My university doesn’t have a fall break of any sort, so this week marks an annual turning point in the fall semester: Students start to take exams and write more significant papers, and start to get tired. Then they realize, “Holy hell: There’s no long weekend between Labor Day and Thanksgiving!” Exhaustion won’t set in for a few weeks yet, but we do have endemic tiredness and stress–just in time for the arrival of the flu season! It’s awesome.
But that’s this week! Last week was a very model of happy busy-ness:
- On Monday, Julie’s epic look at APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) reached its third installment, complete with unicorn. I took a first look at Google’s SideWiki, and Natalie introduced the ProfHacker mentoring series.
- Tuesday, Julie pointed out that blogs, Twitter, and other forms of social media have been an important form of mentoring for years now. Billie discussed how writing groups can help new faculty get started on the path to tenure, and guest author Stan Kurkovsky explained how to make the search for conferences hassle-free.
- Salads were for lunch on Wednesday, thanks to Billie, and I bitterly denounced pointed up the problem of underdocumented policies and institutional memory.
- Thursday, Natalie welcomed October by asking “What’s Working?,” and offering heuristics for tweaking what’s not. (Where “what’s not” = “causing you stress or anxiety,” not “keeping you from becoming fanatically productive.”) Guest author Cory Bohon explains how to screencast on a Mac, while I encouraged people to look after their money a bit more carefully.
- On Friday, Brian looked at pedagogical uses for CommentPress and digress.it, tools for collaboratively annotating texts, while I asked about the perils of using e-mail as institutional memory.
Have a great week! Let’s be safe out there.
[Image by flickr user mgifford. Licensed through Creative Commons.]
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