This weekend, the AAUP has its Summer Institute at San Diego State University. It's a training session, mostly for collective bargaining units. This year's highlight: an epic workshop on "understanding university financial statements."

First rule: Ignore budgets. (Second rule: When looking for money, no need to check under "instruction.") Focus on audited financial reports. Hey...is that coffee?

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Daniel Paul O'Donnell explains the urgency of technological education for humanities scholars: If the scholar who hires a student or asks for advice from their university's technical services does not know in broad terms what they want or what the minimum technological standards of their discipline are, they are likely to receive advice and help that is at best substandard and perhaps even counter-productive.
• Mike Caulfield offers...

Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, can be powerful platforms for discovering new, interesting, and relevant information from people with whom you share interests. (If you're not yet on Twitter, wait: There's a "how to use Twitter productively" post coming up at ProfHacker in a few weeks.) In addition to simple status updates, which can obviously turn into conversations, Twitter makes it easy to share links with your friends and followers. (For a provocative example of how this link-sharing acts as a kind of collective realtime editorial screening process, see Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Now.)

The problem with Twitter is one of scale. I mutually follow around 900 folks, because I write online for three sites, each of which have their own communities (this one, GeekDad, and Blog of a Bookslut. You should follow me, too.) Even if I were on Twitter all the time, which I'm not,...

One usually thinks of weather-related absences as a winter phenomenon, but strong storms and tornadoes can be just as disruptive in the summer. And since each day of a summer class is more or less the equivalent of a week...bad times.

Good thing climate change is a hoax, and we don't have to plan for unpredictable weather going forward, right?

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Paul Graham's essay this month on "The Top Idea in Your Mind" is unmissable. I particularly appreciate his point about letting wrongs go: Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me...

Last month, the archives of FEED, one of the first great webzines, came back online, after nine years' absence. FEED was a remarkable site: Beyond founding editors Stefanie Syman and Steven Johnson, writers like Clay Shirky, Alex Ross, Josh Marshall, Julian Dibbell, and countless others made their reputations in the first flush of online cultural criticism. Eventually, FEED would join forces with Suck.com, the other great arbiter of online taste, circa 1995-2001. (Especially if you were an overeducated humanities type, ideally still in graduate school. Or maybe on hiatus from grad school while you worked at an AI lab. Then, Tim Cavanaugh, Heather Havrilesky, and Steven Johnson were your gods.)

And then it all went away. While some of the site's authors reprinted their own essays on their own websites, it wasn't possible, as Julian Dibbell, laments, "to link to [them] in their...

As Natalie pointed out on Monday, the fall semester is nearly here, so it's time to get one's calendar in order. But there's also *just* enough time left this summer to get something meaningful accomplished on a research project. Rather than panic about time past, this is the opportunity to establish writing and reading habits that will survive the fall's demands.

(This is exactly why teaching in July's a pain: Every day rushes you simultaneously toward an end-of-semester grading binge and the need to re-calibrate for September.)

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• This pseudo-defense of Blackboard, by Phil Ice, takes a realistic view of innovation's appeal to most faculty: Granted, this majority might follow the lead of the innovators and early adopters and run an experiment with twittering in parallel with their courses, but if you think for a minute that these folks are ...

A few years ago, a colleague in my department asked me how to best interpret the odd timing of a class on a draft schedule. Was the chair wilfully disregarding his preferences? Trying to make sure the class failed? Angry that the colleague in question was offering one class and not another? My colleague was convinced that our chair was trying to send a message, but couldn't decide what it was.

Since becoming a union president, I now have similar conversations all the time. It's not enough for an administrator or a faculty member to make a particular decision, with particular consequences--there needs to be a message attached to it. Likewise, regardless of the merits of a particular position, I'll be asked to comment directly on it because "it's important to send a message."

I've come to believe that the whole "send a message" line of thinking is counterproductive. And, as is us...

Laura Vanderkam's 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (Penguin) has two genuine insights to offer. The first is right there in the subtitle: Many of us—especially those of us who claim to be insanely busy—probably aren't quite as overworked as we claim, and that it is in fact possible to fit in most of what you actually want to do during the typical week. The second follows more or less directly from the first: Become more self-conscious about how you use your time, and you will both accomplish more and be happier about it.

168 hours is, of course, the number of hours in a week. To show that we have more time than we think, Vanderkam relies on the American Time Use Survey and related time diaries, which peg our typical workweek at closer to 40 hours (or less!), rather than the 70+ workweeks that one hears so much of in the media. Time-diary surveys in particular suggest...

Summer teaching is the heroin of academe. Once you start, it's very, very hard to wean yourself off of the money, but you're left punchy and exhausted after the course ends, and you've eaten away your time for recovery or research. But, then again, the money. (And, crucially, the academic building is air-conditioned, whereas my house is not. We *never* get out early from class.)

In case it isn't obvious, my summer classes started this week. It never fails to surprise me how much more stressful a 4-day calendar (M-R) is than a 3-day calendar (MWF). With the breaks, there's more chance to do homework (or grading), more time to get over small slights or irritations, and more time to come up with fresh patter. In the summer, all that goes away.

But, then again, the money. And the a/c.

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• ProfHacker has written a lot about the wonders...

In the United States, today kicks off the 4th of July weekend, a holiday in which we commemorate the bravery of our nation's first citizens in forging a new ideal of freedom, equality, and opportunity.

Here in Connecticut, we just call today "furlough day*," thanks to the incapacity of our state leadership--like that in many other states--of imagining any other solution to our budget crisis--especially in an election year.

I'm pretty sure that's what the Founders would've wanted.

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Do you have e-mail apnea? I definitely do this: I wanted to know - how widespread is "email apnea*?" I observed others on computers and Blackberries: in their offices, their homes, at cafes -- the vast majority of people held their breath, or breathed very shallowly, especially when responding to email. I watched people on cell phones, talking and walking, an...

One of the only explicitly teaching-related iOS apps that I use is Attendance, a straightforward program by David Reed, a computer science professor at Capital University. I reviewed the app for Macworld.com upon its first release, and have used it religiously over the intervening 18 months.

Attendance has such a straightforward purpose that, frankly, I haven't paid much attention to the features added in recent updates. It turns out that Attendance is a universal app, in that it runs on iPhones, iPod Touches, and the iPad. While re-installing a copy on my iPad to get ready for summer teaching next week, and with a new version available in iTunes, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a fresh look at the app.

I liked the app because, with a 4/4 teaching load, I need things to be simple and convenient. Once you have the student names entered (more on this in a second), Attendance...