The Olympics are over, which means it’s safe to resume ignoring hockey and curling and such-like again, except when you’re playing Wii.  Here’s what you may have missed at ProfHacker this week:

• Billie kicked off a new series, Writer’s Bootcamp, with “Commitment (to Write).” Brian Croxall offered tips on how to “Expand Your Academic Network in Five Minutes.” I sang the praises of Michael Bérubé’s “Teaching to the Six” and explained how my students “Play to Learn.”
• George field-tested “The Reliability, Efficiency, and Affordability of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.” If you’ve been unsure about trying Google Chrome as your browser, Julie discussed “Using Google Chrome and Chrome Extensions for Speed and Productivity.” Guest author Todd Stanfield continued the Scheduling 101 series with “Using Acuity for Student Appointments.” George has...

ProfHacker gets you ready for the weekend with 5 links worth reading, plus a video!

• Love this: Off-the-rack anti-plagiarism software isn’t good enough for Thomas Crombez, so he built his own: However, for most beginning students, the obvious sources to scavenge are simply found through Google. They do not bother with scholarly databases or real books anyway. So what better way to detect their scams than Google itself?
• Julia Gergits offers an optimistic gloss on the ways working at a regional comprehensive university reshapes your expectations: Despite the challenges, teaching at a comprehensive university offers faculty freedom and responsibility that are unavailable at research institutions. I mean responsibility as a gift, not a burden: it is to be prized.
• East Stroudsburg University is 100% wrong for suspending a professor for griping on Facebook.  At the risk of being a...

In ProfHacker’s prehistory (i.e., during its soft launch), we did a post about “Five Useful Books for (New) Faculty.” They’re all great books–and commenters added several more–but the essay that did the most to settle me down as a teacher is Michael Bérubé’s “Teaching to the Six” (Pedagogy 2.1: 2001. 3-15).  When I started as a teacher, it was either frustrating or panic-inducing to think that there were students who didn’t really want to be in the class.  I’d frequently design assignments or class discussions so that they’d be pitched at the students who most closely matched my interests, but dimly recognized that that was a little self-centered and elitist.  I’d also beat myself up mercilessly if a particular day’s class didn’t grip everyone present.

Bérubé explains the reality of teaching in a reasonably big state school, where some people...

There’s a risk in reading a book with, or showing a movie to, my kid: Depending on how compelling the story, he’ll ask you to “play” it over and over again in the week or so after. In the picture for this post (from 2007), for example, he’s building the Trojan Horse, having just finished reading a children’s version of the Trojan War.

As a grad student, when asked about a new book or topic or whatever, like many people I’d say, “I don’t know: I haven’t written about it yet.”  If you ask my kid the same question, you might well get, “I don’t know: I haven’t played it yet.” I don’t think this is unusual in any way.  In fact, Stuart Brown has recently explained in Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Invigorates the Imagination, and Opens the Soul,  it’s how children figure out the world:

Play’s process of capturing a pretend narrative and...

I’m guessing that the first bullet’s obsession with productivity stuff probably signals something about the time of the semester.

• ‘Twas a week for dueling task managers.  The contenders: Remember the Milk (introduced by Amy) and TeuxDeux.  And all those tasks are probably part of a larger project, which Nels can explain how to organize. One way to get things done is redact certain words from your Twitter feed. A “do engine” for your phone can help, too.
• The inimitable Julie detailed Google’s new social platform, Buzz.
• George noted that university presses seemed to have moved more decisively toward electronic publishing.
• I confessed to a dark secret: not only do I use a course management system, but I use it to deliver–shudder–multiple-choice quizzes.  It’s easy to overreact to teaching experiences, whether in course design or on a daily basis. Interpreting

To help you through the weekend, 5 links plus a video.

• McGraw-Hill hosts a discussion about “The Future of Digital Innovation in Higher Education“; somehow omits ProfHacker.com.  Several interesting talks, though.  Apparently the most important trend for higher ed is geotagging, with a shout-out to the Harvard/FourSquare teamup.  Look for PleaseRobMyDorm.com to spin off from PleaseRobMe shortly.
• Pew released the fourth version of their report on “The Future of the Internet.”  I’m actually slightly concerned that, in a survey of “900 internet stakeholders” only “three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge.”
• Kevin Haggerty claims “Teaching Statements Are Bunk,” mostly because they’re too general and...

At the risk of having my edupunk fellow-traveler card revoked, this morning I’m going to cop to using a course management system.  Most days, students in my literature classes will have accessed Moodle, and will have taken a multiple-choice quiz on the day’s reading.

This might not seem terribly helpful.  The quizzes are open book, and even if they weren’t, they’re administered online, and so students could cheat if they wanted to, and I wouldn’t know.  And a multiple-choice reading quiz about, say, In Memoriam is hardly the royal road to critical thinking.

But it turns out that quizzes are locally pretty useful.  Students are better prepared when there’s a quiz, and so discussion goes a bit better.  Also, in a literature class, the daily quiz offers a way to make sure they’re keeping up with the reading. Even the fact that I tend to write them easy...

On Twitter and in comments, Jessica has asked about “interpreting student evaluations that are heavy on stats and light on narrative.”  Since my department doesn’t use our university’s standard evaluation form, and doesn’t have any bubble-sheet-type questions, I’m probably a curious choice to respond, but I thought ProfHacker readers could chime in.

First, it’s always helpful to keep in mind that institutional evaluation forms are probably not designed to glean useful information about your teaching practice or about your course.  They’re (obviously) designed to cover a whole range of courses and teaching styles, and so are only going to partially reflect the realities of your class.  Moreover, the real purpose of an institution-level evaluation form is to compare your teaching with others at your institution, usually for the purposes of promotion, tenure, or...

A situation that happens more often than you might expect is a medical emergency in class.  In the spirit of being prepared, here are some guidelines. (Most of these are for typical classrooms; labs usually have their own, elaborate safety protocols.)

• If you haven’t done so already, then, now, before you close your browser, program your campus dispatch number into your cell phone, as Natalie said. In an actual emergency, while you’re trying to deal with the student, and with the rest of the class, you don’t want to have to fumble around with numbers.
• Advice to “stay calm” is probably easier said than followed, but if you can keep your voice calm, it’ll go a long way, both for the sick/injured student and any classmates.
• Speaking of classmates, consider dismissing class–while it’s good to have *some* people around, too many probably isn’t helpful.
• I once had a...

Whenever it snows, I inevitably joke that the decision to close the school (whether a college campus or public school system) usually has less to do with the forecast, and more to do with recent history.  For example, a week ago when a big snow storm was dead certain to hit Connecticut during the day, and so everything you can think of closed preemptively.  Naturally, no snow came until about 2pm, and things never really got that bad–the storm turned away from most of the state.

When that happened, I knew that when the next storm hit, come hell or high water that class would be in session–and indeed, yesterday, there was quite a bit of snow, but everything ran on time until evening classes.

I really don’t think it’s true that such decisions are made by overreacting to the mistakes (or at least the loud criticisms) of the previous decision.  For one, I’ve known...