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Author Archives: Brian Croxall

May 17, 2012, 8:00 am

Announcing the Digital Humanities Winter Institute

By Brian Croxall

multicolored tents in the snow

Earlier this week, the fine folks at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)–friends of ProfHacker, all–announced a new initiative, the Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI). DHWI will run from Monday, 7 January through Friday, 11 January 2013. The event will be a companion to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), which takes place at the University of Victoria annually. Julie provided a great report from this “Academic Summer Camp”  in 2010.

Like its cousin, DHWI is a week-long, training opportunity on different topics in the digital humanities. Each participant will take a week-long course on a single topic, getting intensive training from experts in the field. The courses are broken up into differing skill levels: Core Courses, Intermediate Courses, and Advanced Courses.

If you’re new to the field of the digital humanities, you…

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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 2, 2012, 11:00 am

Open Thread Wednesday: Mouse vs. Trackpad vs…

By Brian Croxall

A lolcat: a cat scared of a mouse

Earlier this week, I wrote a review of the recently updated BetterSnapTool, comparing it to my previous review of Divvy. I realized in writing these posts that one of the main reasons I’ve gravitated toward using these two tools is that I work almost entirely on a laptop. Since I don’t regularly use a mouse, cutting down on clicking and dragging has a real effect on how my body feels when working.

While we regularly write about wellness here at ProfHacker, I haven’t been able to find any threads on mice, trackpads, trackballs, or other pointing tools. So for this open thread Wednesday, I want to ask: how do you interact with your computer’s pointing interface? Do you have a favorite piece of hardware? Do you schlep it along with you when traveling? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: it’s a mouse / John Stansbury / CC BY 2.0

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May 1, 2012, 3:00 pm

Getting Your Digital Work to Count

By Brian Croxall

A plush doll of The Count from Sesame Street

Here at ProfHacker, we regularly write about the stages of professional life in academia. One of the most important–and therefore the most stressful–is preparing for promotion and tenure. George wrote about this subject last week; Anastasia has had advice about starting a tenure box; Nels has covered writing annual reviews; and Natalie recently featured a list of our posts on annual reviews and CVs.

Of course, ProfHackers also tend to like digital tools, both in our teaching and research, and such digital scholarship ends up being a challenge when it comes time for the tenure and promotion process. How do you talk about blogging in your tenure documents? Will the committee accept your co-authored essay in a open access journal? What about the code that you shared on GitHub? These are important questions but hard to answer–both for individual faculty and the departments who…

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May 1, 2012, 8:00 am

Resizing and Rearranging Your Windows with Two Keys

By Brian Croxall

A skyscraper's windows

Last month I reviewed Divvy, an application for resizing, rearranging, and repositioning the windows on your Mac or Windows desktop. As I said then, Divvy is a great tool for quickly managing the different applications I have running on my desktop, and I find myself using it daily. It elicits “oohs” and “ahhs” when I’ve used it in during workshops. The only downside of Divvy (as I noted then) is that it costs $14. That might be more than you want to spend for what boils down to something you could accomplish by clicking and dragging.

I positioned the post about Divvy against George’s earlier review of BetterSnapTool. This $2, Mac-only app allows you to drag windows to the edges of the screen where they are automatically resized to take up a quarter, half, or whole of your screen. Pulling the window out of this location returns it to its original size. It performs perfectly well, …

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April 27, 2012, 11:00 am

Google Drive Wants to Sync Your Stuff

By Brian Croxall

Flash drive shaped like a Taco Bell hot sauce packet

On Tuesday, this little company called “Google” announced its newest service: Google Drive. While you might think that this means we’re all getting self-driving cars, it turns out that Google Drive is a syncing service, designed to keep all of your files synced between the different computers, tablets, phones, and other devices in your life. As so often is the case with Google, they’ve got a really nice video explaining the service: (more…)

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March 22, 2012, 11:00 am

Forking Your Syllabus

By Brian Croxall

A forking path

Here at ProfHacker, we’re all about encouraging you to collaborate and share (200+ posts and counting!). Perhaps one of the best places to practice sharing is when you are working on a designing a new class and syllabus. No matter how many classes you’ve taught or how many ProfHacker posts on syllabi you’ve read it can be a bit daunting to start from scratch. Which is a great reason not to start from square one.

In a post for graduate students who are teaching for the first time, I suggested that first-time teachers should learn to embrace theft: recognizing that good teaching often comes from adapting or stealing outright someone’s great assignment, classroom activity, syllabus, or even lecture notes. This advice of course pertains to more than just first-time teachers. When you’re beginning to plan something new, you can always benefit from seeing what others before you have…

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March 14, 2012, 11:00 am

Open Thread Wednesday: Music to Teach By

By Brian Croxall

Image of a Reebok Pump sneaker

At the end of my review of Camouflage yesterday, I suggested that I’ve started using the app to hide all the kruft on my desktop as part of my pre-class planning. That got me thinking about something else I do to prep myself for teaching: listen to music.

If possible, I like to walk to the classroom with my iPod playing something to get me energized. I liken this to the music that plays when baseball players come to the plate, and I’ve taken to calling it “pump-up music.” Popular choices for me recently have included Dom, Black Moth Super Rainbow, and Gold Panda.

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve occasionally written about music: playlists for moving; music to inspire student thinking; the Lady Gaga divide; and even a collection of your playlists. Plus, Jason has this thing for some band.

For this week’s open thread, I wanted to ask what—if any—music you use to get yourself ready to…

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March 13, 2012, 11:00 am

Hide Your Desktop Clutter with Camouflage

By Brian Croxall

Picture of a young boy with camouflage facepaint

One of the great things about laptops is that you can have your work environment with you wherever you go. This portable environment is especially helpful if you’re making a presentation, as you will surely know if you’ve ever had to do a talk using another computer. Of course, using your own computer for a presentation comes with a price: other people will almost certainly get a glimpse of exactly how unorganized your desktop is.

I recently came across a great little tool in the Mac App Store for fixing this problem. Camouflage is a simple program that does more or less what it’s name implies: hides all the items on your desktop. Camouflage lives in the menu bar; simply by clicking on it and choosing “Hide Icons,” you too can have the sort of desktop that could impress the aesthetes over at Minimal Mac. If you’re a fan of keyboard shortcuts, you’ll be happy to know that you can…

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March 8, 2012, 11:00 am

Divide and Conquer Your Screen with Divvy

By Brian Croxall

Photograph of windows on a building

Since moving to a Mac about four years ago, I’ve often thought about the differences between the interface on it and a Windows machine. Perhaps the most telling difference was the way I viewed different applications. In Windows, I tended to maximize every application, viewing it on a full screen. On a Mac, however, it’s actually quite difficult to maximize a single window, leading to a proliferation of overlapping windows on a desktop. I don’t actually mind that, but what I do mind is the difficulty in arranging all of these windows to get them positioned optimally for me to do my work. (It’s not all that hard to do this in Windows 7 with its Snap feature.)

Last spring, George covered BetterSnapTool, a way for Mac users to manage their different windows. In a comment to George’s post, “bdesham” suggested another option for accomplishing the same thing: Divvy. As I read about…

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