Like many ProfHackers, I’m constantly tinkering with my syllabi and assignments, looking to improve the experience for the students (and for myself).  For many of my writing assignments, this tinkering has meant that the guidelines have grown longer and longer (as I address specific issues that have come up in previous iterations).  However, in my senior undergraduate seminar, Adventures in Digital History, I’ve taken the opposite approach, giving students the broadest of guidelines and providing them with the opportunity to create their own assignments for their group digital history projects.

[A note about the course [2008 and 2010 iterations] and my goals for it:  it is focused on digital history concepts and methods, and explicitly offers an alternative to the semester-long research paper that allows students to create something fun, interesting, lasting, and important,...

Following Jason’s request for help in redesigning a campus computer lab, this post looks at one piece of cutting-edge technology to begin to suggest some ideas about our campus classrooms and what we might want from them going forward.

The Big, Cool Wall

This conversation about the classroom begins with what I found to be among the most thought-provoking sessions at the recent EduCon 2.2 conference, those led by Jeff Han and Toby Sanders of Perceptive Pixel.  Han is the inventor of the large, pressure-sensitive multi-touch wall that is well known if you’ve watched any of the major news channels, especially during the 2008 presidential campaign.  [Though you might have seen that use of it made fun of by a certain weekly comedy show.] In any case, it is an impressive hardware and software combination, especially when used in person (and even more so with several...

Though ProfHacker is focused on higher education, we recognize the vital importance of K-12 education (both in the sense of shared endeavor and in terms of the reality that we need K-12 teachers if we have any chance of succeeding in our own educational mission).  In that spirit, this post explores an increasingly important K-12 education conference, EduCon.  This conference, in its third iteration (version 2.2), is held every year at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia.*  [This post will also be the first in a series on ProfHacker looking at the important connections between the expectations and experiences of teachers and students in K-20 education.]

EduCon (aptly billed as “both a conversation and a conference”) has five guiding “axioms” that I suspect will resonate with many ProfHacker readers:

1) Our schools must be inquiry-driven,...

ProfHacker’s series on mentoring has already included a number of gems of advice that I wish I had been privy to as I began my academic career.  I’ve been fairly fortunate, however, to have good mentors at almost every level of my academic career, from my undergraduate days to that year “off” working two full-time jobs to graduate school to my early days as an adjunct and then as an assistant professor.  Even as a tenured faculty member and chair of my department, I have been able to rely on the advice and mentoring of other academics I trust and count on.  Throughout an academic career stretching over half my life I’ve rarely felt isolated or alone.

I mention all of this as context.  Given my long history of having helpful mentors, it is perhaps not surprising that I was particularly interested in the idea of getting junior faculty their own mentors.  One of the...

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received as a new teacher was from a senior colleague who listened to me express anxiety about handing back graded papers to my class.  She looked at me and said, “Why don’t you just deploy the ‘24-hour rule’?”  I looked at her blankly and she explained that she told her students that it was her policy not to discuss their papers/tests/projects with them until 24 hours after they had received them.  She insisted it significantly reduced the number of concerned students following her back to her office wanting an explanation for this or that part of their grade.

I tried it and I’ve never looked back.  When I pass back assignments, I tell students that I spent time commenting on and evaluating their work and that, therefore, I’d ask that they take 24 hours to try to understand my comments before they come to see me about them.  ...

The ProfHacker audience (so far) seems to be made up of people who want to be better, more efficient, more effective in their academic careers. One of the biggest issues that we faculty (new and seasoned, adjunct and long tenured) face is the question of managing our workload. If we care about what we’re doing (and if you’re on this site you must), then we can take on too much. Overloading can affect our ability to teach effectively, to publish, to make academic and institutional deadlines, and to have a (gasp) extra-academic life. [One way to manage the stress that results is to read George's post on managing stress during the semester.]

Along to address the question of academic workload directly is a recent post from Tenured Radical, aka Claire Potter, a professor of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University. The post, entitled “Just Say No (But Not To Me...