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Building Books for Mobile

Anastasia Salter — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:00:48 +0000

Mobile devices and tablets are at the center of new debates on interactive textbooks and educational applications–and, thanks to the growing interest, there are many options for development tools. As Jason Farman described last week, there are lots of exciting ways to integrate mobile devices and tablets in the classroom. Developing your own mobile resources, or inviting your students to try it, is possible even without coding experience and is a great way to see for yourself the possibilities and limitations in these applications.

Fundamentally, building in HTML5–with the Canvas, JavaScript and JQuery Mobile–allows for development across devices. HTML5 can replace proprietary extensions, and avoid the native environments of any of these devices. But there are some tools to consider across some popular platforms, particularly for easily building interactive books:

Android: …

Building Programming Tutorials with Codecademy

Anastasia Salter — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:48 +0000

For 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 …

Keeping Up With Your Records

Anastasia Salter — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:58 +0000

We’re already a month into the new year, and planning for next semester may well be underway at your university–with annual deadlines and reviews right around the corner. In the hectic transition between semesters or with the holiday rush, it’s easy to have lost sight of well-meant plans to keep better records and update files regularly. But while 2011 is still fresh in your memory, it’s a great time to catch up on records. Here are a few strategies for revisiting your tenure box or other personal archive with spring semester goals in mind.

Start thinking about your annual review now. If you’re at a stage in your career where you have an annual review or progress for tenure report due, it’s a great idea to read the forms early–Nels has some great suggestions for making sense of your annual report requirements. There are a number of additional strategies for keeping up with…

Returning to Play at THATCamp

Anastasia Salter — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:00:35 +0000

There’s a lot about THATCamp that’s inherently playful: as participants show up early to vote on sessions and let the structures evolve as needed, it turns the traditional conference model on its head. Last weekend at the University of Maryland, THATCamp Games embraced the combination of play and games and brought together nearly one hundred professors, graduate and undergraduate students, archivists, librarians, game designers, alt-ac professionals and more to brainstorm and build ideas surrounding the role games might play in the intersection of teaching, technology and the humanities.

Here are a few ideas and resources from the THATCamp Games conversations:

The trend towards classes as games. Game ideas are continuing to catch the attention of those outside the “traditional” world of gaming, particularly as projects like the Digital Media and Learning competition in…

New Year’s Resolutions: Learning to Program

Anastasia Salter — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

With 2012 upon us, now is the perfect time to pick projects for the new year. If your new year’s resolution involves learning to program or expanding your technical skills, you’re not alone. Even outside of formal programs there are lots of options for getting started including a new site for learning to code in 2012.

As Jason described in the fall, Codecademy is a website that was launched with interactive lessons for basic programming concepts through JavaScript. One of it’s best assets is a built-in environment for coding and a progressive pace that remembers your place and challenges you to recall previously-learned concepts with hints and reminders available. This can be a great start if you’re looking to understand coding for the first time, whether your goal is to build your own projects, better understand the technology you use, or to build a foundation for…

Sleep and Holiday Travel

Anastasia Salter — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:00:50 +0000

In the spirit of going into the new year well-rested, this is the time of the semester when we all need to get more sleep–as George addressed in last week’s open thread, “A good night’s sleep makes all the difference in the world, but getting one can be frustratingly elusive.” But for all that many of us are looking forward to the start of winter break next week, this can be a disappointing time for catching up on sleep. The nature of academic work makes holiday travel likely, whether for conferences or for family. Often, such travel begins even before grading and other end-of-semester chores have come to an end–and for me, the chance to really catch up on sleep often ends when that travel begins.

But technology for getting a good night’s sleep offers hope to the frequent traveler. High-tech sleep monitors like Zeo promise to monitor sleep, though they may mostly confirm the…

Games in the Library

Anastasia Salter — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:00:49 +0000

Getting games into the classroom is easy when the games are free and short: however, class time is limited, and getting copies of certain games for an entire classroom can be prohibitively expensive. Assigning a game as a class text is also difficult in many programs, as doing so often requires making assumptions about the computer or console that students have access to—not to mention the cost of the game or equipment, and the tech savvy required to get classic games running. Even the availability of games or other digital resources can be challenging. Networks such as Steam have started preserving a wider range of games via digital distribution, but those aren’t necessarily the game that will be most valuable for your class.

I wrestled with this problem when teaching the history of video games, a course where there were far more games than class time could cover, and no easy…

Revisiting Flashcards

Anastasia Salter — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:00:51 +0000

Somewhere buried deep under the layers of paper that fill my desk drawers I still have the flashcard sets I made for drilling Latin vocabulary in high school. Years later, the knowledge those words represent is hard to recall, and it’s mostly because I never studied well or consistently. Now that I’m trying once more to expand some of these memorized knowledge banks, I’ve found a few new solutions that go beyond index cards, and can even help with making forward progress.

A mobile device that’s already flash card sized can be a great solution for drilling. Apps like gFlash do a great job of turning a Google docs spreadsheet into a study aid on the go. This type of app can also be used for some recurrent challenges, like learning student names. There’s also a number of sites that crowdsource knowledge sets, like the popular Quizlet, which has both mobile and web-based applications and…

“Program or Be Programmed”?

Anastasia Salter — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:00:53 +0000

As the job market is getting even less welcoming, and digital skills are at the forefront of national discourse, digital literacy objectives are being integrated into student learning goals across disciplines. But there are still a lot of questions to answer: what skills are essential? Do students in all majors benefit from learning to program?

Stephen Ramsay started a debate when he argued that to be part of the digital humanities, at least in his program, you had to learn code. At ProfHacker, we talk a lot about possibilities for digital projects—which may or may not involve working with code. Many of these echo the desire Brian Croxall described to teach kids (of all ages!) to “make.” We’ve also addressed coding itself: Ryan offered pointers for learning Ruby, and Jason suggested Codecademy for getting started with code-literacy.

I teach many courses labeled as…

First Impressions of the Kindle Fire

Anastasia Salter — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:00:21 +0000

Amazon’s newly released Kindle Fire, a 7-inch full color tablet built for Amazon’s content, is the first in its popular Kindle hardware line to step out into the widening market of convergent devices. Ebook readers, once of the remaining single-purpose gadgets with a clear purpose in a tech-heavy briefcase, are now forced to compete for that space with the more nimble tablets. The first-generation Kindle Fire is a strange combination of both worlds, and while it fails to fully satisfy as either it does promise to leave its mark on our media consumption devices and perhaps even make an appearance in our classrooms or our own toolkits for travel and meetings.

The Kindle Fire has a few immediate selling points. It’s fairly light, and fits in a decent-sized purse or bag without any trouble. It’s the first time I’ve been convinced that there’s hope for this tablet size,…