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  • Wednesday, May 16, 2012

May 15, 2012, 8:00 am

Pinterest and Link With Love

By Natalie Houston

Founded in 2010, Pinterest has rapidly grown in popularity over the past 18 months. Pinterest is a social network based on image sharing. User “pin” images they like to “boards,” and can comment and follow the collections of images created by other users. Some of the popular uses for the site include collecting ideas for major purchases, event planning, and theme boards (because the internet needs more pictures of kittens!). As Erin mentioned in her post on Pinterest, she found herself using it not only as “a fun way to pass time” but also “to collect ideas for my home office . . . to gather recipes, and as a place to get inspired for various creative DIY projects.”

Many Pinterest users describe their image collections as “inspiration boards” and it’s a useful tool for writers, designers, and teachers to be familiar with. But several concerns have been raised in recent months about…

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May 14, 2012, 11:00 am

Simplify, Simplify!

By Ryan Cordell

I have confessed before my appreciation for Henry David Thoreau—an odd thinker, perhaps, for a ProfHacker to esteem. Nevertheless, I think Thoreau can be a useful antidote to unbridled techno-lust. As I wrote in that earlier post, “I want to use gadgets and software that will help me do things I already wanted to do—but better, or more efficiently, or with more impact.” I don’t want to acumulate things for their own sake.

In one of my favorite passages from Walden, Thoreau recalls, “I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.” When I teach Walden, I often ask my students to reflect on this extreme reaction: “Why does Thoreau have such an adverse reaction to such a seemingly simple task? Is he lazy? Is he crazy?” They sometimes…

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May 14, 2012, 8:00 am

Tweetster for WordPress and Omeka

By Cory Bohon

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published several posts about WordPress and Omeka, two great content management systems designed to make it easy for you to publish and organize your online content. How you let readers know when you publish new content, however, is up to you. One strategy is to use social networks like Twitter to send out short blurbs about new posts. However, managing an online profile and manually sending out these updates can be time consuming. While some Twitter plugins already exist for WordPress to Tweet automatically a link to a new post, I haven’t found one that worked especially well. And as far as I could tell, there was no such plugin for Omeka. Until now.

They say that if you want something done right you should do it yourself. So I created a Twitter plugin for WordPress and Omeka and called it Tweetster.

Tweetster was born out of necessity. Managing multiple …

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May 11, 2012, 11:00 am

Writers’ Bootcamp: Disaster Preparedness

By Billie Hara

You’ve probably heard the old adage:  Often the best way to prepare for an emergency is to plan for one.  When I lived on the Gulf of Mexico, where the threat of hurricanes each year is very real, many people taught me how to prepare for such a natural disaster.  These kind folks told me to keep cash on hand, to keep the gas tank in my car filled, and to keep a stock-pile of food and water in the house.  They also encouraged me to create an emergency supply kit that would include a can opener, additional (charged) cell phone batteries, a battery-powered radio, some regular household tools, area maps, and garbage bags.  With these supplies, I’d have the means to evacuate the area if I needed, or if I couldn’t evacuate, at least I wouldn’t starve.  It was good advice that luckily I never had to heed.  I was prepared, though, just in case.

Now, this is a post in the Writer…

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May 11, 2012, 8:00 am

When Enough Is (Good) Enough: A Review of ‘Professor Mommy’

By Prof. Hacker

Professor Mommy cover[This is a guest post by Aimee L. Pozorski, an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. The president of the Philip Roth Society, her book on Roth and Trauma is just out with Continuum. Her prior ProfHacker posts focus on working with student veterans, responding to criticism and on creativity and academic research. Weirdly, she's not online at all.--@jbj]

I first returned to teaching in August of 2003, three months after my son was born. Distracted about leaving a nursing newborn, I hit the house with the side of the car as I backed down the driveway and cried all the way to campus. The dent left in the car door remained for nearly a year afterward, a constant reminder of how I felt that day – battered, vulnerable, and a little bit broken – part memento of a turning point, part reminder of my guilt for leaving.

