My favorite part of the World Cup so far: Hearing cheers erupt from several different offices, each with the door closed, as folks watched the US-Algeria game on ESPN3.com. Isolated, but together.

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Roxie's World has an excellent take on what it really means to be loyal to your institution. Hint: It's not unquestioning fealty: We stand by the . . . call to invest (or reinvest) in the mechanisms of shared governance and other forms of collective action to try to save what's left of academic freedom and democracy on campus. . . . We revisit this topic, though, because we want to make it clear that loyalty might have been the wrong word for what we were actually talking about or that our definition of loyalty is what a lot of other folks might describe as, um, disloyalty.
• As a follow-up to Ryan's "Introduction to Google Voice," it's worth...

Today hasn't been the *best* news day for Twitter, the social media network devote to 140-character updates, and virtual birthplace of ProfHacker. The site's had performance issues again recently, plus it got cited by the FTC for privacy violations. A newspaper columnist even blamed it for taking down General McChrystal (now *there's* your performance issue)!

So is there a Twitter backlash coming, as there has been against Facebook? While there have been predictions of Facebook's demise for almost as long has there has been a site, recent predictions seem more well-reasoned:

Facebook, I believe, and to some extent the idea of social media in general, face a similar dilemma: the more they become everything, the less they mean anything. And when they lose their specific meaning, and with it their specific value, people will come to expect certain functions as normative and standard, and...

Given the historical associations between universities and the church, it's probably not surprising that a book on acedia, "spiritual sloth," or the inability to care, might resonate with academics. Or, as Kathleen Norris put it in her recent book on the topic, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, "Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value" (43).

Acedia is that feeling that afflicts almost anyone who is forced to commit to a certain kind of repetitive, undervalued work. Her three great examples are married life, and the commitment to another it requires; monastic life; and writing, especially poetry. Teaching certainly would count, and it's also not hard to imagine academic service as cognate in important ways with monastic life. (Especially for faculty with tenure! ...

The local public schools ended yesterday, so I think summer's offically here. I think that means more mornings at swimming lessons or video game design camp, and fewer ones catching up on stuff from the academic year . . . which is ok!

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• At one of his other sites, George is currently hosting "an experiment in audio transcription": Here’s the question we’d like to answer:
  Can a project involving audio or video recordings of spoken words rely on volunteers for transcription of interviews broken up across short clips?
• Shelley King compares the structural position of adjuncts to The Skin Horse (via The New Faculty Majority): These marks of recognition and respect from students, from colleagues and from anonymous peer reviewers help make us Real not just to others, but to ourselves: maintaining self-respect in the face of years of...

The American Association of University Professors had its annual meeting and conference on the state of higher education last weekend in DC. (Reporting: Chronicle / InsideHigherEd.com.) What usually garners attention from the press is the AAUP's censure votes, which makes sense, given the diligence and care that Committee A takes with its various reports--this year, about Antioch, Clark Atlanta, and U of Texas Medical Branch. The conference side of things, also draws press coverage--unusual, perhaps, for those of us in quieter fields.

I wanted to draw your attention, though, to five reasons you should pay attention the AAUP:

• The leadership--especially, but by no means exclusively, Cary Nelson, Gary Rhoades, and treasurer/Collective Bargaining Congress chair Howard Bunsis--have pretty much resolved the organization's financial difficulties of a few years back. In the not too...

It's a truism in software development that 80% of users will only use 20% of features. Any application or web service/website of any complexity will have features that the vast majority of users will never, ever see. Sometimes those features are just bloat, and could probably be shrunk without too much trouble.

But one user's bloatware is another person's cherished feature, so let's hear it: What under-used feature does everyone need to know about?

Mine is simple: Wikipedia's "Permanent version of this revision" feature, accessible on every page of the site. It solves one of the major citation problems around Wikipeda, in a simple and straightforward way.

No fair picking a *new* feature. For example, interactive transcripts on YouTube, which let you start playing a clip directly at the words you've searched for, just rolled out, so something like that is off limits. (Example: In...

I'm writing this week's post from the AAUP's national meeting and conference on the state of higher education, where attendees and delegates grapple with the national economic downturn, the rapid emergence (sometimes well thought out, usually not) of assessment and of online education, and much else. I'm here on union business, but all faculty concerned about the state of higher education can join.

Here are 5 links, plus a video, to start your weekend:

• To what extent are edupunks, DIY faculty, and, heck, we ProfHackers, useful idiots in the destruction of higher education? Jim Groom has a thoughtful reflection on the problem: What we are seeing is the gentrification of higher ed as an impulse to razing public education though the liberatory rhetoric of innovation and efficiency—only to have the process devoured by the wolves of the free market. I don't mind admitting that I'm...

At most schools, faculty can't see final evaluations until their grades are in, so the semester is well-and-truly over by the time they become available. And in previous ProfHacker posts on evaluations, I think we've established that there are basically three main schools of thought on what to do with them: the (deprecated) "throw 'em out" mindset; the "review them now while the course is fresh" approach; and the "save them until the next time you teach the course" view.

Before the summer humidity and/or heat wholly occludes the spring semester, here are five things you should consider doing with your evaluations:

• Especially if you are a grad student, postdoc, adjunct, or untenured faculty member, but also if you can still be promoted or if you are subject to posttenure review, make sure you are aware of your university's policy about evaluations. Do you need to preserve the...

Just wanted to mention that I'll be in DC for the AAUP's national meeting and conference on the State of Higher Education next week. Do drop me a line if you're interested in a meetup at some point--and, if you're on Twitter, follow #chrontweetup for a possible meetup of Chronicle writers and staff!

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Mark Sample has a must-read post (the comments are also excellent) on the emerging pedagogical possibilities of geolocative social media: The endeavor turns a consumer-based model of mobile computing into an authorship-based model. It is a uniquely collaborative activity, but also one that invites individual introspection. . . . It operates at the intersection between game and story, between reading and writing, between the real and the virtual.
• Re: Online Course Evaluations. As you surely know by now, the College has gone to a new online...

Ryan Cordell has recently rounded up various systems for managing and annotating PDFs. (See his original post, and the follow-up.) Those posts focused mostly on assimilating PDFs into your research, which is obviously critical.

But it's also the case that PDFs are the format-of-choice for many administrative tasks, both on campus and off. As union president, I spend a fair amount of time commenting on PDFs related to various policies and agreements on campus. As a state employee, there's a ton of paperwork anytime I want to do...just about anything (cf. Neal Stephenson on toilet paper policies).

One of the things I need, then, is a lightweight way to read, markup, and share PDFs with colleagues. A new favorite in this category is iAnnotate PDF, a $9.99 iPad app that puts markup and annotation tools at your fingertips.

The iPad turns out to be pretty good at this. It's a nice-size...