Posts by Prof. Hacker
September 17, 2012, 08:00 AM ET
Quartzy for Life Sciences Inventory Management (and more)
Recently, my department decided to
update our inventory for keeping track of instructional lab items.
Previously we had been using an Access database, but its
unwieldiness had discouraged us from updating it regularly. So we
went on a search for a solution to create Inventory 2.0. We wanted
something that could be accessed from a web browser anywhere,
easily updated by student TAs and busy professors, with entries
that had attachable information such as manuals and pictures of the
items. For months, the search went on. We collaborated with
instructional technologists on campus, searched on our own, even
considered building our own database from scratch. In late July, we
were feeling very discouraged, but then
I serendipitously happened upon Quartzy. We are now
using it to catalog our physics lab equipment and it's working
really well. And I'm sharing this on ProfHacker because its uses
...
August 27, 2012, 11:00 AM ET
Pushing Through The Perils of Teaching Online
[This is a guest post
by Doug Ward, an associate professor of journalism and the Budig
Professor of Writing at the University
of Kansas. You can find him online at www.kuediting.com and www.journalismtech.com, and
follow him on Twitter @kuediting. Doug has written
several guest posts before, most recently on
grading with voice on an iPad.--@jbj] I knew the student
evaluations from my spring online class would be harsh, but that
harshness exceeded anything I had imagined. The class was
disorganized, students said again and again. The professor was
distant and uninvolved, others growled. Several students dismissed
my attempt to promote peer learning, complained about a lack of
feedback, moaned about the added cost of an online class, snarled
about my ability as a teacher. One even suggested that I was unfit
to teach. This was unfamiliar territory. In my march toward tenure,
I had ...
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February 27, 2012, 08:00 AM ET
ProfHacking Abroad: Hardware Choices for Living In Europe
[This is a guest
post by Jason Mittell, Associate Professor of American Studies and
Film & Media
Culture at Middlebury College. In
the 2011-12 academic year, he is a research fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg
at the University
of Göttingen, Germany. He writes the blog Just TV.--@jbj] I am in the
highly enviable situation to be on sabbatical this academic year,
made doubly so by being on a fellowship in Germany for the year.
The last time I was abroad for an extended time was in 1991, when I
spent a semester in London as an undergraduate. Thinking back to
that stay, it’s striking how much my technological life has
changed: I brought no computer to London, writing papers on the
typewriter provided by our program, with my major technological
burden being a Discman player, powered external speaker set, and
dozens of CDs I brought to avoid months of silence. Twenty years
later, I brought 2...
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September 16, 2011, 08:00 AM ET
Elephants, Riders, and Paths: Motivating Students
[This is a
guest post by Meagan Rodgers, an assistant professor of English at
the University of Science and
Arts of Oklahoma, where she teaches various writing classes and
directs the writing center. You can find her online at meaganrodgers.com.--@jbj]
You’re in a field. You’re looking down a path. You’re riding an
elephant. This unlikely circumstance is the central metaphor that
animates
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard
(2010) by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of the popular 2007
book
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
In Switch, the Heaths draw on a breadth of social science
research to construct a reader-friendly approach to individual,
organizational, and societal change. “Ultimately,” they argue, “all
change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to
start behaving in a new way?” You can, the Heaths argue,...
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May 24, 2011, 08:00 AM ET
My Online Summer: Getting Ready
[This is the first in a series of posts about
teaching a fully-online course for the first time. -- @jbj]
This summer, I'm teaching a world lit survey class entirely online.
I've taught the course several times as a face-to-face course, both
in the summer and during the regular semester, and so I'm pretty
comfortable with the material. This, however, will be the first
time I've taught a class entirely online. Moreover, for complicated
reasons, I've agreed to teach the class entirely--or to the
greatest extent possible--using the baked-in tools in Blackboard
Vista, rather than kludging together something with a
wiki or
WordPress, as would normally be my wont. Combining those two
sources of (personal) novelty seemed like a natural for ProfHacker,
and so for the next seven weeks (the five weeks of the course, plus
this preview post and a post-mortem), I'll sort out how the course
is...
