I've written before about Using Super Smartphones for Productivity (and then an update on the same topic), but by far my smartphone productivity increased dramatically simply by using Swype, an input method for Android-based devices.

[The remainder of this post discusses an Android-only application, so you iPhone users are out of luck...except I do talk about Swype for the iPhone and an iPhone Swype alternative.]

My super smartphone of choice is the Motorola Droid; I've had one for almost eight months now. When I upgrade, I will upgrade to either the HTC Incredible or the Motorola Droid X—I haven't thought much about it, because my Droid is dandy. One of the selling points of the original Droid was the slide-out physical keyboard, but I rarely used it because I became quickly (and completely) enamored of a beta version of the Swype virtual keyboard.

I demoed Swype to everyone I met. ...

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, such as:

• This week's most popular post was written by Jeff McClurken and myself; the post, 'How are you going to grade this?': Evaluating Classroom Blogs, grew out of a conversation we had at the University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy, in which Jeff expressed a glimmer of an idea for a post, and I tricked him into writing it by saying I would contribute my two cents. Hey, whatever gets Jeff to write more posts....
• Posts on teaching-related issues were popular and generated good discussion. In addition to the post about evaluating classroom blogs noted above, Ethan wrote about the very important topic of Understanding FERPA & Educational Records Disclosure, Heather...

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, such as:

• This week's most popular post (by a wide margin) was Amy's post on Responding to Plagiarism (a followup to last week's post on Preventing Plagiarism.
• Heather's post on Leaving a Job Gracefully was also very popular and generated a good discussion.
• Speaking of good discussions, several posts asked specific questions and elicited great responses and conversation: Jason started off the week by asking What's Your Favorite Under-Used Feature? and George asked How Many Monitors Do You Use? Guest Author Mark Sample asked if you were up for The Great ProfHacker Offline Challenge, and I didn't ask a question but rounded up answers to a previous one in What Do You Wish You Had...

Two weeks ago I asked ProfHacker readers "What is one thing (related to your field or not) that you wish you had the time or opportunity to learn?" That post received numerous comments and the answers were so interesting that I thought I would round them up in this post.

Then, with the ideas in front of us, perhaps we could offer suggestions that would help each other gain some new skills in these areas.

• languages: drnels wishes he had spent more time learning Japanese (as does velvis and sahara), kaitlinwalsh wishes she had picked up Latin, cnast would like to have learned to speak Plattdeutsch, csgirl and jamesholloway both want to learn Mandarin, and cmanderson and jalvarez would have liked to learn more Spanish. Learning languages was a popular answer!
• technology: On the other hand, some of kaitlinwalsh's fellow doctoral students in modern languages wish they had learned more...

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, such as:

• Two of this week's most popular posts were firmly in the technology camp: Ryan's An Introduction to Google Voice was a big winner, as was Kathleen's Impressions After Two Months of Using an iPad. You can also read Kathleen's thoughts about the iPad in The Chronicle Review, in Do You Like Your E-Reader?: Six takes from academics. The aforementioned article also includes a response from friend-of-ProfHacker and upcoming guest author Mark Sample.
• Teaching posts were also quite popular, such as Jason's Five Things to Do With Evaluations Before the Summer Really Starts and Brian's Reflections on Teaching with Social Media. Nels's How to Apply for Adjunct Positions was also...

A 2008 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education described the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute as "Summer Camp for Digital Humanists".  This is a slightly fancier term than what fellow ProfHacker Natalie Houston calls "grown up nerd camp," but I would argue the latter is more accurate. Call it what you will, but Natalie and I are both happy participants in this digital humanities extravaganza this week on the campus of the University of Victoria (yes, there are bunnies, and depending on your traveling methods, also whales).

What follows is a brief rundown of the event from the perspective of someone sitting in the middle of it at the moment, and ends with a call for participation in next year's event, which promises to be even more exciting.

What is DHSI?

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute  is a week-long event in which participants register for one of (currently)

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

NOTE! Beginning on Monday, June 7th, we will change our publishing schedule to 8am, 11am, and 3pm Eastern time, Monday through Friday.

We certainly hope you found something useful from our offerings this time around, such as:

• I started off the week by asking a question: What Do You Wish You Had Learned? I received a lot of interesting responses detailing the one thing (or things) that readers wish they had the time or opportunity to learn. I will be writing a follow-up post on this topic next week.
• But the most popular post of the week was George's how-to Create Your Syllabus With a Spreadsheet and a Calendar App . Hopefully this proves useful to those of you getting a head-start on your fall syllabi (or that pesky summer syllabus).
• As with all the entries...

I've spent a lot of time recently talking to people who wish they had learned Skill X or Skill Y during their time in graduate school, or at least somewhere along the path toward their current position, but didn't have the time or opportunity to do so. These conversations have prompted me to begin collaborating with others in my (loosely-defined) field to develop a project to provide humanities scholars with technical skills.

But my little project isn't the topic of this post (although I'm happy to babble on about it, it's true). Instead, on this relatively quiet holiday Monday I thought it might be interesting for commenters to reflect upon skills you wish you had learned, are in the process of learning, or would be interested in learning if you had unlimited extra time and free opportunities to do so.

For instance, although I've spent the last fifteen years planning, designing, and ...

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 the fifteen or so offerings this time around, such as:

• Ryan's roundup of reader responses to the question "How Do You Organize and Annotate PDFs?", in which he discussed software that ProfHacker readers mentioned in the comments to his original post two weeks ago.  This post was the big winner as far as number of page views and comments this week, as many of you took the section on "Further Conversation" to heart and added to the post, and that's what we like to see: everyone sharing good stuff.
• Natalie's post Is E-Mail Checking You? was also very popular, showing that once again she has her finger on the pulse of overwhelmed academics everywhere (I kid. A little).
• Nels continued the "Open Letter" series by...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education. Many ProfHackers were at conferences (together! in person!) this week, such as Computers & Writing and THATCamp. At Computers & Writing, ProfHacker was awarded the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award from Kairos. We are grateful to whomever nominated us, are proud to share the award with Viz, and to be in such company as past winners: Dennis Jerz, Alex Reid, Liz Losh, Clancy Ratliff, Collin Brooke, and Jenny Edbauer Rice [Ed. note: links currently broken for the last, but rest assured Jenny is wonderful].

Whew.

We certainly hope you found something useful from the fifteen or so offerings this time around, such as:

• Guest author Shawn Miller's post on Taking a Minute to Collect Your Thoughts with Evernote. Shawn's post would have been the most popular...