Ah…tenure. The hope. The dream. The grail. And Stephan Pastis understands why:

Something to look forward to.

So I was intrigued last week to read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the move toward digital tenure files at Kent State University, Virginia Tech, and others. It’s a fine article about a practice that has been too slow in coming. Most of the discussion is with administrators, however, and I wish they’d had some commentary from professors going through the process at the moment, such as Cheryl E. Ball at Illinois State University, who not only has her digital tenure file posted for all to see (most of it anyway), but also has a video explaining why she is using this format.

How is your institution dealing with the physical products of tenure these days? How else can one simplify a process that is perhaps the most important (and time consuming)...

As I’ve been transitioning from one email system at my old institution to another at the new–to say nothing of doing my daily juggle of my personal email accounts–I’ve been reflecting on some good advice I’ve read in the past about handling email effectively.

• Perhaps the phrase that has most stuck in my head about email is to just “touch it once,” something that Paul English writes about. I’m not quite there yet, but endeavoring to only read each email once has changed how I work.
• Of course, the end product of one-touch email is that you’ll end up with the state of Nirvana known as “Inbox Zero.” Merlin Mann’s tips for email–as well as just getting your stuff done–at his 43 Folders should be required reading for every Prof. Hacker (provided you’ve finished what matters most already).

How do you handle email effectively?

[Image by flickr user will-lion...

via www.coverbrowser.com

I wanted to draw attention to some of the comments in Jason’s post on incorporating learning goals into one’s syllabus. Bill Wolff writes briefly about his experience using the Learning Record, a system for evaluating students’ development over a long period of time (i.e., a semester).

John Jones then provided a link to video of a UT Austin workshop–where the Learning Record was developed–explaining the Learning Record’s methodology. John humbly neglected to mention his own recent, smart post at the HASTAC blog on using the Learning Record.

I have looked into the Learning Record approach a few times over the last year, but have ultimately decided against grading differently (pace Derrida) because, as Bill put it in his comment, “my time is too limited.” The Learning Record seems like it would be a very effective way to measure actual...

In the last two months, the way I read the Internet has completely changed. And I’m not talking about finally getting the F-shaped pattern down. Rather, my reading has become asynchronous through a simple Firefox plugin: Read It Later. Let me explain what I mean.

I start my day with Twitter. It’s the best way for me to track what’s happening in my research network of other academics who share my interests. Inevitably, I’m lead to multiple fascinating articles which I want to read, but which I also know will distract me from the task at hand. (Like all purveyors of productivity, Prof. Hacker suggests that you tackle what matters most, first.) In the past, this has either meant (1) leaving multiple tabs open within Firefox, which I would hope to get back to later (never did) or (2) or saving links to Delicious. I know many people that use Delicious effectively, but for me Delicious ...

Proving that he is not only forward thinking about making his research open, Mark Sample yesterday wrote about making teaching evaluations public. Why–he reasons–allow a self-selected group of student to provide public feedback on a site like RateMyProfessor when he has the full spectrum of qualitative and quantitative data from a much wider sample (pardon the pun) of his students?

Sample is using Scribd to host PDFs of his evaluations and has even released them under a Creative Commons license, anticipating that someone might come up with a way to remix them. This is something that I plan to do myself in the near future. But since I know I’m prone to moving toward openness like this, I wonder reasons one might have for keeping evaluations private. Thoughts?

As I’m currently moving to a new institution and a slate of new courses, I’ve been grateful for colleagues who are willing to share past syllabi. I’ve always believed that pedagogy is simply a fancier name for “borrowing and remixing,” and I think most others in the profession feel this way.

When it gets to our research, however, we tend to clam up. We don’t want to share until we’re quite done with a topic on the chance that we’ll get scooped. Which is why Mark Sample’s recent post on sharing his Zotero library feels so revolutionary (or is that common sensical?). He not only explains why he’s doing this, but he shows you how to roll your own RSS feed using Dapper and Yahoo Pipes so you too can show others on your blog what you’ve “Recently Zoteroed.”

The more academics show their work–while they’re still working on it–the more we can learn, borrow, and remix from one another.

One of Prof. Hacker’s favorite tools is Zotero, the Firefox plugin that allows you to build a bibliography within your browser and to share that bibliography with others. Zotero extracts bibliographic information from thousands of websites, making the creation of a bibliography much more of a one-click solution rather than an encounter with hundreds of 3×5 cards, several of which are sure to go missing and one of which is sure to provide a papercut.

But what if you would like to make your website compatible with Zotero? If your website is built on WordPress.org (as this one is), the process is really very simple. Just download the ScholarPress Coins plugin (created by Zotero’s developers) and add it to your plugin directory. Once you’ve activated the plugin from the dashboard, your posts will have the data that they need to be incorporated into anyone’s Zotero library.