Last semester, I began teaching a new workshop in Emory's library called "Facebook, Privacy, and Online Identity." The goal of the workshop was to help students become aware of how much they share on Facebook and to help them make conscious decisions about what they would share. I know that students, as well as almost everyone on the planet, have become more aware of The Social Network's privacy issues due their policy changes in late 2009 and early 2010, as well as the media coverage that these changes drew. For this reason, I expected that the workshops would draw a large number of students. I was wrong. Over a total of four workshops, I had a total of four students come through.

I'm working on doing better marketing for this semester's workshops, but I was pleased to see that all four of the students who attended the workshops were flabbergasted at how much information they had been a...

We at ProfHacker are quite aware of the onset of the academic job market. That's why you've seen recent posts from Erin about the five things that helped her survive the job market and one from Heather about  keeping track of job postings. (Don't miss Heather's call yesterday for your tips on managing the job application process.) If you dig a bit deeper into the ProfHacker archives, you will be able to find posts from Nels offering ways to stand out on the job search; from Erin on using an NFL analogy to explain the academic job market; and from me last May advising you to get started new (then?) on preparing for the job market.

If I had to pick just one tool that helped me survive the three runs at the academic job market that I've had, it would be Interfolio. As Julie wrote previously, using Interfolio to manage your professional documents takes a lot of aches away from what will no...

Last week, Erin wrote about her opinions on five wardrobe essentials for the female academic in the humanities. She framed this discussion in terms of the many shifts that we face when moving from life as a graduate student to life as faculty member. I navigated this shift two years ago as I moved from grad student to the lecturer circuit. But since I only ever taught two or three days a week, I didn’t have to make the everyday plunge into professional attire.

With my new postdoctoral position on what guest ProfHacker Bethany Nowviskie calls the alt-ac track, however, I’ve been working closer to what most people would consider a regular work week. I’m in the library at least forty hours a week, and I don’t have an office door that I can shut and that would allow me to get away with something more casual. What’s more, since my position happens to be at my graduate institution, I’ve felt ...

If you’ve been around ProfHacker for a bit, you’ll start to notice that we frequently return to a couple of themes. We like to eat, teach, be productive, and we absolutely, positively recommend that you take backups seriously. In the world of technology, it’s not if something will fail, it’s when. And when Fate decides it’s your turn for some hard-drive failure or to wash the phone that you forgot to take out of your pants, you will need your backups to continue to be as productive as you need to be.

It’s not necessarily difficult to make backups of your own, locally stored information. (And you can read some of our previous posts about backing up these data, including Annual Reminders--Backup, Back Up Your Essential Files Using Dropbox, Backing Up a Campus Email Account, and more.) It takes an initial investment of time and maybe some money to make sure that you’ve covered...

It’s the beginning of the school year, but those who have recently graduated are about to get a reminder of last year—and all the other years before that: student loan payments! If you’ve borrowed from the federal government using the Direct Stafford Loan program (the most common lending program that graduate students use), you have a six-month grace period between the time of graduation and when your first loan payment is due. Since you probably graduated at the end of April or beginning of May, you’ve probably got about six weeks before you start paying for that education.

Hopefully you’ve got a job and meeting your loan obligations won’t be too difficult. But if you’re like many recent graduates, you might have had a hard time finding a job in academia or in any other sector of the economy. You could be working as an adjunct or lecturer this year as you prepare for a run at the job...

If you're as devoted to all things Google as many of us on Team ProfHacker, you might find yourself using many different free services that Google provides, including its email, calendar, RSS reader, and more. So it might be logical for you to look to Google's services if you find yourself organizing an event or representing an organization but don't want to go through the trouble of hosting your own website. After all, Google's tools are pretty simple, powerful, and—did I mention this?—free. Google makes it easy to create a new account in just a few minutes, giving your conference its own email address. You might even choose to create different accounts for work- and hobby-related calendaring and email.

Although it's been easy to create multiple Google accounts, there's been a pretty significant downside until recently: you could only be signed into one account at a time within your...

As we were wrapping up the previous semester, three different ProfHackers wrote Open Letters addressed to groups who were making transitions through higher education. Billie kicked off the series with a letter to 2010-2011's first-time tenure-track teachers; Nels followed with a letter for the newly tenured; and Jeff wrote to the new department chairs. Today, I would like to address a new group: those students just beginning graduate school, specifically those full-time students enrolled in a PhD program.

As is the case with much of what we do at ProfHacker, the purpose of this post is to make explicit the unwritten rules, norms, and quirks of academia. Not that people will be intentionally keeping information from you; rather, it's very easy to forget what it was like to be in your position and that what we take as self-evident is actually the product of specific departmental-,...

I appreciated everyone's comments to George's recent query, "Whatever Happened to PDAs." Like many of our readers, I haven't decided to make the switch to a smartphone. As attractive as they are, I haven't been able to justify the monthly cost of the data plan to my internal accountant. But since I spend most of my life being irradiated by in wi-fi coverage, I've discovered that I can get by with a relatively unremarkable phone and my iPod Touch. I've had my touch for 2.5 years now, and while it's no longer as shiny as it once was, the apps that I'm able to run on it make it an indispensable part of my not-quite-always-connected life. Ethan's been kind enough to let me break in on his series (see his previous installments on applications, WordPress plugins, and lecturecasting tools) to talk about the five iPod Touch applications that I couldn't live without.

First, of...

The Internet is a wonderful thing. It brings us cats, comics, and rainbows. But it also brings us tools, services, and applications that are accessible from anywhere and on any computer. When you're using a web-based email service, it suddenly doesn't matter that you're traveling for ten days and away from your own computer. You can just go to the website using any computer that is connected to the web, and you'll be able to get to your inbox. You don't have to worry about configuring the device or installing software--although you could certainly use portable applications to run the browser of your choice. In this realm of web-based services that are not dependent on your desktop but instead upon the cloud, Google is perhaps king. As we've discussed previously, Google provides tools that allow you to read your preferred RSS feeds, manage your to-do list, do calculations, an...

Last week The Chronicle reported in "Tenure, RIP" that by 2007, "the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted...to 31 percent." Lower in this article, "Professors who talked to The Chronicle" speculate that the proportion of tenure or tenure-track teachers "may go as low as 15 percent or 20 percent of all instructors, and then reach a holding pattern." Whether you think that tenure is the only guarantor of academic freedom or something that impedes innovation and flexibility on a university level, these numbers should be troubling because they mean that almost 70% of our current college instructors are not in a position to earn a living wage. Working either as full-time lecturers, graduate students, or adjuncts, the new faculty majority are underpaid. And as research has shown (also reported in "Tenure, RIP"), retention and...