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April 6, 2011, 03:00 PM ET
Mapping Novels with Google Earth
[This is a guest post by Erin Sells, a Visiting Assistant
Professor of English at Lander University in Greenwood, SC. She
writes about modernist literature, the one-day novel, and Anne
Enright, and is interested in academic community partnerships and
higher education policy. You can follow her on Twitter @erinsells --@jbj]. The
use of models and other abstract forms in literary study has
recently seen a revival in a digital age that puts data and
sophisticated data management systems in the hands of the literary
scholar, teacher, and student. Pedagogical applications of these
abstract models are rich with possibility for the literary
classroom, and offer exciting opportunities for engaging
non-English majors and non-traditional learners in the advanced
study of literature, as well as challenging students to verbally
articulate visual and spatial knowledge. In an upper-division...
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October 11, 2010, 08:00 AM ET
Practicing What We Preach
We at ProfHacker write a lot about
possible ways of incorporating a range of technologies into diverse
classrooms. We always try to base our blog posts firmly in our
experiences, but we often mention what we actually do here and
there somewhat randomly. Now that all of our fall semesters are
firmly under way, the ProfHacker team presents this entry with
descriptions and links to what we are actually doing this semester.
Feel free to take a look at our blogs, wikis, syllabi, and other
materials to see how we practice what we preach. In the
comments, let us know what you have up your sleeves this semester.
Has ProfHacker inspired you to try anything new? Or is there
something you're up to that we haven't covered yet? Here's
to a great Fall 2010 for us all!
Amy
Quite some time ago, I moved away from using Blackboard for my courses. Though I really tried hard to like it, it just never... Read MoreOctober 4, 2010, 08:00 AM ET
Teaching Carnival 4.2
[October's Teaching Carnival is from Traci Gardner, a
blogger and social media educator. She blogs on Teaching in the 21st Century for Bedford/St. Martin's
Bits and publishes educational resources on ReadWriteThink.
You can email her at tengrrl@gmail.com or follow her
updates on literacy and education in the news at @newsfromtengrrl.]
Did you notice the smell of deep-fried Twinkies in the air? That's right. It's time for another Teaching Carnival, the monthly round-up of blog posts on teaching and issues in higher ed.
Last month, Billie Hara hosted the carnival and showed us dozens of great links. As she explained then, ProfHacker has become the permanent home of the Teaching Carnival, so each month you can return for a snapshot of the most recent thoughts on teaching in college and university classrooms. You can find previous carnivals on Teaching Carnival's home site.
Now without...
Read MoreSeptember 23, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
Using Mailplane to Manage Multiple Gmail Accounts
[This is a guest post by Meagan Timney, a
postdoctoral fellow at the Electronic
Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria.
Previously at ProfHacker, Meagan wrote about Nurturing
the Mind-Body Connection. You can email her at mbtimney.etcl@gmail.com or
follow her @mbtimney.]
[Editor's note: Mailplane is a commercial application only available for Mac users. We now to return you to your regularly scheduled productivity post.]
I have a daily identity crisis. From the time I wake up until the time I go to bed, I have to manage, simultaneously, at least three (and probably more like five or six) separate people in my brain. The three most dominant, for me, are the athlete, the scholar, and the teacher. Among these identities alone, I have five Gmail accounts (one to filter emails from my local Crossfit Gym, my coach, training partners, race organizers, etc., one for all of my...
Read MoreSeptember 21, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
Checklists: Giving Assignments a Facelift
[This is a guest post by Eric Hansen, a part-time faculty
member at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the
College of Media and
the iSchool at Syracuse
University. He started the websites shiftlearning.com as a showcase of
next-generation LMS technique, and tenprofs.com (@tenprofs) to rally gen-y/x
professors in building an Information-Age successor to the
death-by-PowerPoint model of higher education. Eric can be emailed, tweeted, poked, Googled and linkedIn.]
If you're looking for a quick, road-tested tip, here it is: integrate checklists into your communication of assignment requirements and for improving the submission process. I recommend the Google Docs "New Form" tool, Wufoo.com, or formspring.com. What follows is a quick case study and how-to.
In honor of the 2011 GRE giving the axe to its infamous analogy questions, how about one more for the road?:
Surgeon : ...
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