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  • Saturday, February 11, 2012

February 10, 2012, 11:00 am

Take Better Notes by Paraphrasing

By Lincoln Mullen

notesI’ve recently started doing the research for dissertation, which means I have a minor obsession with note taking. (As do many ProfHackers.) I’m not a good note taker. I must have taken notes well enough to muddle along this far, but there is a fundamental shift in the kind of research I’m doing. The notes I’m taking now need to be usable for a book-length project spanning years, rather than a semester. Indeed, I hope some of the notes I’m taking now will prove the foundation for work beyond the dissertation.

Some of the best advice I’ve read about how to take notes is from the dusty volumes on library research that were recommended to me as an undergrad. Of course some of that advice is basic: identify your source, take one note per card, etc.

The best advice about note taking that I’ve learned I got from Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff’s The Modern Researcher: paraphrase your…

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February 10, 2012, 8:00 am

Teaching Multiple Sections of the Same Course

By Billie Hara

As educators, most of us place content at the center of our courses. After content has been organized, we then focus on ways to teach that content to students and how we will assess their learning.  We think about learning styles, teaching styles, numbers of students, room space, and available technology.  We think about whether we need to deliver content via lecture, discussion, overhead slides, or course management systems.  We think about how (or if) we can make our courses interactive.  Once all this has been defined and planned, we are set to go.  That is, we are set to go until we learn we will teach multiple sections of that same course . . . during the same semester.

Teaching more than one section of the same course sounds easy, doesn’t it? It means one less preparation for a semester, as we can just teach that content two or three times instead of just once.  Yea, easy….

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February 9, 2012, 3:00 pm

Zotero Roundup: Zotero 3.0 and ZotPad for the iPad

By Mark Sample

The ZotPad Zotero App for the iPadThe research and reference manager Zotero is one of our favorite tools at ProfHacker, and there have been several recent developments worth mentioning to our readers.

Most notably, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has officially released Zotero 3.0. I reviewed a beta version of this so-called standalone Zotero back in August. Like the beta version, this latest release can run outside a browser. You can use connector plugins to add Zotero functionality to Chrome and Safari. (The original Firefox extension that started it all has also been updated to 3.0 and is as reliable as ever.) Aside from being browser-independent, two long awaited features of Zotero 3.0 include duplicate detection and a totally revamped, sleek new Microsoft Word and OpenOffice add-in.

Also, independent developer Mikko Rönkkö has released the first ever Zotero client for the iPad, called

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February 9, 2012, 11:00 am

All Things Google: Using Google for Writing Portfolios

By Amy Cavender

Eportfolio

Since ProfHacker launched, we’ve written a lot about Google Documents. George, for instance, has written about using it for collaborative work, and we’ve also run posts on using the tool in writing classes, both for work in general and for peer review in particular. For a few years now, I’ve been asking the students in the writing course I teach each fall to do their writing in Google Docs. (Yes, I teach writing, even though I’m in the Political Science department. My college has a “writing across the curriculum” program, and teaching in such a program provides some real benefits to faculty.)

This past semester, I decided to experiment a bit. In our writing program, students must submit a portfolio at the end of the semester. That portfolio is then evaluated by one (sometimes two) readers other than the instructor. Though I’ve been using Google Documents in class for quite a while…

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February 9, 2012, 8:00 am

Encouraging Distraction? Classroom Experiments with Mobile Media

By Prof. Hacker

iPad[This is a guest post by Jason Farman, the author of Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. He is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park. His website is http://www.jasonfarman.com and he can be found on Twitter at @farman.--@jbj]

The University of Maryland, similar to many colleges and universities in the last couple of years, has made headlines for handing out iPads to students. The University has given iPads to all those accepted into its Digital Cultures and Creativity Program over the last two years. The idea behind giving the students iPads was that they would have a common platform through which they could engage digital objects, data, and other forms of online content.

