[This is a guest post by David Parry, assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas, Dallas. What you'll find below is different than the things we usually publish. After all, each of our authors tends to focus on strategies or tools with which they've acquired some experience in order to address the relative strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, the iPad hasn't even gone on sale yet! However, Dave has a well-deserved reputation as a provocative and thoughtful writer when it comes to technology and higher education, and because this post engages the broader issues of higher ed economics, publishing, and what we do (or don't) want in our digital tools, we believe it will be of interest to ProfHacker readers. --GHW]

I own a MacBook Pro, before that a MacBook, and before that a PowerBook. Perhaps the technology item I could least live without is...

[This is the second in a series by guest author Courtney S. Danforth, an assistant professor of English at Darton College.  You can follow her on Twitter at @csdanforth. --JBJ]

Most people don’t stand in front of their open closets exclaiming, “I have too much to wear!” No, far more common to claim one has “nothing” to wear than “too much,” but (obviously) the “just right” lies somewhere in between. If you won a Nobel prize, could you be ready for a press conference in an hour? Do your course evaluations mention how often you wear that red pullover? Do you have to unfold 17 different long-sleeved black t-shirts to find the one you were looking for?

My previous post addressed customs and style in wardrobe; this post explores wardrobe planning.

“I have nothing to wear!”

[This is a guest post by Thomas R. Burkholder, professor and chair of Chemistry at Central Connecticut State University. (Most important, he also maintains our renegade Moodle server!)  -- JBJ ]

While signing up for the Boxee Beta trial I came across a fairly standard web form: you know the kind with name, email address, etc.  When I was done and submitted the form, a message returned that said Thanks, don’t call us, we’ll call you.   But what caught my eye was the GoogleDocs logo and an invitation to create my own form. I clicked on the invitation and lo and behold, GoogleDocs has a form maker which puts results into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet.

Previous posts have discussed some online scheduling apps like Doodle and Jiffle and survey tools like Survey Monkey and similar survey applications.    GoogleDocs forms are both more generic and less powerful than dedicated survey...

[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by John Jones (no relation!), who is an assistant instructor at UT-Austin and one of the hosts of the HASTAC Forum on Grading 2.0. -- JBJ]

One of the primary goals of teaching is to prepare students for life outside the classroom, either by providing them with job-specific skills or preparing them to be engaged & informed citizens or some combination of the two. As digital technologies become increasingly vital to both the acquisition of job skills as well as civic and cultural engagement, instructors have begun to recognize that they must change their approaching to assessing student work. While traditional grading tends to do a decent job of evaluating individual student work, it isn’t always the best means of measuring the kinds of skills that are valuable in the digital world, such as collaboration, creativity, and the use of emerging...

[This is a guest post by David L. Morgan, who is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Eugene Lang College in Manhattan. -- JBJ]

One of the first things I teach the students in my physics and astronomy classes is to learn how to use Google’s built-in calculator function.

If you type something into Google’s search field that Google recognizes as a mathematical expression, it automatically performs as a calculator instead of merely searching for that expression.

For example, typing…

6 – 2

2^2

sqrt(16)

will each cause Google to respond with the answer “4.” The syntax is the same as most computer languages: + and – for addition and subtraction, * and / for multiplication and division, ^ for exponentiation and sqrt() for square roots. Everything you would be able to do on a scientific calculator, Google’s calculator will understand – sin, cos, ln, etc.

But the...

(This is a guest post by Aimee L. Pozorski, associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, and president of the Philip Roth Society. — Jason.)

I have long been fascinated by the myth that there are two different types of people in the university: The creative faculty who produce works of art, on the one hand, and the scholarly faculty who write peer-reviewed journal articles, on the other hand. It seems like in this culture, people are considered creative or intellectual – artistic or analytical. However, I’ve lately been reflecting on my most successful colleagues – the most apparently hardcore intellects of the academy who receive teaching and research awards based on their mastery of skills appreciated in the ivory tower.

In my discipline, what is most rewarded are abilities to closely read and understand a difficult literary text, to convey...

[This is a guest post by Stan Kurkovsky, a professor of computer science at CCSU.  Stan and I are teaching a course abroad next year called Secrecy: Science & Fiction. (I totally can't believe I've never heard of the two resources Stan mentions near the end of the post!) -- JBJ]

One of the greatest rewards of an academic career is the ability to travel to conferences, present your research work and network with peers from other institutions. The process of getting your work published inevitably involves long hours of invested in a research project with your colleagues and/or students, reading a substantial amount of background literature, and perhaps conducting some experiments. This post, however, is about what happens next – how to keep track of the multitude of research conferences to find the one that is just right for you, your very specific research topic, and held at a...