Rest assured: the image is tongue-in-cheek. ProfHacker won’t be storming the barricades any time soon. However, we would like to see a change in the way digital tools are currently being used in higher eduction. That change doesn’t have to involve buying the latest and greatest hardware and software or stretching to the breaking point the long hours already worked by most campus IT support staff. Instead, we aim to foster change by encouraging individuals to teach themselves and others how to use digital tools with help from their peers…and from ProfHacker.com, of course! You didn’t think I was going to encourage you to stop reading, did you?
ProfHacker.com is not strictly about technology, but “ProfHacker 101″ is.
It’s important to point out that our larger project is not primarily concerned with technology. Rather, this is a community of writers, thinkers, and commenters–that’s you, by the way–who share advice, information, and feedback on the best workarounds they’ve found for how to solve the challenges of the academic world.
That said, we’ve created a category–specifically designed for beginners–concerning digital tools: “ProfHacker 101.” You’ll see it at the top of every page if you hover your cursor over the category of “How-to.” If you’ve heard someone mention a particular term or product, but you don’t exactly know what it is or why you should be interested in it, then “ProfHacker 101” is the category for you. It’s possible that we’ll eventually move on to “ProfHacker 201,” “ProfHacker 301″ and beyond, but for now we’ll stick to the basics.
We don’t expect everything to be useful to everyone, mind you: take what you need and just ignore the rest, if necessary.
The ProfHacker 101 Manifesto
Everyone on Team ProfHacker was asked to put in their 2 cents on these points, so this should be considered a group-authored statement. We reserve the right to revise our manifesto in the future, should we choose to.
- Everyone with computing skills (plus time and inclination) should make an effort to demonstrate how easy and inexpensive it is to accomplish many of the things that are possible with digital tools.
- We’ve all had the experience of someone saying, “Oh, you’re good with computers? That’s great! Could you help me (get my printer working | set up Blackboard | create a web site | learn about blogging)?”
- It would be great if more people already knew how to do the basic stuff we know how to do so that the advantages we enjoy could be enjoyed by more people.
- Many things are much easier than they appear to the non-expert.
- If you show people how simple it is to do something, and show them with an easy-to-understand tutorial, then more people will actually do it. (Fingers crossed!)
- If people have something to which they can point their institution’s tech/decision people (IT, Admin, Teaching and Learning Center, or otherwise) that shows easy-to-support, low-cost tools with clear models of effective use, then hopefully more institutions will adopt these tools. (Fingers crossed!)
- Money is saved, headaches are avoided, independence is acquired. (Fingers crossed!)
- Tutorials involving screencasts, screen captures, and “1-2-3” step-by-step instructions are not terribly hard to create, so more of us should be creating our own to share with students and colleagues.
- “ProfHacker 101” posts will not always be guides to using specific software or hardware tools. There will also be posts that cover a particular concept, perhaps making reference to the kinds of tools one might use.
- Each “ProfHacker 101” post will cover most (if not all) of the following, not necessarily in this order:
- What it is
- Common uses for it
- Why you’d want to use it
- How to use it
- Examples of it in action
- What you can/cannot do with it
Let us hear from you in the comments: What would you like to see covered in future “ProfHacker 101″ posts?
Comments
1. dance - September 14, 2009 at 04:24 pm
Tutorials involving screencasts, screen captures, and “1-2-3” step-by-step instructions are not terribly hard to create
I've written some, and they aren't that easy, nor quick, particularly if you are trying to help students who might be using any of 4-6 versions across three platforms, and who tend to stop short whenever the system doesn't match the tutorial. (And I say this as someone who is nevertheless planning to do an MS Word workshop for thesis students in the winter.)
Also, I suggest that Working with APIs belongs in a PH201 category, before it scares people away.
2. George H. Williams - September 14, 2009 at 04:42 pm
Actually, dance, they're getting easier and easier to create.
3. George H. Williams - September 14, 2009 at 04:47 pm
Here's an annotated screencapture I created using Jing.
As you can see by the gap in time between my previous comment and this one, it doesn't take very long.
(I'm not saying this is a brilliant set of annotations, just that it's easy and quick.)
4. George H. Williams - September 14, 2009 at 04:59 pm
And then here's a screencast (also made with Jing).
Quick. Easy. Cheap. (And Jing is only one of several such tools to choose from.)
In other words, if you've got 10 minutes, you've got time to create your own screencast.
5. dance - September 14, 2009 at 05:11 pm
A lot of the speed and ease was because you already have Jing installed and a Flickr account, and already know how to use those tools.
Even beyond that, it was easy and quick because this is a small, tightly defined, single-version constrained task (since we can generally now assume that blogging software looks pretty much the same in the mainstream browsers, and we can legitimately expect people to upload to free newer versions). How many of the things that would make a professor's/student's life easier fit into those parameters?
Even with that very narrow task, let's say I'm a 101-style reader of the screencapture--"what if I'm not logged in? Do I have to be logged in?"
Anyhow, a too-oblique point I meant to make was that you'd better start by doing a PH 101 on Jing/Skitch/etc, the tools that help make these things easier and quicker. Also, don't devalue the conceptual effort (rather than technological skill) that it takes to do such a tutorial well, and don't forgot to warn people that such things will need persistent updating to remain useful.