The next day, during a…

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May 10, 2012, 11:00 am

Staying Productive on the Go with Onlive Desktop

By Amy Cavender

Onlive screenshotAcademics seem to travel a lot (at least, more than a lot of people). Whether that travel is for professional or personal reasons, we seem to travel with a fair amount of tech gear, including (usually) a laptop. Though laptops usually weigh no more than about five pounds—and netbooks and machines such as the Macbook Air weigh even less—it can still add up.

It’s tempting to leave the laptop at home and travel with just a tablet. Some people have tried that, including James Kendrik of ZDNet. We’ve even had a guest post about it here.

While some users have reported good results traveling with a tablet alone, others have been hesitant to take the plunge. Onlive Desktop may make the prospect more tempting.

Onlive provides access to a virtual Windows machine capable of running the full Microsoft Office suite and browsing the web (including sites that use Flash). Each user has…

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May 10, 2012, 8:00 am

Asking Students To Revise Your Syllabus

By Brian Croxall

picture of a toy robot

About a month ago, Inside Higher Ed reported on a study (PDF) conducted at the University of Akron on automated essay scoring software. The researchers compared the performance of the software with that of trained human graders on a sample of 22,000 essays. Surprisingly (or not–it is, after all, the 21st century), the Akron team found the differences between computational and human scoring to be minimal. 

Of the many responses to this article, the ones that struck me most were the ones that critiqued not the ability of the software but the type of writing that they are asked to grade: standardized exams. The University at Buffalo’s Alex Reid perhaps put it best, “If computers can read like people it’s because we have trained people to read like computers. [...] And FYC [first-year composition] essays are perhaps the best real world instantiation of the widget, the…

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May 9, 2012, 3:00 pm

Hack Your Learning Spaces?

By Prof. Hacker

[Last weekend I had a rewarding and thoroughly enjoyable time attending THATCamp Piedmont 2012 at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. (Check out previous ProfHacker coverage of THATCamps here.)

Session topics at THATCamp Piedmont included “Deforming the Humanities” (proposed by ProfHacker Erin E. Templeton), “Teaching as Scholarship” (Roger Whitson), and “The UnTeacher: Hacking the Syllabus and the Everyday” (Leeann Hunter).

What I’d like to draw your attention to for this week’s “Open Thread Wednesday,” however, are the ideas contained in the proposal for a session on “Hacking Campus Space,” by ProfHacker Mark Sample. I’ve reproduced his session proposal below (with a few formatting changes) and hope to spark a conversation in the comments. At my campus, I’m on a committee tasked with re-imagining our classrooms, considering everything from furniture to lighting to floor…

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May 9, 2012, 8:00 am

Digital Distraction: Honey Badger Don’t Care

By Cory Bohon

As the end of the semester is upon us, it is important to take some time and refresh your mind. This weekend, having just this last week completed my undergraduate studies, I’ll be doing that by playing the “Honey Badger Don’t Care” game for iOS.

By this point, you might have already seen the YouTube videos in which Christopher Gordon provides comedic narration over National Geographic videos of wild animals. His most famous video, “The Honey Badger” (NSFW language), has over 43 million views.

This video has became so popular that there is now an iPhone/iPod Touch game called “Honey Badger Don’t Care.” The premise of the game is to see how many days you (as the honey badger) can survive in the desert by hunting various animals and completing tasks, such as eating 25 mice or scorpions in a single level (or “day”).

Honey Badger Video Game Screenshot

You accomplish the tasks by moving the honey badger around…

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May 8, 2012, 3:00 pm

Global Accessibility Awareness Day: May 9

By George Williams

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published a number of posts about accessibility for people with disabilities. For example, I’ve shared “5 Suggestions Concerning Disability, Accommodation, and the College Classroom,” addressed “Academic Resources and Universal Design,” shared some thoughts about “Universal Design, Usability, and Accessibility,” and written several posts about “Accessibility in a Digital Age.” So I was interested to learn that May 9 has been designated as Global Accessibility Awareness Day, described as “a community-driven effort to dedicate one day to raising the profile of digital accessibility and people with different disabilities to the broadest audience possible.”

What does this mean?

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