We all know better than to use “12345″ or our date of birth as a password for securing our data. But, even though we take care not to use passwords that are too obvious, a lot of us have a tendency to recycle the same set of passwords over and over, and it’s not uncommon for some of us to use passwords that aren’t genuinely secure.

It’s understandable. Often enough, it’s sanity maintenance. I know I’ve rolled my eyes when my institution, for security reasons, periodically demands that I change my password on some of my databases (and won’t let me recycle passwords I’ve used recently). I know why they insist on it. They’re right to insist on it, especially given the sensitivity of some of the student data that faculty work with. Just yesterday, Lifehacker ran a post on why it’s so important to use strong passwords. Having your password at RockYou compromised may...

Even if one doesn’t buy into the idea that blogging=street cred, a good number of folks are thinking about moving away from using a full-blown CMS such as Blackboard, Moodle, or Angel and using blogs to manage their courses instead.

For those who are considering that route, what are some of the tools that come in handy, especially if you’re teaching multiple courses? We’ve written about a number of these tools already here at ProfHacker; consider this a “round-up” post of sorts.

A blogging platform. There are a lot of options out there, both free and paid. Among the most common are Blogger, WordPress (which can be hosted at WordPress.com or on your own domain), WordPress MU, and TypePad. If you’re looking at running WordPress on your own domain, you’ll need to decide whether to choose standard WordPress or WordPress MU.

A hosting service. Though there are good free...

If you like what you see in the WordPress platform and you only maintain one blog, a standard WordPress installation will probably work just fine for you. But if you’re thinking of using blogs in conjunction with your courses, you’d do well to consider installing WordPress Mu (Multi-User) instead.

Why?

Here I can best speak from my own recent decision to move to WordPress Mu. I’d had some minor issues in the past with hosting course blogs at free sites, and had decided I wanted more direct control over my blogs in any case–including the ability to make use of a wide range of plugins and themes. So, late last spring, I bit the bullet and decided to pay for hosting. I started installing course blogs on my own domain just before the fall semester began.

It’s gone well; I have a lot more control over my blogging setup than I did before. I also like the idea that, since the...

I read a lot of blogs. And I do mean a lot: I just checked, and I have 197 of them in my list. And something tells me I’m really not all that unusual. Academics and news junkies tend to read a lot. Add in an interest in technology, and you’ve got a recipe for a reading list that never ends.

How to manage all that information? The tool I’ve found incredibly helpful for staying on top of my reading is Google Reader.

Google Reader is a great timesaver. I can’t imagine manually going to each of the sites I read; it would take forever. Just how long does it take me to get through those 197 feeds on any given day? Not more than 30-60 minutes, depending on how many items I decide I actually want to devote my time to reading in any depth.

I can get through my daily reading list so quickly because Google Reader shows me my news feeds in headline form. Let’s face it: most days, most...

It’s late. You’re trying to finish a writing project, and you recall that a previous conference paper you wrote contains some passages that would be very helpful. You search your hard drive, looking for the paper.

Uh oh. It isn’t there. You begin to feel some despair about having to reconstruct your brilliant ideas from memory. Then you remember that you submitted the paper electronically to your professional association. Hurrah! You rush off to the relevant website and download the paper, looking forward to copying, pasting, and reworking the sections you need.

You fire up your PDF reader and select the text, head to the Edit menu, and … discover that the Copy option is grayed out. Someone has protected the file, and neglected to give you the password. Grr.

Now what?

If you’re a GMail user, you might be in luck. Give the following a try:*

• Once you’ve downloaded the file,...

In last week’s post, I gave a quick overview on getting started with Zotero. This week, I want to provide a brief introduction to using Zotero groups and synchronization.

To get started, you’ll want to set up a Zotero account for yourself.

At the main Zotero page, click on “register.”

Fill out the form and CAPTCHA, and you’re all set with your account.

Now that you have that done, you might wish to explore Zotero groups.

Groups can be public or private, and you can control both who can join, and what group members can do. Above you see two groups I belong to. The first is a place where my student assistant (the only other member of the private group) can share resources she’s found that might be useful for a project I’m working on. The second is an open, public group that I’m a member of (and to which, I must somewhat sheepishly admit, I’ve contributed no...

Some time back, Jason wrote about organizing class files, student work, etc. In that post, he offered an excellent and succinct bit of advice: “Don’t file. Search.”

“But what should I hold on to so that I can search for it later?” you might ask. “What will I actually need two, four, five, or ten years from now?”

Stuff we use in our classes from one semester to another is fairly intuitive; it doesn’t take us too many semesters to figure out what we’ll reuse and what we won’t. But what should we keep track of for broader purposes of professional development and advancement?

When I was just getting started, a more senior colleague offered me an excellent bit of advice: “Start a wordprocessing file titled ‘review’ or ‘professional activity’ or something similar. Every time during the year that you do anything that should go on your CV or in your annual review, make a note of it...

I’m old enough to be the parent of some of my students (the first-years, anyway). If you want some idea of what that means in the history of computing, my first introduction to a computer came in the sixth grade; we had a Commodore PET in our classroom. At home, my brother and I begged for the Sears knockoff of the Atari system one Christmas. The first computer we had in our home was the Commodore 64.

When I started trying to integrate technology into my courses, I made two assumptions:

• I have no formal training in the use of computer technology. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned because it was something I needed or wanted to know, and I was willing to experiment as needed to figure it out. Due to my lack of training, I really don’t know much.
• My students have had much more exposure to computers than I had growing up.

Based on these two assumptions, I...

(co-authored by Brian Croxall and Amy Cavender)

It’s not an understatement to say that Google, its products, and its actions are a constant subject of interest to people across the world. There is no exception to this point in higher education; just look at recent episodes of the Digital Campus podcast (a ProfHacker-recommended listen if there ever was one). Recently the buzz around Google in academia and elsewhere has been focused on Google Wave. According to one of its principal developers, Lars Rasmussen, Wave was developed in response to the question, “What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?”

We at ProfHacker plan to give you our own take on Wave in the near future, but it’s worth noting that while that system might be designed to replace email, email is still one of the primary tools we use as academics. And for many of us, you can’t really be...