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Author Archives: Billie Hara

May 18, 2012, 11:00 am

ProfHacker: Projects with Instructables

By Billie Hara

So. How are you going to spend your summer?  Writing that book?  Finishing the article?  Recreating that course?  Spending hours upon hours in the stacks at your university library?   Sounds like fun.  How about activities that are less-than academic?  Remodeling the kitchen?  Canning vegetables from your garden?  Finishing that quilt?  Making your own backpacking food?  Building a heavy-duty sling shot?  Learning basic break dancing moves and freezes?  Throughout the year, we spend most of our time working.  We even work during our vacations.  Yet to have a balanced life, we must make plans to play and have some fun.

Building a heavy-duty sling shot is fun.  So is building an inexpensive terrarium or making strawberry and banana whoopie pies.  We just have to make plans to do them.  We also, at least for most of us, need know how to do these things.

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May 11, 2012, 11:00 am

Writers’ Bootcamp: Disaster Preparedness

By Billie Hara

You’ve probably heard the old adage:  Often the best way to prepare for an emergency is to plan for one.  When I lived on the Gulf of Mexico, where the threat of hurricanes each year is very real, many people taught me how to prepare for such a natural disaster.  These kind folks told me to keep cash on hand, to keep the gas tank in my car filled, and to keep a stock-pile of food and water in the house.  They also encouraged me to create an emergency supply kit that would include a can opener, additional (charged) cell phone batteries, a battery-powered radio, some regular household tools, area maps, and garbage bags.  With these supplies, I’d have the means to evacuate the area if I needed, or if I couldn’t evacuate, at least I wouldn’t starve.  It was good advice that luckily I never had to heed.  I was prepared, though, just in case.

Now, this is a post in the Writer…

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May 3, 2012, 8:00 am

Writers’ Bootcamp: Summer Writing Edition 2012

By Billie Hara

Summer time is almost here.  For many of us, this means vacations and travel with family.  For others, summer may mean time spent reading for pleasure, taking up a new hobby, or kick starting an exercise and diet program.  For most of us in higher education, though, the summer is time we spend hunched over a keyboard revising an article, finishing a book, or writing a dissertation.  Well, no worries.  ProfHacker is here to help.  We have summertime tips and tricks for writing productivity.  In fact, we’ve done this before:

While these link roundups are wonderful to read, it’s even more beneficial to revisit some of the more important tips and tricks again.  Maybe we should re-title this blog post as “Seven…

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March 29, 2012, 8:00 am

Disruptive Student Behavior: Do You Really Know What You’d Do?

By Billie Hara

Here at ProfHacker, we are committed to helping you (and ourselves) become better educators.  We write about teaching strategies, tools that aid in (teaching) productivity, and classroom strategies that work for us and that might just work for you.  Some of our posts deal with methods of instruction in specific disciplines.  Some of our content is generalizable across many fields and classroom situations.  And lastly, we focus on teaching situations that few of us cover in graduate school:  classroom management techniques.  We have the “disruptive student behavior” series that outlines a specific disruptive situation and then asks you, our readers, how you might handle that situation.  Shared knowledge can be good knowledge.

Our posts are serious, but some are more serious than others.  Faculty of all ranks need information about how to handle disruptive students.  Maybe …

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March 23, 2012, 11:00 am

How Do You, NTT Faculty, Pay Your Rent?

By Billie Hara

In February of this year, Josh Boldt, a Writing Instructor and EdTech Consultant at the University of Georgia, asked his blog’s readership to contribute to a crowdsourced document on adjunct labor working conditions in the United States, this in response to Michael Bérubé’s call, as the new president of the Modern Language Association, to address adjunct labor practices and conditions.This simple request exploded across social media resulting in thousands of people contributing to a current profile of adjunct labor in the United States.  This simple document has morphed into The Adjunct Project, a place that, according to Boldt, promotes transparency in higher education employment practices, provides a quick reference for parents and teachers (et al) to gauge how much value a college or university places on education and human rights, recognizes schools that are treating faculty…

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March 9, 2012, 11:05 am

When Is Old School the ‘Best School’?

By Billie Hara

Here at ProfHacker, we strive to introduce you to the newest technologies and tools that can streamline your workflow, making your work life and even your home life a little easier, a little smoother, a little more manageable.  I don’t know about you (and I’m looking over my shoulder to make sure other ProfHackers aren’t reading this), sometimes those new fangled gadgets get in the way of my productivity.  (There I said it.)  Learning curves can be steep.  The tools can be expensive.  Using them in classes, for example, can serve no pedagogical purpose other than to be “cool.”  (And I frequently tell the neighborhood kids to “get off my lawn!”)

In all seriousness, though, technology is wonderful and it gives us options in how we handle the thousands of tasks we do in our professional and personal lives.  I’m an early adopter of most technology in classes and in …

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March 1, 2012, 8:20 am

Teaching Carnival 5.07

By Billie Hara

[March’s Teaching Carnival is compiled by Billie Hara, a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Arlington.  You can reach her via email or on Twitter. ProfHacker has become the permanent home of the Teaching Carnival, so each month you can return for a snapshot of the most recent thoughts on teaching in college and university classrooms. You can find previous carnivals on Teaching Carnival’s home page. –Billie Hara]

(more…)

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February 24, 2012, 11:00 am

Disruptive Student Behavior: The Entitled Students

By Billie Hara

As higher education professionals, we have conversations with friends and colleagues about our students.  We’ve all done it.  The conversations can include how engaged students are with course material, how interesting classes can be when students participate, or maybe we’ve passed along a particularly funny exchange with students.  We love what we do, and we want to share that joy.  But then there are the other experiences, experiences we don’t readily share because we don’t quite know how to handle them.  Or, we don’t share them because we don’t want our colleagues and friends to know that we can’t handle the situations. That’s what ProfHacker’s “Disruptive Student Behavior” is all about:  it gives us a space to discuss—calmly, respectfully, and sometimes anonymously—how to handle difficult situations with students.

This series has a few caveats:

    …

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February 10, 2012, 8:00 am

Teaching Multiple Sections of the Same Course

By Billie Hara

As educators, most of us place content at the center of our courses. After content has been organized, we then focus on ways to teach that content to students and how we will assess their learning.  We think about learning styles, teaching styles, numbers of students, room space, and available technology.  We think about whether we need to deliver content via lecture, discussion, overhead slides, or course management systems.  We think about how (or if) we can make our courses interactive.  Once all this has been defined and planned, we are set to go.  That is, we are set to go until we learn we will teach multiple sections of that same course . . . during the same semester.

Teaching more than one section of the same course sounds easy, doesn’t it? It means one less preparation for a semester, as we can just teach that content two or three times instead of just once.  Yea, easy….

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February 1, 2012, 8:00 am

Teaching Carnival 5.06

By Billie Hara

[February’s Teaching Carnival is compiled by Billie Hara, a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Arlington.  You can reach her via email or on Twitter. ProfHacker has become the permanent home of the Teaching Carnival, so each month you can return for a snapshot of the most recent thoughts on teaching in college and university classrooms. You can find previous carnivals on Teaching Carnival’s home page. –Billie Hara]

Know of a blog post (perhaps your own) that should be included in the next Teaching Carnival…?

  1. Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of your blog post, and/or
  2. Tag your post in Delicious (or Diigo or other bookmarking service) with teaching-carnival.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The start of the spring semester brings many new ideas to the university and college classrooms.  Grab some coffee (or…

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