Here at ProfHacker, we write a lot about the tools we use. Some of these are of the “techie” variety, but not all. In this post, I’d like to briefly make note of a few tools that I use on a daily basis (two of them digital, two not) and explain how use them, and invite readers to share some of their own.

• Dropbox. Jason reviewed this service back in September. I can’t imagine working without it. I use it to keep critical files in sync between my home and office machines. It’s also handy in the classroom, as it makes any materials I may need for class readily accessible via the web.
• Google Documents. For many of the reasons Julie mentioned a while back, I gave Google Documents a try with the students in my Political Science writing class last semester. It worked well, and I now use it regularly in all my classes.
• A Rollabind notebook (that I picked up at a local Staples store...

If we’ve been fortunate, most of us in academia have benefited from good mentoring. Sometimes, though, we’re not fortunate enough to have a mentor, and/or we’ve got questions that we’re pretty sure are really common. In such instances, there are a number of books (broadly categorizable as “academic professional development” of “self-help for academics”) that may be helpful.

I got to thinking about these sorts of books when Billie mentioned Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success on Twitter a little over a week ago. (The book looks intriguing, and I’m planning to acquire a copy soon.) Here, I mention some other titles that I’ve found useful over the years.

With two exceptions (one of which pretty clearly dates me a bit), all of the books in the list have editions published within the last six years, so they’re...

OK, this post isn’t really about the second day of the Great Lakes THATCamp; it’s really about a few things I learned both days. But @jlknott made me laugh so hard over the weekend that I couldn’t resist having some fun with the post title.

I had the good fortune to be one of the campers at the Great Lakes THATCamp held at Michigan State University this past weekend, and organized by a marvelous team of people (scroll down to the “Who is Organizing…” section of the camp’s About page to meet them). In this post, I offer a few brief thoughts about what I saw and heard.

The first morning, I made it a point to attend a few sessions on things I didn’t know much about, so I attended sessions on:

• Geospatial tools. I was familiar with things like Google Maps and Google Earth, of course, but I’d never thought about all the other geospatial tools that are available, or ...

Ever have one of those days at work in which you know you’ve been busy all day, but you can’t quite point to just what you’ve accomplished? Regulating (not eliminating!) media use may be worth considering.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a heavy user of technology and social media. I’m a big fan of All Things Google, I use an Android-based smartphone for keeping track of both the personal and professional aspects of my life, and I run my course blogs on a WordPress MU installation.

Heck, I even got connected with Team ProfHacker because of my use of social media.

But sometimes, digital media just get in the way. Last weekend, I finally took some time to watch PBS’s recent Frontline feature, Digital Nation. There’s lots to think about there, and the program does a good job of portraying both the benefits and the drawbacks of our near-constant use of technology.

What...

At many schools, the middle of the semester is nearly upon us. It can be a stressful time for students and faculty alike.

If we’re giving midterm exams, we don’t really want our students to take the advice on the banner shown in this post’s image. Frankly, we’d also rather not do the professorial equivalent.

What steps can we take to lower the stress level for our students and for ourselves?

There are probably as many answers to that question as there are college teachers, but here’s what I’m doing:

• I’m providing my students with a review sheet so they know how best to focus their efforts as they prepare.
• I hold a review session before the exam. The agenda for this session is completely up to the students, and they have the review sheet in advance of this session.
• I’m not giving midterm exams in all of my courses. In one of my courses, it makes good sense to have more...

About a month ago, Ryan Cordell gave a great overview of a fine task manager: Cultured Code’s Things. It’s a powerful application. I was intrigued enough by it that I actually purchased a copy last summer.

I ended up deciding, though, that it wasn’t quite right for me, for two reasons:

First, I have separate work and home machines, and I need to keep them in sync with each other. Yes, using a service like Dropbox, it’s possible to keep two machines in sync with one another, but as Ryan noted, you have to be cautious when doing that. I’ve had enough experience with data lost to bad synchronization that I didn’t want to risk losing my tasks to stupid user error.

The other deciding factor for me came in September, when I moved to an Android phone (I’d been using Things on an iPod Touch). There is, unfortunately, no Things app for Android (nor is there a web interface)...

I’m something of a neat freak (perhaps that’s a function of my Myers-Briggs type?). I like a clean desktop, whether that’s my actual desktop, or the one on my computer. I literally keep nothing on my computer desktop. When I need to launch something, I usually just use Quicksilver.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that I like a clean email inbox, too.

I haven’t yet achieved my goal of Inbox Zero. That’s probably because I’ve yet to fully implement and be faithful to a good system for managing my tasks and projects. There are almost always some emails that need to stay in my inbox, just so I don’t forget about them.

Even with my bad habits, though, I’m generally able to keep my inbox at fewer than ten messages; on good days, it’s fewer than five (right now I’m at two–hurrah!).

I’ve found that one of the easiest ways to keep my inbox under control is to...

Balance? In academic life? What’s that?

We all know it’s hard to attain. Though academic life can provide us with a great deal of flexibility, it seems that our work is never finished. There’s always something we could be working on–and often enough we feel like we should be working on it.

We can manage our projects and action lists using a system like Getting Things Done. What about life balance more generally?

Natalie has written about this before, pointing out that balance isn’t something we achieve, but something that that we strive for, making course corrections as we go.

Those course corrections are often the purpose of resolutions that we make for the beginning of a new year or term.

At my institution, we’re just completing the fourth week of the semester, so it’s a good time to reflect on resolutions that I’ve made with the intention of maintaining some semblance of...

You knew that sooner or later one of us would end up doing a Wikipedia post, didn’t you?

Yes, it’s a resource with some potential pitfalls for students. In fact, I’ve been known to point my students to Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala to illustrate one of those pitfalls: sometimes, the information it contains is inaccurate. It’s precisely this sort of problem that led the History Department at Middlebury to ban citations of Wikipedia in student work.

Well, of course college and university students shouldn’t be citing Wikipedia in their work, any more than they should be citing any other encyclopedia–as was noted in an Inside Higher Ed article on the citation ban at Middlebury. And yes, Wikipedia does have a wider range of contributors–some very knowledgeable about their subject, others less so–than more traditional encyclopedias, and it’s good to caution student...