The iPad in a Living/Learning Community

When I was hired to help launch this living and learning…

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February 8, 2012, 3:00 pm

Using Google Docs to Check In On Students’ Reading

By Brian Croxall

Picture of House of LeavesLast semester I taught my favorite book, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. With nightly reading assignments that take three to four hours, I expect students to fall behind. So I wasn’t surprised when, a few days in, I asked if everyone had done all the reading and the majority of the class avoided looking at me. Such are the occupational hazards of teaching.

We’re only a few weeks into the semester, but experience shows that it’s never too early for students to get behind in their reading—even if you’re not teaching amazing post-print fiction. While students clearly have the right to choose what they will and will not read, when a significant portion of the class falls behind it can make it very difficult to lead a class discussion.

Last semester, I heard a strategy from my friend and colleague Alyssa Stalsberg-Canelli for dealing with exactly this problem: have the students…

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February 8, 2012, 1:00 pm

What Are Your Favorite Technologies in the Classroom?

By George Williams

If you could design your ideal, digitally-equipped classroom, what would you do?

We’ve published a few posts about this question. See, for example, “What Are Your Favorite Classrooms?,” “My Ideal Classroom, Part 1: Information Technology,” and “Redesigning the Classroom: Let’s Start with the Wall.” (You might also be interested in “Re-Imagining the Student Computer Lab.”)

Today, I’d like to hear about your positive experiences with technology in the classroom. I think many (if not most) of us have at some point taught in a classroom with some feature that we grew to love, finding it both reliable and pedagogically helpful.

For example, I once taught in a computer classroom that allowed me to project any student’s computer screen onto the wall, which was a great way to allow students to demonstrate something right from their seat (and also a great way to decenter the classroom). …

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February 8, 2012, 8:00 am

Building Programming Tutorials with Codecademy

By Anastasia Salter

Codecademy PlatformFor those learning to code this year, either for professional reasons or to expand personal horizons, Codecademy has been a popular tool. Jason has written about Codecademy as a platform for code-literacy, and I discussed the Codeyear “new year’s resolution” initiative the site launched in January. Now the platform has expanded even further with the addition of tools that allow any user to create new courses and projects in JavaScript, Python and Ruby.

Codecademy may not be a substitute for more traditional forms of programming instruction, but this new platform does offer possibilities for shaping hybrid learning or building coding familiarity into a course dedicated to another topic, as customized tutorials could supplement face to face instruction. Julie Meloni makes some great points about the pedagogical problems of Codecademy and the question of results: “…it is not teaching …

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February 7, 2012, 3:00 pm

Unglue a Book: Crowdfunding to Liberate Published Works

By Konrad Lawson

Over the past few years I have seen some fantastic projects reach their funding goals on the crowdfunding service Kickstarter and create some wonderful films, products, software, and websites. The proposed project picks a sum of money they need to accomplish some aim, promises to produce certain results if they get what they ask for, and doesn’t receive a penny unless their funding goal is met.

What if there was a similar system that let us, the community of readers, buy books out of indentured copyright? Or, from the publishers perspective, what if there was a system that paid you to allow a digital edition of your work enter free into the wild? Let’s say you get a book published, it has a good run and is popular, but is now only making you a very small trickle of income. The book goes out of print, and ebook sales are way down. If you own the rights to the work, and someone…

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February 7, 2012, 11:00 am

How Do You Name Your Devices?

By Jason B. Jones

Google Doodle for Dickens's 200th
We’ve written about naming conventions before, as they afford real conveniences when keeping track of things like papers or syllabuses or . . . well, anything, really!

For example, rather than have a series of devices with the default manufacturer-supplied name (SEAGATE 1, 2, 3x; X’s iPod), you might name your devices after . . . characters on The Wire. You get the advantage of unique names for all your devices, added personalization, and a little hit of joy when you see them in an application window. The key, as Tom Scheinfeldt notes in the tweet linked below, is having a long enough source of names.

This came up on Twitter this morning, as some friends were discussing my GeekDad post about Dickens’s birthday Google Doodle (complete with a full-throated endorsement of the South Park adaptation of Great Expectations). It turns out that a fellow GeekDad writer, Michael Harrison, …

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