Jeff

• Jabra Cruiser2 Bluetooth Speakerphone($40) (for listening to iPod/iPhone/iPad in the car)
• Cases:  Otterbox for...

Last month Brian Croxall wrote an open letter to new graduate students, full of excellent advice—advice that Brian and his contributors often had to learn the hard way during their own time in grad school. Reflecting the experience of many faculty in academia, Brian's letter was geared toward full-time PhD students. But as many people pointed out in the comments, whether they're working on an MS, an MA, an MFA, or even a PhD, part-time grad students have their own set of concerns, their own challenges to navigate. So ProfHacker has consulted a few knowledgeable parties, and we are pleased to present their suggestions below, in an open letter to part-time graduate students.

Before moving on to the advice, I want to say a word about one of the most difficult challenges part-time graduate students face: invisibility. Because part-time grad students are so diverse and so diffuse, performing...

The pedagogical value and the challenges of integrating student blogging into your teaching is a recurring topic on ProfHacker. Some of our earliest posts dealt with student blogging, and we have revisited the issue frequently. Most recently, Jeff and Julie wrote about that age-old question—How are you going to grade this?—when it comes to evaluating classroom blogs. Jeff and Julie offer a number of fantastic pointers, and they also refer to a blogging rubric that I use in my own teaching. I've never directly described how I grade student blog posts on ProfHacker, but I think it's about time to share what has been a valuable tool, and to encourage professors to adopt and modify it to fit their own needs.

I typically require weekly blog posts from my students, and though each post by itself may not amount to much, they cumulatively account for a substantial portion of a student's...

Early in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, the sight of a colleague's elegant new business card sends the narrator and sociopath Patrick Bateman into a panic attack. As his Wall Street buddies debate the merits of a Silian Rail font on bone-colored stock versus a Romalian typeface on eggshell, Bateman's world closes in on him: "Suddenly the restaurant seems far away, hushed, the noise distant, a meaningless hum, compared to this card."

Ellis's novel is of course an unrelenting, purposefully over-the-top satire of the 1980s. At its heart, American Psycho is a novel of manners, basically Jane Austen with a chainsaw. You can't imagine anybody getting so worked up over a business card these days, even a clincally self-absorbed monster like Patrick Bateman.

Nonetheless, business cards are a standard accouterment for academics, even in this world of Bump, texting, and direct messaging....

In my recent ProfHacker guide to 5 Android Apps I Can't Live Without, there was one seemingly obvious mobile application missing from my list: Evernote, which has gotten a lot of attention on ProfHacker. That wasn't an oversight on my part. I rarely use Evernote, for many reasons: I don't like the way it locks up my data, the desktop client is distractingly cluttered, and both the Apple and Android app interfaces are forgettable and unintuitive. And then there's Evernote's firepower. It's too much application for my purposes. I don't know about you, but I don't need my grocery shopping list tagged with keywords and filed away in notebooks. Bloated with features, Evernote is simply not useful for quick and dirty notes.

What I use instead is 3Banana Notes, an application available for iPhone and Android devices, powered in the cloud by Snaptic.com. Besides being oddly named, 3Banana is...

Back in June Ethan began an informal series on ProfHacker with his 5 Applications I Simply Can't Live Without (and Why). He followed that 5 WordPress Plugins I Simply Can't Live Without (and Why), and the popular 5 iPad Applications I Simply Can't...well, you get the idea.

The idea of 5 [Insert Cool Software Here] I Can't Live Without (and Why) has endless, useful variations, such as Brian's list of 5 essential iPod Touch apps, and now, my own contribution to the series, in which I'll shift the focus onto the Android operating system. With a mere 50,000 or so applications, the Android Market pales in comparison to Apple's App Store, but it can nonetheless be difficult to find the perfect app to fit your needs. So I'll run through 5 essential Android apps that work for me. As with the other 5 [Insert Cool Software Here] posts, I am not recommending any specific applications so much as I ...

Last week I introduced a pedagogical framework for using Twitter in your teaching, organized along two axes: monologic to dialogic and passive to active. These high-falutin terms are fine for a theoretical matrix, but what about the real life implementation of Twitter in and outside of your classroom? How do you actually do it? I'm going to leave behind the pedagogy (mostly) in this post, and instead offer some practical advice for teaching with Twitter.

I'll cover six aspects of Twitter integration where it pays to plan ahead of time (i.e. sometime last week): organization, access, frequency, substance, archiving, and assessment. I'll deal with of each of these areas in turn, but before I do, and if you're new to Twitter, I want to urge you to read Ryan Cordell's comprehensive ProfHacker primer on Twitter. Ryan addresses many common questions about Twitter, and his guide is...

Faculty are increasingly experimenting with social media, and it's exciting to find more and more courses incorporating Twitter, a ProfHacker favorite. Just last week on ProfHacker Ryan provided an excellent introduction to Twitter, while earlier in the summer Brian reflected on his use of Twitter in the classroom during Spring 2010. As we gear up for the Fall 2010 semester, I wanted to revisit the idea of teaching with Twitter.

I'll address my own pedagogical use of Twitter in a future ProfHacker post, but for today I want to share a general framework for Twitter adoption in the classroom, originally sketched out in late August 2009 by Rick Reo. Rick is an instructional designer at George Mason University, and he'd been keeping tabs on the different ways instructors were using Twitter in their teaching. Rick sent a draft of this adoption matrix to the university's Teaching with...