The title of this post emerged at home a couple of weeks ago: the seven-year-old [YouTube] barked it at his mother as she tried to juggle, simultaneously, helping him with a convoluted craft/project *and* improving a policy that had been held up by the senate. He complained that she was taking too long answering an e-mail; she responded that he should trust that she was coming back; and he flipped the script: "Mom, you can't be trusted if you're trusted with too much."

There's a tricky moment in any career: When you're starting out, you want to be appreciated for your abilities, and are often frustrated that you're not being asked to do certain things that you think are within your skill set. Over time, you start to earn more respect from your colleagues, and are given more responsibilities . . . until there comes a time when you wake up in a panic every day about what you need to...

In the US, of course, this weekend is Memorial Day. There are regional variations, though--New Britain, CT, my fair city, has its parade on the actual day of Memorial Day, no matter when it's observed. So, even though most towns will have their Memorial Day festivities on Monday, ours will be Sunday. Everybody's gotta be different. Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• Lukas Mathis argues that the current state of multitouch computing is arguably closer to the command line than people think. (Via Daring Fireball.) Mathis argues: Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface.
  
  Of course, gestural computing seems to be working ok for this guy.
• Chad Sansing...

Let's take it as read that in most ways the spring semester is better than the fall. (It's followed by graduation and then summer; the days get brighter and longer and warmer; the campus greenery returns, rather than dies, etc.) One special challenge in the spring, however, is that youth sports leagues ramp up right about the same time that the semester gets crazed. In the fall, it's less of a problem because most outdoor sports for kids finish by early November, at least in states that have the usual complement of four seasons.

For the past 3 years, I've coached both soccer and baseball, in both the spring and the fall. (This is *slightly* comical, because I never played organized baseball--never even went to a tryout.) I do this for all the usual reasons: I don't want some other kid's Crazy Sports Dad to have the power to ruin my kid's season. Plus, my father coached rec sports...

Today marks the end of exams at my campus. Not only do seniors graduate tomorrow, but, as always, the end of the semester also marks a fresh opportunity to bury the semester's bodies, and move on.

In that spirit, here are five links to start off the weekend:

• If there's anyone on earth that we here at ProfHacker love as much as The Hold Steady, it's Merlin Mann (podcast evidence). He's been working on a talk (mostly for undergrads) called "Future-Proofing Your Passion"--he gave a version last year at CCSU--and this week posted a text version. Every undergrad should read it: I think this is about how being an adult is not only unbelievably complicated in ways that you can’t begin to imagine—that it’s frequently defined by impossible decisions and non-stop layers of "hypocrisy"—but that there’s an invisible but entirely real risk to doggedly chasing the theoretically...

Classes ended at my university this week--followed immediately by the return of spring-like temperatures--so there's an air of optimism under all the anxiety. Despite all the grading, semesters really do end.

Here are five links to start off the weekend:

• I'm not sure this column about Askers vs. Guessers is as life-changing for most people as advertised, but I'm positive it explains a significant amount of tension in academic life. It's how you get two parties complaining, simultaneously, "Who the hell does she think she is, asking to teach that class?" on the one hand, and, on the other, "Why haven't they asked me to teach that class yet?" or "Why are they asking me to teach this class when they know I'm so busy?": An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no....

This has been a long, fascinating, complicated stressful year: in short, an academic year like most others. The most interesting things about it were that George and I started this blog, and I served out my first year as union president--thus far, apparently without any attempt at recall.

Since classes end for us tomorrow, I thought it would be an opportune time to reflect on the five things I learned this year:

• Not everyone has an iPod; if you give everyone one, they can't all get one to work without help; not everyone has access to internet/computers at home. "Digital native" is one of the most bankrupt labels you'll ever come across.
• If you accept work in electronic formats, then every minute you spend teaching naming conventions at the start of the semester buys you up to 10 minutes per student over the course of the semester.
• Deep down, in their heart of hearts, most...

Rumor has it that this puppy will arrive at our house today. This will be good news, in that it will ease our kid's excitement; on the other hand, the books on the lower bookshelves of our home are already negotiating for a higher spot, the better to escape a boxer puppy's teeth!

Here are five-ish links to start off the weekend:

• Duelling views of the HTML 5/Open Web/Flash argument: Ian Bogost, arguing that the insistence on Flash might be "an indictment of the state of computational literacy"; Ben Ward on the difference between platforms and the web, which is content; and Tim Bray on the idea that "every interesting application, more or less, is already a web application."
• Using Google Wave as a "scratchpad for collaborative translation work" in class.
• "Reading and Time: A Dialectic Between Academic Expectation and Academic Frustration." I'm disappointed there's not a shoutout to...

One key difference between the NFL analogy and the academic job system (not market) is that, at least in this country, all the major professional sports leagues are unionized, and so have the benefit of collective bargaining and other protections. Thanks to the infamous Yeshiva decision, and the relentless anti-unionism of the past 30-odd years, the same can hardly be said for higher education.

The other key difference is that, while professional sports teams certainly have vast disparities between star players and role players, it's not as though they sign 40% of the team to full-time contracts, and let 60% of them scrape by with multiple jobs--possibly for multiple teams, usually without any benefits. For that kind of treatment, you need a university.

It's tempting, at the end of the academic year, to try to distance yourself from questions of campus and governance. Especially if...

[Beloved xkcd comic "Duty Calls," by Randall Munro]

"You know I'll never ask you to change /
I'll only ask you to try"
—The Hold Steady, "Hurricane J"

If you have been on the internet longer than about 8 minutes, then someone has probably alerted you that you are doing it wrong. (Because you are. For real.)

Productivity systems and websites make this gesture their stock-in-trade: Tell readers that they are, in fact, doing it wrong, thus establishing decisively your own superiority. (After all, you're the one who knows the right way to do it!) When I first described ProfHacker to friends, they imagined that it would look very like the comic above.

That's not really the way ProfHacker works. We don't really know what you're doing wrong. Plus, we don't think academe works that way. As Matthew Arnold said of Oxford, higher education is the home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs. The who...

The notion that such pre-flight rituals as taking off your shoes, dumping your coffee or bottled water, and taking your laptop (but not your iPad!) out of your bag represents security theater, rather than a genuine interest in security, has long since passed into received opinion. This week, a couple of bloggers have focused on Cormac Herley's recent study, which demonstrates that the vast majority of information technology security practices are also theatrical in nature. (Seen various places–most recently here.)

The problem, as Felix Salmon makes vividly clear, isn't that such practices do no good; it's that their costs outweigh their benefits. Mark Pothier cites Herley on the fundamental problem: Bureaucratic responses to security threats tend to assume users' time is worthless. (I particularly enjoy the 14-day countdown before my university's e-mail system forces me to change�...