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  • Thursday, February 23, 2012

February 22, 2012, 8:00 am

Backup Google Documents with Insync

By Ryan Cordell

Insync logoProfHacker loves Google Docs and backup plans. Today’s recommendation combines the two. Recently a post at Lifehacker made me aware of Insyc, free software that creates a folder on your hard drive and automatically syncs the documents in your Google Docs to it. Insync works in both directions—new documents added online are downloaded to your hard drive, and documents added to the synced folder are uploaded to Google Docs. I’ve only played with Insync for a few days, but it seems to work as advertised. I certainly feel better about adding content to Google Docs knowing I will have a local copy of what I create there. I can also use Insync to backup local documents to Google Docs. I look forward to testing Insync more thoroughly in the coming weeks.

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February 21, 2012, 3:00 pm

Reformatting Confucius with Regular Expressions

By Konrad Lawson

SteamBook ProIt was a fine spring afternoon in 1867. Mr. James Legge was just back from China and had settled back into his home in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. When he turned on his SteamBook Pro to check for mail coming in over the Intertubes, he was excited to see news from his publisher about his new popular edition of the Confucian Analects. Was the book already out, perhaps?

He growled in disappointment when he saw the one line message: “CHAPTER NUMBERS ON SEPARATE LINES, PLEASE.”

He opened his manuscript (which you can download here) and saw what the publisher meant: the chapter headings were on the same line as the opening text of the chapter. They were formatted as, for example, CHAPTER I or as CHAP. II followed by a period and a space. For example: CHAP. III. The Master said, …

This was a silly request, he thought. Some of these chapters are only a few lines long and putting…

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February 21, 2012, 11:00 am

Conducting Your Midterm Evaluations Publicly with Google Docs

By Brian Croxall

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Although the recent weather down here in Atlanta suggests that we’re nearing May and the semester’s end, it turns out that we’re only getting close to midterms. The middle of the semester is a great time to take stock of how your courses are going. One approach is to conduct a mid-semester self evaluation, asking yourself what’s going well and what you can do to improve the rest of the semester.

While knowing thyself is useful, it’s also useful to know what your students are thinking. That’s why we at ProfHacker have written about giving midterm evaluations to students every year since our blog was born: Billie covered the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis as a midterm model in 2009; Amy asked her students to evaluate their own performance in 2010; and George provided four simple questions for a midterm evaluation in 2011. (Guys, I’ve got 2012 covered. Holler!)

It turns out…

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February 20, 2012, 11:00 am

Set Traps for Online Information with Trapit

By Natalie Houston

What are your sources of information about the topics you care most about? Do you use an RSS reader to keep up with blogs or news sites? Do you rely upon the links posted, liked, tweeted, or shared by a circle of friends or authorities? Do you browse aggregator sites and curated collections of links on particular topics?

There’s a tremendous amount of reading material out there, and even when you’ve let go of the idea that you could “keep up” with it all, chances are good that you might be missing some things that would be of interest to you, if only you knew where they were.

Enter Trapit, (trap.it) a web service that combines machine learning algorithms with user-selected topics and filters. (The algorithms used in this project stem from the same research that led to Apple’s Siri.) After creating an account, you create a “trap” by entering in a keyword or short phrase into the…

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February 20, 2012, 8:00 am

iPad Screencasting: Educreations and Explain Everything

By Prof. Hacker

Screencast Cookies

[This is a guest post by Lissa Pompos and Kevin Yee. Lissa is an undergraduate English Literature student and Research Assistant for the Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Central Florida. Kevin is an Assistant Director at the UCF Faculty Center. Follow Kevin on Twitter.--@jbj]

Nearly two years after its initial release, the iPad has become a technological staple in the world of higher education. Many posters have reviewed the potential academic uses of the device, but some of the iPad’s more educational possibilities have been overshadowed by its popularity for entertainment and personal uses. Still, some well-known applications such as Dropbox, Diigo, Instapaper, and WordPress lend themselves nicely to academic tasks.

One academic task the iPad lends itself towards is screencasting. After all, the iPad is portable, powerful, and…

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February 19, 2012, 10:09 pm

The ProfHacker Week in Review

By Jason B. Jones

Hoar frost on umbelliferThis post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

We certainly hope you found something interesting and/or useful among this week’s posts, which included:

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February 17, 2012, 3:00 pm

Weekend Reading: Making Our Case Edition

By Jason B. Jones

Weekend WarriorsThis week brought two trips to testify before state legislators about various bills concerning aspects of higher education–in this case, general education (especially transfer and articulation) and remediation. Both times, the testimony sparked engaged questioning from a variety of legislators on the committee, who clearly had thought about the issues. (They didn’t always agree with me–but they had thought about things, which is pretty much all one can ask.)

What both visits made clear, though, is that all of us in higher education need to do a better job explaining what it is we do, and why. We need to explain who makes what decisions, and the consequences of those decisions for students, as well as for workload. Because we live inside it, we get pretty used to the jargon and silos of a university, and forget that to someone only there for four years, or who hasn’t been there yet a…

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February 17, 2012, 8:00 am

Give Me a Break!

By Erin E. Templeton

TGIF. It’s been one of those weeks. Classes are in full swing. Committees are meeting regularly. Papers are coming due. Deadlines loom. And we’re smack-dab in the middle of cold and flu season.

It may seem like for every item we cross off our to-do list, two more spring up in its place like some kind of task-based Hydra. Most of us, no matter where we find ourselves on the academic ladder can feel overwhelmed from time to time. There’s always another batch of essays to grade, another class to prep, another student to meet, another email to answer.

It’s okay to give yourself a time out.

In fact, it’s not only okay, but it can often help you be more productive and efficient, not to mention happier and healthier to take a break every once in a while. We cannot function at 110% all the time, and if we try we can end up doing more harm than good. We might push ourselves to…

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February 16, 2012, 3:00 pm

Note-taking on a Nook Color

By Amy Cavender

NC notesIn a recent post, I mentioned that I’m a new Nook Color user. Among the things I wanted to use it for (besides reading, of course!) were accessing class notes, and, equally if not more importantly, taking notes of various sorts.

The stock Nook Color software lets users easily highlight passages as they read, and make notes on them. Provided the wifi is on, it will sync those notes and highlights with NookStudy or Nook software on a PC or Mac. Though they can’t easily be copied within the software itself, they can easily be exported to Word or plain text format, so it’s fairly easy to make use of those notes when writing. ProfHacker favorite Evernote is also available for the Nook Color.

Here’s the catch: doing much writing with the Nook Color’s onscreen keyboard is, frankly, a pain–and as far as I’ve been able to determine, there’s simply no good replacement keyboard available for…

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February 16, 2012, 11:00 am

Make Your Own Zotero WebDav Server and Access Your Zotero Attachments Anywhere

By Mark Sample

2114683166_45ce6d7e43_mI’ve written about many developments in the Zotero ecosystem recently, but this is definitely the most hackish. How about setting up your own Zotero server, where you can access your Zotero references, PDF attachments, and even web snapshots from any browser on any computer. And how about being able to run this server on almost any web hosting service, including free ones?

That’s exactly what Christian Holz’s phpZoteroWebDAV 2.0 does. Holz’s program creates a PHP-based WebDav server, to which you can sync your Zotero attachments (e.g. PDFs associated with citations and snapshots of your Zoteroed pages). The program then uses Zotero’s API to pull in the citations themselves from your Zotero library, allowing you to view, browse, and search virtually every element of your Zotero library from your own server.

Why might you want to do this?

One of Zotero’s powerful features is it…

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