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Author Archives: Amy Cavender

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 17, 2012, 11:00 am

Managing Email with Postbox

By Amy Cavender

PostboxSince we launched in 2009, we’ve written a lot about email here at ProfHacker. No doubt that’s a reflection of just how much email is involved in our day-to-day work. And whether you love or hate email, whether you use your inbox as a task manger or strive for Inbox Zero, the stuff’s got to be managed somehow.

Those who prefer a desktop client for managing their email might consider giving Postbox (available for Windows and Mac; alas, there’s no Linux version available or planned) a look. After hearing about it for quite a while, I recently decided to give it a try, and so far, I really like it. (I was actually a little surprised that it hasn’t received much mention here, though it did make Ryan’s list in the 2011 Holiday Gift Guide.)

Here’s what I’m really liking about it:

  • It has a nice interface, with some options for customization.
  • It plays well with GMail, including…

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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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April 30, 2012, 8:00 am

Standardization or Variety? Where’s the Balance?

By Amy Cavender

Finches A student’s lament: “One professor refuses to accept assignments electronically. Another only accepts assignments electronically. One professor wants me to use Microsoft Word for all my writing assignments. One doesn’t want to see anything with a .doc or .docx extension. One professor thinks that ‘electronic submission’ should translate to ‘send as an email attachment.’ One can’t stand attachments, and wants everything shared with her in Google Documents. One posts everything related to the class in Blackboard. One stays as far away from Blackboard as possible, and uses a combination of WordPress and Engrade. Arrgh!”

One can understand the student’s frustration, but is this lack of standardization necessarily a bad thing?

Yes, having to learn different systems for different instructors can be annoying. And granted, some institutions use an LMS for purposes that go far beyond the…

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April 26, 2012, 8:00 am

Great Lakes THATCamp 2012

By Amy Cavender

Twitter GLThatCampIt’s no great secret that many of us here at ProfHacker are huge fans of the THATCamp series of unconferences; we’ve written quite a lot about these gatherings—and there’s really no reason to change that pattern, is there?

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s Great Lakes THATCamp, which was held on the campus of Western University in London, Ontario. Over 80 campers attended.

Like many THATCamps, this one had workshops (or “bootcamps”) as well as regular sessions. These were held on Friday, and gave early arrivals the opportunity to learn by doing. The only downside I found was having to choose among concurrent sessions; there’s no way, unfortunately, to do everything. I was able to participate in “Introduction to Arduino and Physical Computing,” “Introduction to TEI for Hypertext and Digital Archives,” and the “Drupal Site Building Sprint,” each of…

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April 24, 2012, 8:00 am

Managing Meeting Notes with Meshin Recall

By Amy Cavender

MeetingnotesMeetings, meetings, meetings. They’re part of many people’s lives, and there’s no exception for those of us in academia. Often, when we attend meetings, we need to keep notes about them.

One way, of course, is to do it the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper. Those who prefer to take notes electronically, however, might want to have a look at Meshin Recall. Meshin works in tandem with Evernote and with the calendar application on your iOS or Android device. Opening the application brings up an agenda view of your calendar events. Clicking the + sign next to an event starts a new note in Evernote; you can assign the note to any notebook you wish, and Meshin gives you the option to set a notebook as the default if you like.

You can quickly find your notes in one of two ways. If you want a quick overview of which calendar events have notes, just tap the icon in the top right corner …

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March 30, 2012, 11:00 am

Scheduling Email Revisited

By Amy Cavender

perfect email app

Email. It often seems we’re inundated with it, like it or not. We’ve written a lot here at ProfHacker about managing it, including scheduling it with Boomerang, which works with both Outlook (free for the first 30 days, $29.95 to keep) and GMail (available in free, $4.99/month, and $14.99/month plans).

For me, the ability to schedule email is important. Sometimes I need or want to write an email while I’m thinking about it, but for whatever reason I don’t want to send it right away—and I simply don’t trust myself to remember to go back to my drafts folder and find it to send later. My mind is much more at ease when I’m able to just write the email, schedule it, and forget about it.

Though being able to schedule email is important for me, I don’t need to do it terribly often, so Boomerang’s free plan is usually sufficient for my purposes. Still, I was glad to have two…

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March 15, 2012, 11:00 am

A First Look at FacultyFiles.com

By Amy Cavender

OrganizedChaosA few weeks ago, a new service for faculty launched: FacultyFiles.com.

The service is designed to make work easier for faculty by making it very easy to store and reuse frequently used items, such as feedback for purposes of grading, common responses to discussion board questions, course materials, and the like. The service is directed primarily at those who teach (at least partly) online, though all faculty can benefit from this sort of service. FacultyFiles is well aware of faculty who may be part-time; it’s possible to set up courses for more than one school. In fact, a perusal of the job boards (at least the job boards available with the ten-day trial subscription) indicates that part-time faculty are the intended user base; all of the links are to adjunct job sites.

Once you’re signed up, getting set up is fairly easy. Just add a school, then add a course, and FacultyFiles.com…

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March 6, 2012, 11:00 am

Google Is Watching You …

By Amy Cavender

Google copsGoogle’s new privacy policy, which went into effect on March 1st, has been attracting a lot of attention. The Digital Campus crew mentioned it in their February 15 podcast, and there’s been a fair amount of discussion in the Chronicle about the degree to which the new policy will impact education partners and whether students’ privacy will be adequately protected (do be sure to read the short comment threads on some of those articles, as they provide some good points to think about). Enterprise users of Google services will apparently see relatively little impact.

Many of us who use Google services in our academic work, though, aren’t users of Google Apps for Education; we use the standard services instead. What do the changes to the privacy policy mean for us?

For myself personally, I don’t know that it’s going to make a great deal of difference in my daily work. As far as I can…

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March 1, 2012, 11:00 am

Note-taking and Copyright Infringment

By Amy Cavender

MarginaliaI don’t often post to Twitter before I’ve even had my morning coffee, but I did this morning (February 23; see the image below for the post).

What occasioned the comment was an article in the Chronicle that I’d received an email about, noting that Kno is suing Cengage Learning for breach of contract. Nate Hoffelder has some commentary here.

As I understand the case, it boils down to this. Kno is suing because Cengage has pulled their books from Kno’s store. Cengage did this because Kno made it possible for students to annotate their textbooks and easily use those annotations, through a feature called Journal. Cengage claims that this makes derivative works possible, and is thus an infringement of their copyright.

Really

Of course, highlighting, annotating, and even quoting from books of many sorts is nothing new. We’ve written quite a lot about annotating digital texts here at…

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