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Author Archives: Prof. Hacker

May 21, 2012, 11:00 am

Google Docs Research Tool: A Review

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Amanda French (@amandafrench), THATCamp Coordinator at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. You can read more about her (and by her) at AmandaFrench.net.]

Yesterday I was unusually intrigued by a little yellow notification in a Google Doc I was working on. It informed me of a new Google Doc feature called “Research Tool.” Who could resist playing with a feature so named? Not any regular reader of ProfHacker. And so I tested it. Here are my thoughts:

The new feature puts a new option in the Tools menu within a Google Doc called “Research.” To use it, you first highlight a word or phrase (or, as in the image below, a large chunk of text like a poem) in the document you’re writing, then click Tools –> Research (or use the keyboard shortcut: Command+Option+R on Mac; Control+Alt+R on Windows). This performs a Google Search on the…

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May 11, 2012, 8:00 am

When Enough Is (Good) Enough: A Review of ‘Professor Mommy’

By Prof. Hacker

Professor Mommy cover[This is a guest post by Aimee L. Pozorski, an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. The president of the Philip Roth Society, her book on Roth and Trauma is just out with Continuum. Her prior ProfHacker posts focus on working with student veterans, responding to criticism and on creativity and academic research. Weirdly, she's not online at all.--@jbj]

I first returned to teaching in August of 2003, three months after my son was born. Distracted about leaving a nursing newborn, I hit the house with the side of the car as I backed down the driveway and cried all the way to campus. The dent left in the car door remained for nearly a year afterward, a constant reminder of how I felt that day – battered, vulnerable, and a little bit broken – part memento of a turning point, part reminder of my guilt for leaving.

The next day, during a…

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May 9, 2012, 3:00 pm

Hack Your Learning Spaces?

By Prof. Hacker

[Last weekend I had a rewarding and thoroughly enjoyable time attending THATCamp Piedmont 2012 at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. (Check out previous ProfHacker coverage of THATCamps here.)

Session topics at THATCamp Piedmont included “Deforming the Humanities” (proposed by ProfHacker Erin E. Templeton), “Teaching as Scholarship” (Roger Whitson), and “The UnTeacher: Hacking the Syllabus and the Everyday” (Leeann Hunter).

What I’d like to draw your attention to for this week’s “Open Thread Wednesday,” however, are the ideas contained in the proposal for a session on “Hacking Campus Space,” by ProfHacker Mark Sample. I’ve reproduced his session proposal below (with a few formatting changes) and hope to spark a conversation in the comments. At my campus, I’m on a committee tasked with re-imagining our classrooms, considering everything from furniture to lighting to floor…

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May 4, 2012, 2:53 pm

In Lieu of Weekend Reading: SMH Edition

By Prof. Hacker

Sign from Occupy Ann Arbor

Ordinarily, ProfHacker doesn’t spend a lot of time chasing down nonsense on blogs, even on other blogs published at the Chronicle. As xkcd documented so long ago, that way madness lies. And especially at this time of year, who has time for it, anyway?

But sometimes, there are errors in judgment that are so massive, that so dramatically misunderstand and reinforce a self-created problem, that they have to be identified and repudiated. One of those problems happened this week at Brainstorm.

We are not primarily talking about the posts about Black Studies dissertations by Naomi Schaefer Riley, which we’re not going to bother to link to, and thus feed the traffic trolls. (If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the issue, check out TressieMc’s awesome post, “The Inferiority of Blackness as a Subject” or Natalia Cecire’s post, “Anti-Intellectualism, Déjà Vu.”) The…

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May 4, 2012, 8:12 am

Finding Apps for an iOS Device

By Prof. Hacker

Finding Something[This is a guest post by Doug Ward, an associate professor of journalism and the Budig Professor of Writing at the University of Kansas. You can find him online at www.kuediting.com and www.journalismtech.com, and follow him on Twitter @kuediting. Doug's previous posts have looked at iPads in the classroom (one, two, at using music to engage students, and at responding to a Twitter hack.--@jbj]

I’m always looking for ways to make my iPad more useful. That means I’m always looking for new apps.

That can be a challenge. Developers submit new apps for the iPad daily, and the volume of apps – 140,000 and climbing – in the App Store can be overwhelming. The iPad’s Genius function offers suggestions based on the apps you own, but I’ve found those suggestions more random than useful. Recommendations from ProfHacker help, of course, as do those from sites like Lifehacker,

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May 1, 2012, 8:00 am

Teaching Carnival 5.09

By Prof. Hacker

May’s Teaching Carnival was compiled by Delaney Kirk, a management professor at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. You can reach her via email or on Twitter. Delaney is both an educator and an edublogger–ask her a question or check out her tips on teaching effectiveness at Ask Dr. Kirk. This month she gathers tips on teaching, advice to share with our students, ways to utilize technology in the classroom, and suggestions for professional development, along with a few sites to enjoy this summer.

 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. . . ?

    …

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April 17, 2012, 8:00 am

The Printing Press of the Digital Environment: A Conversation with Stanford’s Highwire Press

By Prof. Hacker

High Wire[Adeline Koh is an assistant professor of literature at Richard Stockton College, New Jersey. She currently directs two digital humanities projects: Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen,’ an open-source site on 19th century ‘Asian Victorians,’ and The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project, an online magazine on postcolonial studies and the digital humanities. Find her on twitter at @adelinekoh. -GHW]

This is the second article in a new series, Digital Challenges to Academic Publishing, by guest author Adeline Koh. Each article in this series will feature an interview with an academic publisher, press or journal editor on how their organization is changing in response to the digital world. Part one was an interview with NYU’s Monica McCormick.

What the modern printing press was to the twentieth century, digital platform providers are to the twenty-first. With the move to digital, …

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April 2, 2012, 11:00 am

Using Piazza to Encourage Interaction

By Prof. Hacker

Piazza del Campo, Siena[This is a guest post by Abir Qasem, who teaches intro to programming, AI, cloud, and device programming courses for the Computer Science Department at Bridgewater College. You can find him online or follow him on Twitter at @abirqasem.--@JBJ]

In my introductory programming courses, my pedagogy relies heavily on collaborative problem solving during class time. A big challenge for me, until recently, had been getting the “quiet” students in my class to participate in class discussions. (Judging by the ProfHacker archives, I am not alone!) In my introductory programming courses, my pedagogy relies heavily on collaborative problem solving during class time. It took a lot of time, effort and creativity for me to get the whole class “talking. Often by the time everyone felt comfortable enough to contribute, the semester was almost over. I always felt somewhat guilty that my pedagogy…

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April 2, 2012, 8:00 am

Teaching Carnival 5.08

By Prof. Hacker

[April's Teaching Carnival is compiled by Dawn M. Armfield, a PhD Candidate in the Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communications program in the Writing Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. You can reach her via email or 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s About the Students

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March 27, 2012, 11:00 am

Are You a Press or Are You a Library? An Interview with NYU’s Monica McCormick

By Prof. Hacker

Libraries are creepy[Adeline Koh is an assistant professor of literature at Richard Stockton College, New Jersey. She currently directs two digital humanities projects: Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen,’ an open-source resource on 19th century ‘Asian Victorians,’ and The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project, an online magazine on postcolonial studies and the digital humanities. Find her on twitter at @adelinekoh. -GHW]

This is the first article in a new series, Digital Challenges to Academic Publishing, by guest author Adeline Koh. Each article in this series will feature an interview with an academic publisher, press or journal editor on how their organization is changing in response to the digital world.

Think of a library and most people conjure up an image of a stately building with stacks and stacks of books. This vision is rapidly changing. Libraries are beginning to expand their missions…

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