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Author Archives: George Williams

May 23, 2012, 3:00 pm

The Modern Language Association Teams Up With Interfolio

By George Williams

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve praised dossier management service Interfolio a number of different times: Julie covered how to use the service to manage your professional documents1; Brian mentioned it when covering how to prepare for the job market; and Erin included it in her job market advice about using dossier services. For academic job seekers, Interfolio is an extremely helpful service that streamlines the application process and simplifies document management.

Today, the Modern Language Association2 announced a new partnership starting fall 2012 with Interfolio, arguing that this new system will offer advantages to job applicants, hiring departments, and those who write letters of recommendation:

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May 22, 2012, 1:00 pm

Update: ‘Google Search Education’

By George Williams

Google’s search engine is a powerful and impressive tool for locating information online. Unfortunately for many students, the simplicity of the default search interface can lead to some pretty poor search habits and results. As I wrote in a previous post about Google’s efforts to provide information literacy resources, “it’s often a challenge (in my experience) not only to get students to search using something other than Google; it’s also difficult to teach them how to use Google effectively.”

In that previous post, I pointed readers to something Google was calling their “Search Education Evangelism” site, a resource designed to make it easier for instructors to teach information literacy. This week I received notice that Google has moved that resource to a new location, given it a different name, and updated the content.

The new site is called “Google Search Education.” As…

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May 16, 2012, 10:00 am

And That’s a Wrap? Ending Your Semester

By George Williams

When an academic term comes to a close, there’s often a great deal of chaos: committee reports are due, final projects need to be graded, panicked students need to be reassured, work-related paperwork needs to be submitted.

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published a number of things about how best to handle this busy time of the year. Ethan provided us with an end of semester checklist. Natalie has advised us about wrapping up the semester. And we’ve published two relevant collections of posts about getting through the end of term and ProfHacking the end of your semester.

How about you? What are your strategies for finishing up and looking ahead? Where are you currently in your calendar? Please share in the comments.

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo "Present from Evan!" by Judson Dunn]

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May 8, 2012, 3:00 pm

Global Accessibility Awareness Day: May 9

By George Williams

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published a number of posts about accessibility for people with disabilities. For example, I’ve shared “5 Suggestions Concerning Disability, Accommodation, and the College Classroom,” addressed “Academic Resources and Universal Design,” shared some thoughts about “Universal Design, Usability, and Accessibility,” and written several posts about “Accessibility in a Digital Age.” So I was interested to learn that May 9 has been designated as Global Accessibility Awareness Day, described as “a community-driven effort to dedicate one day to raising the profile of digital accessibility and people with different disabilities to the broadest audience possible.”

What does this mean?

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April 25, 2012, 3:00 pm

Preparing for Promotion and Tenure

By George Williams

Last week, Natalie published “From the Archives: CVs and Annual Reports.” Well, I was planning on publishing a post this week about “Preparing for Promotion and Tenure,” but it turns out that I’ve been beaten to the punch. (That’s just as well, given that my post was going to share the three most important pieces of advice I’ve received while the post I’m referring to contains ten.)

In “Top 10 Strategies for Preparing the Annual Tenure and Promotion Dossier,” Joy J. Burnham, Lisa M. Hooper, and Vivian H. Wright provide advice designed to “assist junior faculty prepare an annual tenure and promotion dossier that best demonstrates and documents competencies in teaching, research, and service.”

What follows is an excerpted version of their list of ten strategies:
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April 19, 2012, 3:00 pm

The Academic Workforce Data Center and Survey

By George Williams

Recently, Michael Bérubé (current president of the Modern Language Association) announced the launch of the MLA’s Academic Workforce Data Center and Survey. The data center, he writes, “will present US Department of Education (DOE) data on the academic workforce in a convenient format that allows users to compare institutions for numbers of faculty members employed full- and part-time and in tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track positions. The MLA database will cover 4,246 degree-granting two- and four-year colleges and universities in the United States.” You can search the workforce data center for information about your own institution’s employment statistics, comparing the percentages of tenured & tenure-track faculty to full- & and part-time non-tenure track faculty (and tracking how those percentages may have changed between 1995 and 2009).

Bérubé points out that during…

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April 18, 2012, 11:00 am

End-of-Semester Planning?

By George Williams

On my campus the end of the semester is in sight, which means that it’s time to start taking stock of what’s been done, what’s almost finished, and what still needs to be wrapped up. Committee deadlines approach, student projects near completion, and research tasks need to be completed over the next month or so. (Ethan wrote a nice “End of Semester Checklist” back in 2009 that’s worth a look, by the way.)

How much time is left in the term on your campus? What kinds of plans are you making? How do you make sure that everything that needs to get taken care of actually gets taken care of? Let’s hear from you in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Rémi Noyon]

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April 11, 2012, 12:00 pm

What Are Your Summer Plans?

By George Williams

Hey, it’s Wednesday! I think you know what that means. It’s time for an open thread!

Although there are at least a few weeks of teaching left in the term for most of us, the end of the academic year is in sight. Today, we’d like to hear from you about what plans you’re making for Summer 2012. Specifically, we’d like to hear about your plans involving fun things: a vacation, a family get-together, a new workout regimen, a class you’ll be taking just for the heck of it . . . anything that helps you recharge your batteries. Many academics–myself included–are still expected to show up to work on campus for some or all of the summer, but we can still try to use these in-between months to enjoy ourselves.

Let us hear from you in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Per Ola Wiberg]

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April 10, 2012, 4:53 pm

New Online Journal Addresses Teaching

By George Williams

Earlier this year a new journal was launched: Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal of Teaching & Technology, which describes itself as “an academic and networked journal on teaching and technology that combines the strands of critical and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses of technology and digital media in the classroom.”

Hybrid Pedagogy is the creation of Pete Rorabaugh (@allistelling) and Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer). New readers might start with Rorabaugh’s “Hybridity, pt. 1: Virtuality and Empiricism,” follow up with Stommel’s “Hybridity, pt. 2: What is Hybrid Pedagogy?,” and then explore the archive of articles. Other resources include a “concordance of digital tools” for teaching & learning and a discussion forum.

If you’d like to submit something for consideration they are currently “accepting short-form articles of approximately 1000 words” and are…

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March 28, 2012, 12:00 pm

How Did Your Plan to Try Something New Work Out?

By George Williams

Earlier this semester, we asked if you were trying something new this semester with regard to your teaching, your research, or your your health?

Well, how did that work out?

Please share the results of your experiment in the comments below!

[Each Wednesday, ProfHacker hosts an open thread discussion. Sometimes a specific topic is announced, and sometimes the discussion is completely open. Please remember to abide by our commenting and community guidelines. Thanks!]

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Rémi Noyon]

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