, I liked the ending: Their uses may even be mutually necessary. [Jonah] Peretti puts it this way: if 4chan is the id of the Internet, then "Google is kind of like the ego, and Facebook is kind of like the superego." If that's so, then there's only one way the trend toward radical transparency won't end up killing the Internet's soul: if we can leave the light of...

More or less every night for the last seven years, I've sung "The Star-Spangled Banner" to our kid as he drifts off to sleep. He looks forward to it, and sings along about half the time. It's a sweet, patriotic moment—except for all the times I blank on the words.

It's not that I hate America, or somehow don't really know the lyrics: I've sung the anthem more than 2500 times over the past seven years—it's engraved in my mind. Every six months or so, though, I lose all recollection of three or fourlines for several nights in a row. (Like these poor souls [YouTube], except with less talent.) After about three nights, the lyrics come back, and everything's back to normal.

While I haven't started forgetting names yet—yet—this lyrical blackout has always felt like an harbinger of middle age, or of absentminded professordom, and so it was with great interest that I picked up Barbara...

Today, my department chair, Gil Gigliotti, returns to full-time teaching. He became chair a few days after I was hired in 2003, and so is the only chair I've ever known. He is a stand-up guy, flexible where he could be, and effective in some tough spots. I like the new chair, too, but will miss Gil's presence in the department office. Since Gil's a Sinatra scholar (A Storied Singer: Frank Sinatra as Literary Conceit and Sinatra...but buddy, I'm a kind of poem, today's video is for him.

Also, I can't embed this picture because of the Creative Commons license, but Jeffrey Veen has some good advice for everyone, perhaps especially for Gil. This week's links:

• This summer, Mark proposed The Great ProfHacker Offline Challenge; this week, the Times reports on some scientists who've actually studied the physical brain when it's disconnected from modern gadgets: Mr. Atchley says he can see ...

Mid-August is for one of two things: desperately piling in a bit more summer, or getting your semester started. (Or, I guess, getting your fantasy football team sorted.)

Whichever of these applies to you, good luck to your endeavors at this pivotal time of summer!

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Scott Berkun explains why a long-lasting public failure like Google Wave is better for learning/innovation than an immediate debacle like Microsoft Kin: An easy metric of innovation culture is learning – are people at all levels learning, sharing and growing from whatever happens, good or bad. Not lip-service. But actual learning, where people admit their own mistakes or oversights and what they themselves might have done differently (rather than the witch-hunt many big companies confuse with learning). (Via Michael Sippey)
• If you're having trouble deciphering the trendy...