The start of the fall academic calendar has meant an uptick in our readership here at the Chronicle and with it the need to revisit a couple of points. Also, keep reading to find out how you, too, can write for ProfHacker.

First, ProfHacker started life as an independent group blog a little more than a year ago, and moved to the Chronicle in late April 2010. We still retain editorial independence, and are not staffed by Chronicle writers or editors. ProfHacker is a community of academics, first and foremost, and, in conversation with that community, sets its own agenda for improving the lives of those working in academe.

Second, ProfHacker doesn't want to tell you what to do. The ethos at ProfHacker isn't, "we're the experts, and you should be like us." It's "Here's something I've tried—what works for you?" As George is often fond of saying, ProfHacker isn't about us, it's about ...

[This is a guest post by Dr. Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library. (That's the Scholars' Lab to you and me.) Bethany blogs and can be found on Twitter. She's currently editing an open-access collection of essays by #alt-ac professionals and serving as both associate director of the Scholarly Communication Institute and vice president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.]

By now, avid ProfHacker readers will have encountered the cipher "#alt-ac:" a neologism and Twitter hashtag that marks conversations about "alternate academic" careers for humanities scholars. Here, "alternate" typically denotes neither adjunct teaching positions nor wholly non-academic (what-color-is-your-parachute, maybe-should-have-gotten-an-MBA) jobs—about which, in comparison, advice is easy to find.

Instead, the #alt-ac label speaks to...

[This is a guest post by Louisa A. Burnham, Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College.]

I am an academic medievalist, and I have spent six weeks traveling this summer with no other computer than my iPad. Here are some thoughts about my experience. First off, the technical details: I have the 64g WiFi iPad, and I traveled in Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, Spain and Andorra. I was mostly on the road for two weeks (Israel, Jordan and Cyprus), and mostly in one place (Barcelona) for a month.

Connectivity

I had to rely on WiFi, and mostly did just fine on the road, with the usual "this hotel's WiFi sucks" kinds of problems.

For Barcelona, however, I brought along a travel router, since I knew that I could get an ethernet connection in my room but not WiFi. This was brilliant. I had my own little WiFi zone just for me! Email, internet, no problem. I didn't Skype at all, so I can't tell you...

[This is a guest post by Derek Bruff, assistant director at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and senior lecturer in mathematics at Vanderbilt.  You can follow Derek on Twitter (@derekbruff) and on his blog, where he writes about educational technology, student motivation, and visual thinking, among other topics. At ProfHacker, he has written about Multiple Choice Questions on Exams, Pre-Class Quizzes on Wordpress, and Motivating Students with Application Projects and Poster Sessions.]

On Jennifer Imazeki's great Economics for Teachers blog, Jennifer recently asked for suggestions why one might make the jump from "regular" bookmarking (saving interesting websites using the bookmarks or favorites tool in your browser) to social bookmarking (using an online service like Delicious or Diigo to save those interesting websites). Jennifer's post got me thinking about why I'm a fan ...

[This is a guest post by Nate Kogan, who teaches upper school history at Fort Worth Country Day in Fort Worth, TX, and is also a second-year doctoral student at the University of Texas at Arlington studying Transatlantic History. He blogs at The History Channel This Is Not....]

Unfortunately, for those of you hoping to read something more gruesome than what follows, the "sacrificial lamb" I write about in this post is neither a literal lamb, nor is it some new type of technology. Instead, I'll be musing about a particular pedagogical approach: using a text in a class for the primary purpose of showing students what not to do.

In preparation for some of my doctoral classes this fall, I've been meeting with a fellow grad student to get a head start on our reading and ease our workload (at least a little bit) for the upcoming semester. Independently, we both found a number of problems...

[This is a guest post by Shannon Polchow, an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina Upstate. You can communicate with her at spolchow@uscupstate.edu.]

Just like most educators, I view teaching as a process. After incorporating a new activity or giving a new course, I reflect upon the outcomes. What went well? What failed? Sometimes I know the modifications I would make the next time around, but other times I look to my student evaluations for guidance. This recently happened after teaching an introductory Spanish class online. While I felt that the class had gone well, a student's simple observation led me to my latest modification: find a way for students interact with one another in an online setting. The online forum I employed enabled me to speak in an asynchronous fashion with my students, but it did not allow them to communicate with one another,...

[This is a guest post by Matt Thomas, a PhD Candidate in American Studies at the University of Iowa. You can follow him on Twitter: @mattthomas.]

If you spend time browsing the Web, you undoubtedly come across stuff you don't want to or simply can't deal with right away. It could be an article you want to read, a website you want to explore, an audio clip you want to listen to, a video you want to watch, or a piece of software you want to try out. Tools like Instapaper and Read It Later make it easy to save these things for later. But what do you do when you come across a tweet you don't want to or simply can't deal with right away but that you'd like to save for later, either because it's inherently interesting to you or because it contains a link to something you want to check out when you have more time?.

Twitter offers a built-in solution to this problem: Twitter favorites. [Editor's...

On occasion, the ProfHacker contributors collaborate on posts ranging from professional advice and software tips to...some that are a little more fun than that. Take, for instance, last year's Holiday Gift Guide. In that post, each of us listed three or four items we thought would make nifty gifts for others (or for ourselves, even).

Now that summer is winding down and most of us are heading back to school very soon, it's time for another fun collaborative post, one that discusses the five things that helped us survive summer. While it's perhaps a little late for you to make use of these things during the summer, we think that there's a good chance they could prove useful in the fall as well. And if not? Well, summer is only 10 months away!

We hope that you enjoy this post as much as we enjoyed putting it together; this post more than any other gives you a clear sense of our...

[This is a guest post by Jason Mittell, Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College. Jason blogs at Just TV.]

In my previous post, I detailed how the new DMCA exemption allows all faculty to legally rip excerpts from DVDs for educational purposes, whether in-class lectures, online posting in a digital publication, or at conference presentations. (Anyone interested in the legal issues raised by the ruling should definitely read law professor and fair use advocate Peter Jaszi's commentary.) I have found that even among film & media studies professors, who have had a similar but more narrow exemption in place since 2006, one of the chief obstacles to exercising this right to rip is not legal, but technological. Even faculty who are fluent in video editing software can find the ripping process technically cumbersome and confusing.

It's important to...

[This is a guest post by Gerry Canavan, a graduate student in the Program in Literature at Duke University who is writing his dissertation on British and American science fiction in the twentieth century. He can be found at his blog and on Twitter at @gerrycanavan. Jason B. Jones will be back with more Weekend Reading next week.]

Sixty-five years ago today, the United States detonated an atomic bomb two thousand miles above the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Last year the Boston Globe's Big Picture blog marked the occasion with photographs from that day and its aftermath; I have also always been struck by the Ground Zero 1945 art created by survivors at Children of the Atomic Bomb.

With solemnity, here are some links to start off the weekend:

• The New York Times caused a stir yesterday with its report that Google and Verizon have been having secret meetings to create tiered Internet service, ...