Author Archives: George Williams

February 12, 2013, 11:00 am

A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, part 1

If you don’t already understand the markup language known as HTML, there’s not necessarily a compelling reason for you to learn. However, if you’d like a better idea of how web pages work, then it’s worth taking some time to understand the underlying concepts. In today’s post, and the ones that follow in this series, I’m going to introduce the basics of how to create HTML documents.

Of course, here at ProfHacker, we’ve published on topics related to this. Julie offered “a pleasant little chat about XML.” Lincoln provided an informative post about Markdown, which is a user-friendly “syntax invented by John Gruber for marking up plain text.” Mark discussed “writing in Markdown with Gonzo,” a free open-source editor. I explained “how to get clean HTML from Microsoft Word documents.” Amy considered why you might want to use an HTML editor and introduced us to Mozilla Thimble.

What we…

February 7, 2013, 3:00 pm

Use Amara to Crowdsource Captions on Your Entire YouTube Channel

By George Williams

Amara is the relatively new name given to the service formerly known as Universal Subtitles. As I’ve written before, I’ve found this to be the most user-friendly online interface for adding captions to a web-hosted video (I even made a screencast, though some of the details are out of date).

One thing that kept me from declaring Amara the perfect online tool for captioning web-hosted videos is the somewhat involved (but admittedly still pretty easy) process of downloading the captions from the Amara server and then uploading them to, say, your YouTube account where your videos are hosted. Something as mechanical and repetitive as this ought to be automated in some way.

Well, guess what. Amara recently made a welcome announcement:

We are very proud to launch a major new Amara.org feature– free crowd subtitling for every personal YouTube user! Want to make your videos accessible…

January 25, 2013, 11:00 am

MobileMouse Pro: Use Your SmartPhone to Give a Presentation

By George Williams

I gave a presentation at a recent conference in which I did not use presentation software to advance from one slide to the next but instead demonstrated a few things about setting up and using WordPress for teaching and learning. There was no podium, so I couldn’t just stand in front of my computer and use the keyboard and mouse. Instead, I put my laptop (hooked up to the projector) on a nearby table and used an app on my iPhone to control the computer. After my presentation, a few people came up to me to ask what I was using, and I thought it might be a good idea to share the answer in a ProfHacker post.

The app in question? MobileMouse Pro, available for iOS ($1.99, $2.99 for iPad version) and for Android ($2.99). There’s also a free version (for both iOS and Android) but its features are limited.

Essentially, MobileMouse Pro turns your smartphone into a trackpad and keyboard for…

January 15, 2013, 2:30 pm

Civil Disobedience? The Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator

By George Williams

Many ProfHacker readers have probably already read about Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old open-access advocate who committed suicide last week. Swartz was facing federal charges for downloading “nearly the entire [JSTOR] archive.” (Andrew Mytelka provides some links to additional information about the case.) Soon after news of his death began to spread, scholars began posting online PDFs of their work and using Twitter to share the links, adding the hashtag #PDFtribute (and the site PDFtribute.net is a collection of those Tweets with their associated links).

Now, via Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica, we learn of the “Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator,” described by its creators at the ArchiveTeam web site as

a tiny bit of civil disobedience, presented to you in clicktivism form. By running this bookmarklet (which you should not do if you are not comfortable potentially violating…

January 7, 2013, 8:00 am

R.I.P. Google Calendar Appointments: Detailed Tutorial on Possible Replacement YouCanBook.Me

By George Williams

As Heather wrote last month, Google has canceled the “appointment slot” feature of Google Calendar, which was a much-loved and easy-to-use way for professors to allow students to sign up for meetings with their instructors.

There are other options, of course, but since many of us use GCal already, the demise of the appointment slot feature has been lamented by many. Heather wrote that she plans on using ScheduleOnce, and if that service suits her needs we can probably look forward to an informative post about how best to use it.

In the meantime, Jack Dougherty of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, has written up a detailed tutorial explaining how to use YouCanBook.Me to fill the gap left by the department of GCal appointment slots:

Looking around for alternative tools helped clarify which features were most valuable to me. Organizing group meetings is great with Doodle,…

December 21, 2012, 7:53 pm

Weekend Reading: End-of-Year Edition

By George Williams

This is our last post for 2012. ProfHacker is taking our annual publishing break for the holidays, but we’ll be back in just a few weeks.

We’ll return to a light publishing schedule during the first full week of January and then our regular publishing schedule after that.

On to this week’s links…

“Utopian for Beginners,” by Joshua Foer: “Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades…

November 12, 2012, 8:00 am

Digital Pedagogy, Play, and Mass Collaboration: An Online Event This Afternoon

By George Williams

From the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University comes this announcement of an event this afternoon from 1:30-3:00pm Eastern time, featuring ProfHacker’s own Adeline Koh:

Please join us for an event on MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) and play in education with Pete Rorabaugh (English, Georgia State University; @allistelling) and Jesse Stommel (English & Digital Humanities, Marylhurst University; @jessifer), editors of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy. Adeline Koh (Literature, Richard Stockton College & 2012-13 Humanities Writ Large Visiting Faculty Fellow) will moderate.

We’ll be livestreaming the event on the FHI Youtube channel, and everyone is encouraged to watch and take part via the Twitterstream: hashtag #dukehp.

For more information, read the entire announcement.

Update at 5:00pm Here is the video from today’s event:

[Creative Commons-licensed…

November 9, 2012, 8:00 am

A Sincere Question About LinkedIn

By George Williams

I have a sincere question about LinkedIn, the professional social networking site. Do any of you ProfHacker readers find it to be useful? If so, how? (Okay, that’s two questions…) In her post titled “Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics,” Miriam Posner recommends creating a LinkedIn account (and also mentions Academia.edu). What’s been your experience?

I ask because the only time I log in is when someone requests a connection with me. Other than that, I don’t seem to have a reason to use it. Now I understand that it might be useful when advertising a new job on your campus, but I’d like to hear about any examples of how people have taken advantage of LinkedIn’s features in an academic professional context.

For that matter, do you recommend to your students that they sign up for an account? Why or why not? Please share in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed…

November 5, 2012, 8:00 am

What Kind of Textbooks Do You (and Your Students) Want?

By George Williams

We’ve written several different posts over the years about textbooks, both printed and electronic.

Erin wrote about the pros and cons of using a Kindle in the classroom. Natalie shared some observations about students who use their cell phones as their e-readers. Amy experimented with ditching textbooks for a class and updated us on the results. Jason provided some advice about textbook costs and classroom ethos. I asked for some feedback and examples of how ProfHacker readers actually use electronic textbooks.

At least two trends in higher education and publishing are working together to make electronic textbooks more (potentially) attractive. First, the cost of a college degree has risen significantly over the last generation, and textbook prices have become a substantial percentage of that cost. Electronic textbooks hold out the promise of savings (although whether that promise …

October 24, 2012, 3:00 pm

When It’s Time to Abandon the Digital…

By George Williams

I have a confession to make: I hate responding to student essays through a computer screen.

Yes, I know I’ve advocated using text-expansion software to respond to student writing, Billie has taught us how to respond to student writing audio style, Jason has explained how tracking changes on the iPad might be useful when grading, Doug Ward has described grading with voice on the iPad, and I know that Erin (among others, probably) uses iAnnotate with her students’ essays (an iPad app that both Jason and Mark have covered).

Here’s the thing, though: I am much more comfortable (both ergonomically and psychologically) with a printed essay on the table in front of me and a pen in my hand. It’s much faster (for me), and it is much less taxing (for me). I realize that it might sound ridiculous to describe reading and responding to student essays as “taxing,” but here we are. When it comes …