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Author Archives: Brian Croxall

February 21, 2012, 11:00 am

Conducting Your Midterm Evaluations Publicly with Google Docs

By Brian Croxall

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Although the recent weather down here in Atlanta suggests that we’re nearing May and the semester’s end, it turns out that we’re only getting close to midterms. The middle of the semester is a great time to take stock of how your courses are going. One approach is to conduct a mid-semester self evaluation, asking yourself what’s going well and what you can do to improve the rest of the semester.

While knowing thyself is useful, it’s also useful to know what your students are thinking. That’s why we at ProfHacker have written about giving midterm evaluations to students every year since our blog was born: Billie covered the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis as a midterm model in 2009; Amy asked her students to evaluate their own performance in 2010; and George provided four simple questions for a midterm evaluation in 2011. (Guys, I’ve got 2012 covered. Holler!)

It turns out…

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February 14, 2012, 11:00 am

Managing Your Mac Clipboard with iClip

By Brian Croxall

Scissors, ruler, pen

Our family switched from PC to Mac almost four years ago. On the whole, there haven’t been a lot of things that I missed about being a PC user. But one that immediately stood out to me was the lack of a good clipboard manager on the Mac. I’m constantly copying and pasting different things in my work, and it’s not uncommon for me to try to paste something only to discover that I’d already copied over it. So I would have to go back to the original thing, copy it, and then paste it again. That or—the horror!—I’d have to type it again.

I’d experimented with a few different pieces of software over the years to help me manage a clipboard, but none of them stuck until I discovered iClip a few months ago. Once installed and running in the background, iClip quietly records everything that I copy on its (predictably titled) “Recorder.” (more…)

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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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January 30, 2012, 8:00 am

Reporting from the New Faculty Majority Summit

By Brian Croxall

picture of a mountain summitHere at ProfHacker we like to talk about things in academia that “everyone just knows.” It turns out that many people don’t know these things because they go unspoken for one reason or another. And among those things is the role that non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty play in higher education. It’s not the readers of ProfHacker that don’t know about adjunct labor, however, so much as the general public. On Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend an event that is looking to change that.

I was at the first national summit—Reclaiming Academic Democracy—called by the New Faculty Majority (NFM). NFM is a three-year old group that seeks to (1) highlight the extent of NTT faculty (hint: they teach the majority of classes and students across the country) and (2) the conditions under which many of these NTT faculty labor (hint: it ain’t pretty). The goals of the summit were to bring…

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January 27, 2012, 8:00 am

Conquering Special Characters with CharacterPal

By Brian Croxall

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Anyone who’s spent some time working on a typewriter can tell you that one of the great things about a computer is how easy it is to type special characters. By “special characters,” I mean those symbols or accented letters that aren’t part of regular use in English but that come up plenty often in your scholarship. Instead of typing an “e” and then trying to position the paper so you can strike an apostrophe on top of it, you can just use a combination of keys to generate the perfect “é.” Much, much easier. Of course, the ease of creating these special characters is entirely dependent upon your ability to remember what the key combination is.

I recently discovered a handy widget for the Mac OS Dashboard that fixes this problem. CharacterPal, designed by tacowidgets.com, provides a small reference for typing the character you want. Once you download and install the widget, you…

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January 9, 2012, 11:00 am

Four Tips for a Non-Teaching Academic Job Search

By Brian Croxall

Zombies with "Will Work for Brains" sign

It’s currently the high point of the academic job search for many disciplines. The MLA and AHA, for example, have just concluded their annual conventions, where first-round job interviews take place. But not everyone necessarily wants a tenure-track appointment.

To help those who still want to work in higher education but are not interested in the professorial track, the MLA offered a workshop on the nonteaching academic job search run by Brenda Bethman (Director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Women’s Center), Shaun Longstreet (Director of Marquette University’s Center for Teaching and Learning), and Lisa Roetzel (Associate Director of the Campuswide Honors Program at UC Irvine). I participated in the workshop and wanted to share some brief highlights for those looking to hack their career.

First, it’s worth remembering—and saying over and over again—that

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December 21, 2011, 8:00 am

Give the Gift of Less Email

By Brian Croxall

line of mailboxes covered with leaves

With the semester (hopefully) wrapped at this point, you might not be the only person who is just now starting to think of what you could get your partner, parents, children, pets, and mail carrier to celebrate the holidays. You will have naturally consulted the epic EPIC ProfHacker 2011 Holiday Gift Guide. But with only 4 days ’til Christmas and as we’re halfway through Hanukkah, you might not be able to buy anything online and get it shipped in time. Not to fear! This year, you can give something to everyone you interact with: the gift of less email.

Way back in June in one of his weekend reading lists, Jason mentioned the effort to create an Email Charter by TED’s Chris Anderson. A few weeks later, after soliciting feedback on his initial suggestions, Anderson posted an actual list of resolutions at the helpful and easy to remember URL of emailcharter.org. The Email Charter is 10…

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December 14, 2011, 8:00 am

Reporting from HASTAC 2011

By Brian Croxall

Field of haystacks, arranged for a maze

A week and a half ago, I had the pleasure of attending the fifth HASTAC conference, which was held at the University of Michigan. HASTAC, or the—Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory—is a group of faculty, graduate students, librarians, technologists, and more whose work intersects in some way with different technologies.

The theme of the conference was Digital Scholarly Communication, and over three days, I heard a lot about the shifts that are happening at university presses (where Michigan’s MPublishing is leading the way); in the classroom (if you think that there’s not anything new to say or learn about blogging and teaching, you would have ended up very surprised); and about the effect that the digital is having on the humanities and—to a much lesser extent, unfortunately—the arts, social sciences, and hard sciences. There were several…

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December 12, 2011, 11:00 am

Use Dropbox to Instantly Update Your Online CV

By Brian Croxall

Portion of the Berlin Wall with words

Your curriculum vitae or CV is one of among the most important documents in academe. As Heather mentions in Friday’s post on archiving CVs, you’ll use it when looking for jobs, when applying for grants, when going up for tenure, and so on and so on. More than a year ago, Natalie wrote a great post summarizing how one should go about creating and maintaining a CV. I find myself doing a lot of the latter. I find it easier just to add information about a conference, a publication, or classes I’m teaching as soon as they happen rather than at the end of the semester.

This works well for me…until I need to update the CV that lives on my website. Since I write my CV in Word, the formatting doesn’t translate especially well to WordPress or the web in general. (Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if I used LaTeX for writing.) I’ve redesigned the layout and I’m generally pleased with the…

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September 29, 2011, 3:00 pm

Travel Essentials: Bereavement Fares

By Brian Croxall

A little over a month ago, we had a death in the family. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, although it didn’t happen quite on the schedule that we had anticipated. To get my wife home, I needed to book a cross-country flight, and I needed it to leave within 18 hours. As I steeled myself to look at the ticket prices between Atlanta and a small regional airport, I had a stray thought tickle my mind. When investigating flight change policies in the past year, I had noticed that the fees that are normally assessed in such situations can be waived in the case of a family death. I wondered if there might be such a thing as discounted fares for those who had lost a family member.

The answer, it turns out, is yes. Most of the major airlines offer what are collectively known as “bereavement fares.” (Continental calls them “compassion fares.”) While most of us purchase airline tickets online these…

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