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  • Sunday, May 27, 2012

May 25, 2012, 3:03 pm

Weekend Reading: Memorial Day edition

By Jason B. Jones

Pancake squirrel

I currently feel like this squirrel looks: pancaked by, yet ready to flee from a semester that refuses to end, and so rather than talk much here, I’ll simply wish American readers a happy Memorial Day holiday, and everyone a good weekend. (Spare a minute, though for the students in Quebec!)

On to this weekend’s links!

  • Kate Clancy draws on that evergreen scientific resource, Justin Bieber’s hair, to teach good poster design: For the last few years, one of the running jokes in my lab has involved a striking physical (or rather, follicular) similarity between biological anthropology researcher Dana Ahern (now a University of Illinois graduate!) and multi-platinum pop superstar Justin Bieber. I thought this observed correlation would make an…

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May 25, 2012, 11:00 am

Digital Distraction: Diablo III

By Anastasia Salter

As an avid gamer, I’m always disappointed when a particularly hot new title launches mid-semester. So I was thrilled by the launch of Diablo III last week just on the heels of graduation, perfectly timed as a reward for finishing grading. This new role-playing game is my pick for a digital distraction this weekend, although its shaky launch includes some warnings for the future not only of gaming but of any online “service.”

First the good stuff: Diablo III is a classic dungeon crawl, with demons to fight and treasure to gain through relatively easy to pick up gameplay: click to move, and click or use different hotkeys to launch weapons or spells at the bad guys. The story of the Diablo series follows a realm torn by continue warfare between heaven and hell. This sequel has been awaited for over ten years, and the mechanics are polished, with lots of flexibility in equipping your…

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May 24, 2012, 11:00 am

When a “Catastrophe” Turns Out Well

By Amy Cavender

2070718497 84a8379634 mWe’ve all dreaded it: the day something goes horribly wrong with something that’s of ongoing importance for a course we’re teaching.  It happened to me the middle of the semester.

I use a multisite installation of WordPress to run my courses. I try to be very faithful about keeping up with updates as appropriate. It was just that fidelity that caused a problem.

One evening in late March, one of my students emailed to let me know that she couldn’t access the course site—she kept getting an error that said something about too many redirects. I tried to go to the site myself, and got the same error. So I decided to try the sites for the other courses I was teaching this spring. I got the same result. In fact, I was getting the same error for every single site on my domain. Ugh.

I’d done some automatic updates on my WordPress installation earlier in the day; I can only conclude …

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May 24, 2012, 8:00 am

Why 15 Minutes?

By Natalie Houston

number 15Hands down, my favorite productivity tool is a simple digital timer. I’ve written before at ProfHacker about some of the ways I use it for writing, for exercising, and for household chores. (If you don’t have a physical timer handy, you can use one of these online versions, or download one for your phone.)

One of the questions I frequently get asked is: how long should my timed interval be?

The answer depends on what you’re doing and how you want the timer to help you.

For instance, a quick five-minute clean up can be a great way to tackle a messy desk.  When I’m engaged in serious writing, I’ll often set my timer for 40 minutes for concentrated effort. But many tasks fall somewhere in between.

My go-to midway timer setting is fifteen minutes. Here’s why:

  • 15 minutes is familiar: you already have a good internal sense of what a quarter hour means since it’s an interval we…

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May 23, 2012, 3:00 pm

The Modern Language Association Teams Up With Interfolio

By George Williams

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve praised dossier management service Interfolio a number of different times: Julie covered how to use the service to manage your professional documents1; Brian mentioned it when covering how to prepare for the job market; and Erin included it in her job market advice about using dossier services. For academic job seekers, Interfolio is an extremely helpful service that streamlines the application process and simplifies document management.

Today, the Modern Language Association2 announced a new partnership starting fall 2012 with Interfolio, arguing that this new system will offer advantages to job applicants, hiring departments, and those who write letters of recommendation:

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May 23, 2012, 8:00 am

Create Markdown Documents in the Cloud with WikiPack

By Cory Bohon

Wikis are great tools to share and collaborate, but many of the wiki services are far from user-friendly, and sometimes you don’t want to share your wiki with everyone. If only there was a wiki tool that could create pages using the awesome Markdown language, and store the documents in Dropbox for safe keeping. Luckily, a new tool called WikiPack can do just that, and then some.

WikiPack uses Markdown and WikiWords to create a private wiki that is stored and accessed from your Dropbox account. The easy to use and powerful Markdown language lets you easily create and edit your pages without knowing any strange wiki syntax.

(more…)

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May 22, 2012, 1:00 pm

Update: ‘Google Search Education’

By George Williams

Google’s search engine is a powerful and impressive tool for locating information online. Unfortunately for many students, the simplicity of the default search interface can lead to some pretty poor search habits and results. As I wrote in a previous post about Google’s efforts to provide information literacy resources, “it’s often a challenge (in my experience) not only to get students to search using something other than Google; it’s also difficult to teach them how to use Google effectively.”

In that previous post, I pointed readers to something Google was calling their “Search Education Evangelism” site, a resource designed to make it easier for instructors to teach information literacy. This week I received notice that Google has moved that resource to a new location, given it a different name, and updated the content.

The new site is called “Google Search Education.” As…

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May 22, 2012, 8:00 am

Powering Postbox with Add-Ons

By Mark Sample

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Last week Amy introduced the Mozilla Thunderbird-based email client Postbox. I’ve been a Postbox user for years, ever since it was a free beta project. I came to rely on Postbox so much that I gladly paid for it when Postbox was officially released.

In addition to the features Amy mentioned—like Postbox’s seamless integration with Gmail and its plethora of keyboard shortcuts (press V to quickly move a message into a folder!)—I also appreciate Postbox’s powerful search functions.

As Amy explained, Postbox also works with extensions. I wanted to highlight a few of the add-ons I have found to be especially useful:

  • The combination of Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar enables two-way sync with all of your Google calendars.
  • Zindus syncs your Postbox contacts with your Google/Gmail contacts.
  • Quicktext creates smart email templates, allowing you to send personalized (yet…

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May 21, 2012, 11:00 am

Google Docs Research Tool: A Review

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Amanda French (@amandafrench), THATCamp Coordinator at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. You can read more about her (and by her) at AmandaFrench.net.]

Yesterday I was unusually intrigued by a little yellow notification in a Google Doc I was working on. It informed me of a new Google Doc feature called “Research Tool.” Who could resist playing with a feature so named? Not any regular reader of ProfHacker. And so I tested it. Here are my thoughts:

The new feature puts a new option in the Tools menu within a Google Doc called “Research.” To use it, you first highlight a word or phrase (or, as in the image below, a large chunk of text like a poem) in the document you’re writing, then click Tools –> Research (or use the keyboard shortcut: Command+Option+R on Mac; Control+Alt+R on Windows). This performs a Google Search on the…

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May 21, 2012, 8:00 am

Lessons Learned from Student Evaluations?

By Ryan Cordell

The semester is over. Grades are submitted. Summer approaches. And student evaluations are complete and ready to review. Student evaluations, as most professors know, are an imperfect arbiter of teaching excellence. Nonetheless, student evaluations can point to aspects of classes that need development and improvement, especially when many students point to the same issues in their evaluations.

This semester, for instance, I taught a course for the first time. It was a course I was excited to teach—an upper-division course, squarely in my areas of interest—and for the most part it went well. As with any new course, however, the semester was an experiment, and parts of that experiment worked better than others. In my student evaluations, I noticed several trends that I will consider closely as I revise the course to teach it again in the fall:

  • The relationships between the course…

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