The image used in this post is of a small group of students sitting in a room together, (seemingly) energetically talking about the issues at hand. This is an example of synchronous discussion—the students are in the same room, ostensibly discussing the same topic (the caption says they are “debating search engine liability,” which sounds really interesting to me, at least). When we teach in the physical classroom, we are engaged in synchronous communication with the students. We hope that when they get into small groups they carry on the same sort of lively real-time interaction that we’ve modeled for them as we move around the classroom.

But if you teach online, you might employ a synchronous model—”same time, different place”—or an asynchronous model—”different time, different place.” Or, you might use a combination of tools to meet a variety of...

If you search for “writing for the web” in your search engine of choice, the first results are likely to be links to usability expert1 Jakob Nielsen’s guidelines for writing for the web.

These guidelines are well over a decade old at the moment, but unlike some other technology-related information, the age of these tips should not preclude you from using them. In other words, they still hold true.
Here are a few of the basics:

• Be brief (unless you write for ProfHacker, natch)
• Be specific (and get to the point)
• Update facts when necessary (and provide a “last updated” date if possible)
• Produce scannable text—are the keywords and phrases emphasized or hyperlinked such that they stand out and a reader can get the main idea of your text just from those keywords and links?
• Use bullet lists (of the proper type—ordered or unordered—and when the length of the content ...

Recently at ProfHacker, in his post about intellectual property, George Williams noted “it would be in our best interest as teachers and scholars to start being more assertive about the doctrine of our Fair Use rights.” I couldn’t agree more, but as anyone who isn’t a lawyer knows, Fair Use is a complex issue. Furthermore, it’s an issue relevant not only to teachers but also to scholars at any level—and that includes first-year students who might be using copyrighted material in essays or presentations. So how do we go about talking about Fair Use in the classroom, and when should we?

The answer to “when should we” obviously depends on the type of course you’re teaching, and the extent to which students might have occasion to use copyrighted materials as part of their work. I’ve taught courses in composition, professional & technical writing, literature, an...

On October 26, 2009, I wrote “Managing Facebook Privacy Settings” in response to a reader’s query: “Could ProfHacker do a piece on how to manage Facebook accounts so that I could remember how to keep my privacy settings up to date? I keep losing track of how to shield chat and newsfeed.” In that post, I noted the number of times Facebook has made a significant change to their service, and that you can usually tell when Facebook changes something because a) it will be big news and b) some people will be ticked off about it.

It has happened again, and the response was no different—Facebook once again announced a change to their service, this time asking all 350 million of its users to personalize their privacy settings.

In the previous post on this topic, I said that Facebook does give you the tools to manage the security of your profile. That is still true....

There isn’t an industry definition of a “smartphone,” nor is there an industry definition of “super smartphone,” but the implication with both terms is clear—these are devices that do more than just facilitate communication via the phone lines. In some cases, we’re talking a lot more. One characteristic of a smartphone is that it has an operating system complete with an interface for developers to produce applications to run on that system—hence the term “app phone”. Others may characterize a smartphone as a phone that can perform tasks similar to their computer—read and send e-mail, access the web, read e-books, view and edit documents. When the lines between phone and computer blur in this manner, one might ask would you rather have a super smartphone or a netbook when it comes to ultraportable devices, and that’s a good question to ponder if you’re...

Here at ProfHacker we talk a lot about Google Docs and other Google tools, myself included. But I also have two other office suites installed on my primary machine—Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. On my netbook, I only have OpenOffice. I’ve had some version or another of OpenOffice on at least one of my machines since 2000. Although I keep Microsoft Office around on the primary machine, I can certainly envision a time (perhaps with the next machine) when I don’t have it installed at all. Why? Simply put, there’s nothing that I do with an office suite that I can’t do with OpenOffice, and OpenOffice is free and open source.

I’m not alone. A few hours ago, unrelated to the creation of this post, ProfHacker writer Nels Highberg tweeted a similar sentiment. The OpenOffice suite contains six different programs:

• Base: for relational databases (coming from Microsoft...

I learned about Creately, an online diagramming application, from a short Lifehacker post two months ago. I immediately bookmarked that post as a reminder to write about it for ProfHacker readers, as I think one could easily use Creately in the classroom just as many of us use Google Docs and all the other Google tools. [In fact, if I were a betting person, I'd put money on Google buying Creately at some point.]

If you have ever worked with Microsoft Visio (and paid for Visio in oh so many ways, either in cash or blood pressure points), you can expect the same sorts of things with Creately, but with the added benefits of:

• Collaboration: at all pay levels (free, $4.95/mo and $9.95/mo) you can have multiple collaborators on a document (the number of collaborators increases with the pay level)
• Commenting: all collaborators can comment on your diagrams
• Multiple Revision...

Back in the olden days of ProfHacker—August 21st, 2009, to be exact—I wrote about Using Twitter Clients to Manage Your Information Stream. I discussed various approaches to using Twitter/reading the information stream and included a few examples of using Twitter clients.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I currently follow 404 accounts (no, that’s not an error), and because my Twitter client of choice (Brizzly) allows me to scroll back through my twitter stream without hitting a limit, I can honestly say my eyes pass over every tweet in that stream.

I never see a spammer in my Twitter timeline, yet I often hear people complain about how “there’s so much spam on Twitter” or “I opened my client and all I see is spam spam spam” and so on. Are there spammers on Twitter? Oh heck yes. But I never see them in my information stream, and neither should you. If you do,...

NOTE: On December 9, 2009, Facebook made additional changes to their privacy settings. Please see an updated ProfHacker post on the subject.

A reader recently asked: “Could ProfHacker do a piece on how to manage Facebook accounts so that I could remember how to keep my privacy settings up to date? I keep losing track of how to shield chat and newsfeed.”

Facebook has made at least three, if not more, fundamental changes to their service in the past nine months. You can usually tell when Facebook changes something because a) it will be big news and b) some people will be ticked off about it (and that will be big news). Call me old and jaded, but I’m so used to Facebook changing things seemingly for the heck of it that I really don’t care anymore—I check in on Facebook when someone plays a move in Lexulous and that’s about it; if you want to find me online, find me ...

The descriptive text for the Wordle service says that “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” The emphasis on “toy” is my own, because while Wordle may be a toy in that it is interesting, fun, and generates play, it is certainly not “something of little value” or something useful only as a “diversion, rather than for serious practical use” (that’s me, showing off my mad dictionary skillz). Instead, I firmly believe that Wordles are the gateway drug to getting students interested in textual analysis. In a word cloud, the most frequently used words are the largest words in the display, while words used less frequently are displayed in a smaller font. It’s so very simple, yet so very useful.

Believe me, I think talking about concordances and collocates is cool, and I’m still waiting for the day I can throw...