Author Archives: Prof. Hacker

March 20, 2013, 3:00 pm

Open Thread Wednesday: Your Campus Content Management System

You might already know what a content management system (or CMS) is. If not, to quote Wikipedia (which, as we all know, is never wrong), “[a] Content Management System (CMS) is a computer program that allows publishing, editing and modifying content as well as maintenance from a central interface. Such systems of content management provide procedures to manage workflow in a collaborative environment.”

For this week’s open thread, we’d like to hear which CMS (or CMSes) are being used on your campus (There are many to choose from, of course) and what your experience has been, whether positive or negative:

How much input did faculty, staff, or students have over the choice of campus CMS?
Does your office or department site run on a different CMS than your university’s?
How much control do you have over what goes on your department office or department site?
Are you happy with the…

March 18, 2013, 8:00 am

How to Find the Best Tool for the Job

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Seth Denbo, project coordinator for Project Bamboo at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Seth is a cultural historian of eighteenth-century England, has worked on projects in digital history, and is also a convenor of a new seminar in digital history at the Institute of Historical Research.]

When I’m confronted with a new dataset or a recently digitized resource that might be relevant to my research, my first thought isn’t “Oh wow, there are lots of cool things I can do with this material!” Instead, it’s usually more like “Where do I begin?”

For all the excitement around digital scholarship, the problem of knowing how to set about using computers for research can be a significant barrier for scholars who may not feel they have the skills or expertise to pursue computational methodologies. In fact, there are many…

March 13, 2013, 11:00 am

Open Thread Wednesday: Have You Taken a MOOC?

By Prof. Hacker

Regardless of what you think of “massive open online courses” (MOOCs), they are currently getting a great deal of attention in the media.

Perhaps most prominently, syndicated columnist Thomas Friedman wrote not one, but two recent columns that sing the praises of MOOCs. This morning the New York Times reports that a legislation is in the works in California to “force colleges to honor online classes” for credit, including those offered by private vendors. If passed, this legislation seems likely to create a gold rush (sorry) to California by commercial educational technology companies.

There have been a number of persuasive critiques of the rush to MOOCs (see, for instance, Mark S. Byrnes’ “MOOCs and Books” and “MOOCs and Books, continued.”), but today we’re interested in hearing from ProfHacker readers who have actually been in one of these online courses.

Have you participated…

February 27, 2013, 8:00 am

Making Digital Collaboration Visible

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. Find out more at her homepage and follow her on Twitter at @wadewitz.--@JBJ]

In my first two posts in this series, I described a day in the life of digital humanities postdoc at a liberal arts college and digital scholarship in the liberal arts tradition. In this post, I will explore the question of how one develops as a scholar and a professional academic in a digital humanities postdoc at a liberal arts institution. Specifically, I want to highlight the various kinds of collaboration necessary to digital scholarship that are often elided when we think about professionalization and marketability.

Because postdoc positions are by their nature of short duration, those of us in them must constantly think about maximizing our marketability. As …

February 20, 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 Rock Cousteau]

February 20, 2013, 8:00 am

Facebooking the Past

By Prof. Hacker

[Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a lecturer in history at Liverpool John Moore (UK), where she teaches nineteenth-century British History. Details of her research can be found on her academia.edu profile. She also blogs and co-edits the Journal of Victorian Culture: www.victorianculture.com. She tweets from @luciejones83.--@JBJ]

Digital databases have provided scholars with new ways to access source material. Have we been quick enough to extend these benefits to our students? As a history lecturer, I am keen to encourage students to get their hands dirty by exploring a number of different kinds of primary source databases. Just before Christmas, I decided that I wanted to use digital sources in a different way. I wanted my students not just to find source material but also to use it, digitally, in ways that showed their understanding of lecture…

February 18, 2013, 11:00 am

Organizing Our (Analog) Library

By Prof. Hacker

The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money or expert knowledge alone. Not even both factors together suffice for the establishment of a real library, which is always somewhat impenetrable and at the same time uniquely itself. 
–Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

[This is a guest post by Jonathan Sterne, an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His latest books are MP3: The Meaning of a Format(Duke University Press) and The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge). Find him online at http://sterneworks.org and follow him on Twitter @jonathansterne.--@JBJ]

Over the winter break, my partner Carrie Rentschler and I spent a few days organizing our library. For humanist academics who spend so much of their time engaged with books, we don’t really …

January 28, 2013, 8:00 am

How to Get the Most out of Your Midterm Evaluations

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Meg Worley, an assistant professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University. You can follow her on Twitter at @mmwwah and read her blog at http://xom.blogs.com]

It’s late January, and many of us are polishing our syllabi for spring semester. Others are already launched into the new term. Even if you are a couple of weeks into winter quarter, there is still plenty of time to plan for midterm course evaluations.

Over the years, ProfHacker (both columnists and commenters) has discussed a number of reasons why we might want to incorporate midterm evaluations into our schedules, as well as offering tips on using technologies like Google Docs and Blackboard to administer evals. If you can’t fully recall them (or if you missed them first time round), be sure to check them out.

I’ve developed my own way of giving and getting midterm…