6. George H. Williams - September 14, 2009 at 05:14 pm
Thanks for the clarification, dance. What kinds of strategies have you used for creating these tutorials? Can you point us to some examples? What are your favorite tools to use when creating them?
As I say in the screencast: We don't intend to represent ourselves as all-knowing experts. This is what's worked for us. Please tell us what's worked for you.
7. dance - September 14, 2009 at 05:17 pm
"Prof Williams, I couldn't get the screencast to play? It was just a black screen."
It took me 10 minutes to load and watch it. Not really something I can demand of my students.
Also, please don't forget to warn people that by doing a tutorial, you are committing yourself to supporting that task, and whatever may go wrong when people try to follow your tutorial.
8. Kaitlin - September 14, 2009 at 05:31 pm
Oooh, oooh, are you looking for contributors???
9. dance - September 14, 2009 at 05:33 pm
I write tutorials in Dreamweaver, inserting screenshots (taken in Grab) and anchors/internal links as necessary. There's a lot of "if...then..." and version-specific asides. It's quite time-consuming. I would LOVE to know about a program that makes it easier to publish help content to the web, where you can mix multiple pictures and a fair amount of text, and students can easily save it for offline use.
Still (trying) to listen to your screencast in the background, as it cuts in and out. I generally find that any question I could answer with a single annotated screenshot, I can do verbally just as well, or that people can figure out themselves. It's the complex tasks where people need tutorials, and doing a guide to a complex task is neither quick nor easy. E.g., the 1-2-3 tutorials I have NOT written for my students involve: 1) getting started with Zotero/EndNote/Bookends/etc; 2) taking notes while reading PDFs; 3) using Outline View in MS Word to manage note-taking and paper writing; 4) MS Word formatting for basic essays.
The screen-capture level questions: uploading assignments to Blackboard; saving a Pages/OpenOffice doc as Word; checking word count of essays. But generally I've managed to get those across without the help of Jing, etc.
10. dance - September 14, 2009 at 05:49 pm
PS: Re your screencast, and "polished and perfect" vs. "good enough" vs. "introduce general concepts without specific guidance" vs. "nothing". Whenever I have given tech tips to students easily and quickly and figured it was "good enough", I get a lot of emails: "my version doesn't have this, my version doesn't have that, I did what you said but it didn't work, etc, etc, etc, so I couldn't do the reading/couldn't submit the assignment/couldn't etc, etc, etc." After a couple of rounds of that, with the associated lackluster classes and late assignments, sure, I wind up at polished and perfect.
shorter dance: I think your manifesto is unrealistic.
11. George H. Williams - September 14, 2009 at 08:00 pm
"I think your manifesto is unrealistic."
Yeah, I think we all get that. :-)
12. George H. Williams - September 14, 2009 at 08:03 pm
To reiterate: Our philosophy is "Here's what's worked pretty well for us. What's worked well for you?"
And... "What would you like to see covered in future 'ProfHacker 101' posts?"
13. George H. Williams - September 14, 2009 at 08:05 pm
You can always submit a proposal!
14. Janice - September 14, 2009 at 10:46 pm
I'd like to have a tutorial that shows how to screencap and do very simple image editing (crop, resize and rotate). Preferably in a cross-platform way!
I've been image-editing for years. This is very much second nature to me and many of my colleagues know this so they just send the problem pictures or picture problems my way. I want to help them master this task but I'm unfamiliar with any online image editing sites and solutions. If there's something that a student or colleague could use to take an image from their screen or scanner and fix it enough to be ready to insert into a paper or project that doesn't involve me firing up my graphics editing software, I'd be happy to point people that way.
Probably other skills that could be useful in 101 tutorials -- identifying and opening different file types, file compression (zip archives and more), any cool online sites to drill in terms or vocab work. Looking forward to more PH101!
15. Julie Meloni - September 14, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Janice, I can tackle this for you & others because I just wrote a lesson on exactly these things!
16. dance - September 15, 2009 at 01:02 am
Sorry, I was done, but actually something else occurred to me, which is that our back-and-forth shows exactly why many professors resist instructional technology. You are focusing on how easy the tools are to use--I'm saying it really doesn't matter if the tools are easy to use when using them effectively requires significant conceptual work beforehand and support afterwards. EdTech overpromises without seeming to recognize the full context of their suggestions (leading to frustration), and because they've sold the world on "oh so easy!", technological investment is rarely valued by admin/chairs at a level commensurate with the time it takes to achieve it. This manifesto, which emphasizes tutorials and preemptively practically apologizes for conceptual rather than nuts-and-bolts posts, doesn't seem to help move us past that stalemate.
17. dance - September 15, 2009 at 11:35 am
On a totally different note, I find that Skitch does easy annotated screencaptures AND quickly posts them to the web, reducing two tools to one. Would recommend checking it out for quick one-offs--it also allows extensive captions for tutorial text.
18. Larry Cebula - September 15, 2009 at 12:47 pm
"What would you like to see covered in future “ProfHacker 101″ posts?"
Podcasting 101 and 102.
Setting up a Wordpress site for blogging.
Setting up a Wordpress blog for other purposes.
Where should my videos go--YouTube, Vimeo, or . . . ?
Moodle!
Blackboard alternatives in general--because we all hate Blackboard.
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