Author Archives: Prof. Hacker

June 7, 2013, 11:00 am

Hacking Prezi as a Platform for Visual Composition and Design Experimentation

[This is a guest post by Kimon Keramidas, Assistant Professor and Director for the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center. Kimon teaches about the design and material culture of technology and is tasked with integrating and implementing digital media within the curricular and research goals of faculty and students. He also leads the development of digital media and interactives for the BGC's Focus Gallery exhibitions. Find him online at http://kimonkeramidas.net and follow him on Twitter at @kimonizer.--@BC]

One of my favorite parts of ProfHacker is the idea of subtly hacking tools for educational purposes. By subtle hacking I mean not changing the code or structure of a tool, but using it for a purpose it may not have been originally intended for. One tool that I have found is readily hackable in this sense is Prezi. (Editors: See our previous posts covering how…

May 21, 2013, 11:00 am

My Attempt at Managing Qualitative Research Data

By Prof. Hacker

fieldnotes [This is a guest post by Austin Kocher, a Ph.D. student in geography at the Ohio State University. You can find his minimalist blog at austinkocher.com or see some of his work online here.--@JBJ]

Qualitative data. The phrase conjures up stacks of spiral-bound field notebooks, a dented-and-scratched voice recorder, and most of all, perpetual disorganization. While chemists have lab notebooks and accountants have spreadsheets, qualitative researchers are often left to invent a data management system entirely from scratch. Not one to turn down a challenge, in the summer of 2011 I tried find a workable and productive solution to managing a busy year of interview-driven research. Here’s what I did.

The Demands

Interview data – like any James Cameron movie –is 90% pre- and post-production and only 10% on-site action. I needed a centralized and secure system for managing contact…

May 8, 2013, 11:00 am

Open Thread Wednesday: One Thing to Change

By Prof. Hacker

As this academic year winds down, it’s time to start thinking about next year (after you finish up your semester, of course!). Looking back over the previous year is likely to remind one of things that didn’t go as well as they should have, and to spark ideas for how to do things differently in the future. However, as Jason has written, it’s important not to overcorrect. In some situations, it might be best to stick to one thing to change with regard to your research, teaching, service, or personal activities. That way, you can better track what effect that change has.

Next year, if you could change just one thing under your control, what would it be? Please share in this week’s open thread!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Fabio Penna]

May 1, 2013, 11:00 am

Open Thread Wednesday: End-of-Semester Edition

By Prof. Hacker

For many of us, the end of the term has arrived (or will soon be here).

Over the years, we’ve had much to say about the end of the semester here at ProfHacker. Ethan provided us with an end-of-semester checklist. Heather suggested that we engage in an end-of-semeseter review. And Natalie has given us advice on how to wrap things up.

What are you doing to finish up your semester? What have you found to be the most useful practices to adopt as the term draws to a close? Please share in this week’s open thread!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by mao_lini]

April 18, 2013, 8:47 am

Making Scientists: Some Assembly Required

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Jeremy Yoder, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Minnesota. You can find him online at Denim and Tweed, or follow him on Twitter at @jbyoder.--@JBJ]

One of the quirks of academic science is that earning a graduate degree in science doesn’t necessarily prepare you for teaching, which is one of the principal things one does after earning a graduate degree in science. Graduate school is primarily about learning how to be a scientist—developing new ideas, designing experiments to test them, finding funding to support those experiments—and those tasks have very little to do with the process of undergraduate education, right?

Not so, according to Gregory Light and Marina Micari. In their new book Making Scientists: Six Principles for Effective College Teaching, (Harvard…

April 11, 2013, 8:00 am

Three Applications for Planning Classes

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Doug Ward, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, where he is teaching a research and digital literacy course he developed called Infomania. You can find him online at www.kuediting.com and www.journalismtech.com, and follow him on Twitter @kuediting.--@JBJ]

Planning a new class is a lot like starting a new research project: filled with the anticipation of discovery but also the trepidation of organizing material in a coherent way.

I’ve found that a combination of three tools — Scrivener, Evernote and Workflowy — eases some of that trepidation.

ProfHacker readers are no doubt familiar with Scrivener and Evernote. Ryan provided an excellent overview of Scrivener, explaining how he uses it for writing. George wrote about using it for transcription, and Mark and Billie looked at the Windows version (the one I use). Kathleen…

April 9, 2013, 8:00 am

Preparing for Launch: Avoiding Browser Hell with BrowserStack

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Joanna Swafford, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia. She is currently working on her dissertation on the gendered intermediations of Victorian poetry and music. You can find her online at her blog and follow her on Twitter at @annieswafford.--@JBJ]

March 11th saw the pre-release of my digital project, Songs of the Victorians, an archive of parlor and art song settings of Victorian poems, and also a scholarly tool to facilitate interdisciplinary music and poetry scholarship. I had been building it for the last two years with the help of fellowships from NINES and the Scholars’ Lab, and it was a great experience to finally make the site public.

It was also a surprisingly challenging experience, as I had to figure out how to make the site display properly on a wide variety of browsers, operating systems, and iOS devices (iPad,…

April 3, 2013, 11:00 am

Open Thread Wednesday!

By Prof. Hacker

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!

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

What’s on your mind? Do you need advice or feedback about something related to life and work in higher ed? Do you have advice or feedback to share about something related to life and work in higher ed? What would you like to see covered at ProfHacker? Do you have any suggestions for Open Thread topics? Do you have any interesting, ProfHacker-y links to share?

Let us hear from you in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by PhotKing]

April 3, 2013, 8:00 am

The Itinerant Postdoc

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Adrianne Wadewitz, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College. You can visit her home page and follow her on Twitter at @wadewitz.--@jbj]

In previous posts in this series, I have discussed a day in the life of a digital humanities postdoc, digital scholarship at a liberal arts college, and the invisibility of digital work. In this last post, I would like to discuss the time management and life choices involved in a postdoc.

One of the real joys of my position is that I have time to learn new skills, such as coding. I can take time out of every day to work on projects that flesh out my skills. For example, I can take real time to develop this website on the New England Primer that I have been working on only sporadically for the past few years or I can experiment with 18thconnect’s TypeWright…

April 1, 2013, 11:00 am

Browzine: Academic Journals on Your Tablet

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by J. Michael Duvall, an associate professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he teaches American Literature. You can find him online at his website and follow him on Twitter @duvalljm]

BrowZine is a free app — by Third Iron — for accessing and reading content from academic journals on the iPad (with versions for other tablets being developed). The app allows users to

select academic journals from a “shelf” display (see Figure 1.),
browse complete journal issues,
read individual articles,
collect favorite journals on a shelf of one’s own,
save favorite articles,
and perform additional tasks with journal content.

A service, rather than an app, as Third Iron prefers to think of it, Browzine emphasizes perusing or thumbing through and reading of academic journals, rather than searching or marking up texts….