"If we think that no-one is watching us and making value judgements about our community, our research, our relevance, and our output, then we are misguided."

When Melissa Terras spoke these words in her plenary presentation at the recent Digital Humanities 2010 conference, people listened and took these words to heart—at least in the corner of the DH community where I hang out, there's been a noticeable shift toward stepping up the game. I've also seen an energy ripple through the group; sure, there are days full up with the drudgery of writing grant application after grant application, and it might take a week to accomplish what should have taken a day, but underneath all of that is the ongoing fervent desire to make something new—a new process, a new path, even a new tool—not out of a need to justify one's scholarly existence, but because that neverending push through the...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

The completion of this week (and what a crazy week it was) marked the first week of the second year of ProfHacker, and we have high hopes for weeks to come.

We certainly hope you found something useful from our posts:

• Although the post Celebrating ProfHacker's First Anniversary was the first post of the week, the most popular post was Natalie's post From the Archives: On Syllabi and Course Design. I am a huge fan of the biweekly "From the Archives" features because it reminds me of all the great stuff our regular and guest contributors have created in the past year (and Natalie does a great job of pulling it all together).
• In other teaching-related posts, George rounded up the responses to his earlier post asking you Share Your Ideas for Evaluating Teaching....

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

We certainly hope you found something useful from our offerings this time around. Judging by the spectacular helpful and generous comments on numerous posts this week, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that yes, someone found something useful among our posts:

• George's call to Share Your Ideas for Evaluating Teaching led the way; look for a round-up post on this topic coming up next week.
• Also popular and full of good discussion was Billie's post on Disruptive Student Behavior: Meet the Thwarters
• Showing the diversity of our readers, the next most popular was Kathleen's post on suggestions how to OCR Those PDFs.
• Natalie's post on how and why to Discover Your Personal Organizational Style was also quite popular, as was my post on Using Mendeley for...

Both the concept and practice of revision control (also known as version control) are near and dear to my heart; a body of work as a technical writer, programmer, and project manager before moving over to academia made sure that particular personality trait was deeply ingrained. But during my time as a graduate student—when one might argue my sole purpose was to produce documents of one type or another—I completely lost touch with roots. For some reason, it didn't occur to me that everything I had learned and valued with regards to revision control would actually work in an academic setting. While I made it through an MA and then PhD without (much of) a hitch, looking back I can clearly see times when implementing revision control methods would have saved myself a lot of trouble—mental trouble if not actual writing troubles.

A few months ago, when I wrote A Gentle Introduction to...

One of the goals of ProfHacker is to experiment with new things and share our results, in the hopes that our experiences—whether positive or negative for us—may be useful to others. To that end, we might step out of our comfort zones and work with software (or processes or pedagogy) that we might not otherwise try. If you think about it, such a move can only ever be positive in the long run—either we learn something new and exciting and improve our workflow or we gain perspective on what it is about the status quo that we like so much.

Such is the case here; when I said I was going to write a post on Mendeley, the cross-platform desktop and web-based research management tool, everyone said "You? Who wears your Zotero jacket everywhere you go?" Hey, what I can I say? I wanted to see what all the hype was about.

Before I continue, let me just say that this post is in no way a...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

As an aside, does anyone else feel like this summer is passing by ridiculously quickly? I found myself working on my fall syllabus the other day. That's a sure sign the semester is right around the corner.

Anyway, we certainly hope you found something useful from our offerings this time around:

• I started the week off by talking about Using Portable Applications for Productivity; these little bit of software goodness really are wonderful.
• Jason followed this up with the most popular post of the week, Maybe We're Not That Busy: Laura Vanderkam's 168 Hours.
• In our biweekly "From the Archives" feature, Natalie reviewing previous ProfHacker posts concerning Calendars and Scheduling.
• In profession-related posts, Kathleen provided a report from the Digital...

In the recent Open Thread Wednesday, William Patrick Wend asked what are the most essential word processing skills for composition students?

Moments later, I saw the Lifehacker post on Preparing for College: Tech Essentials for Your First Year, which takes a look at "some of the most important hardware, software, and textbook tools you'll want in your arsenal when you matriculate." The "software" suggestions include note-taking applications like Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and Simplenote, and office suites like Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and Google Docs. Students definitely have many options, starting with hardware and then moving to the software that powers the hardware. Of course, there are students who have no options—these things aren't cheap, and most institutions do have computer labs of some type for their students to use...in which case students may be stuck with...

Because I am that lame teacher who uses the same gags over and over in class, at least once a week my students can count on me to pull my smartphone out of my pocket and look something up just to make the point that it is now possible to carry the entire Internet around in our pockets. Sure, I usually mention something about mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces (@souzaesilva) and so on, but the point of the gag is clear: the future is awesome because things are easier to carry and easier to integrate—they're portable.

A portable application is an application that lives entirely on a USB drive, external hard drive, or other portable device; you can access and run this application entirely off the media without installing anything or leaving a trace of data on the computer hosting your device.

Uses and types of portable applications vary greatly, from standalone application...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

We certainly hope you found something useful from our offerings this time around, even if it was a short week due to the (U.S.) holiday observed on Monday.

It was a good week for discussion in the comments of our posts, with more than 125 comments on the 12 posts this week—that's what we like to see (and read, and think about)!

• Heather got the discussion started by asking What is Your Bag?, and Ryan wrapped up that day by beginning an open forum on Responding to Your Institution's Technological Choices—lively, though different, discussions in both comment threads.
• Sandwiched between these posts was Kathleen's Brief Word from an Evernote Convert, which itself produced a bit of discussion.
• Nels kept up the spirit of sharing by asking readers to produce Your...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education

We certainly hope you found something useful from our offerings this time around.

It was a good week for technology posts; as a reminder, we try to provide a balance in our posts between pedagogy, productivity, the profession, and technology.

• The most popular post of the week was Ethan's 5 Applications I Simply Can't Live Without (and Why) (see the comments for more than just Ethan's five apps!).
• Continuing the trend of popular technology posts, guest author Mark Sample provided the first installment in a series: Hacking Your Library's Catalog: SMS and RSS. Ryan told us about Automating Research with Google Scholar Alerts, Brian returned to the "All Things Google" series with a post on Gmail Labs, George gave told us how to Simplify Your Scheduling: Doodle an...