Open Thread Wednesday!

I’d like to see you write about the use of customized ning sites for classroom purposes.

Also would be great to have a regular theme on excellent wordpress course sites/blogs. Perhaps a running thing on wordpress themes especially useful for teaching purposes.

Finally, some in depth coverage of DevonThink, Mendeley, evernote, etc, for research purposes.

Thanks, Rob–I definitely think we have a DevonThink post coming soon, and these are all good ideas!

Because I’m so visually oriented in the ways I think about information, I’m wondering why more of our commenters haven’t signed up with Gravatar so they can have a unique avatar appear next to their comments. It’s easy, it’s free, and it works almost everywhere on the web.

So…?

I’ve come this close to co-teaching a couple of times, and I still want to create a course one day that straddles disciplines and involves 2 instructors. I guess what I’m saying is two-fold: (a) I’d love to read a post or series of posts covering such strategies/ideas, and (b) because I have no experience in doing this, I’m not the one to write such posts.

But hopefully we can get someone who is!

Good point, Jason.

Hmm…

I think I know what I’ll be writing about soon.

Could also have the same # as present, but a balance of longform posts and short, well-curated links.

Excellent – I have done it before — and loved it — but I don’t feel as if I was 100% effective in creating that perfect synergy ;)

This is a good idea–we do a certain amount of it in my school, where it’s prominently featured in the honors program.

Actually, the grad student among you has experience in this, believe it or not. We can talk offline about it and if you think that my experience will have enough ethos behind it I would be happy to write something, or at least start the conversation from a good place.

I actually came here to say this when I saw the mention on Twitter. I have been offline since Thursday, and there were eighteen posts when I returned (along with the other couple of hundred on other websites I read). I admit that I read all the posts from blogs and sites that had two or three from while I was gone, but if a site had more than five, I skimmed them or skipped them. To be honest, when I saw eighteen posts from this site, I skipped them. It just felt overwhelming. Yes, we don’t have to read everything, but I’m someone who feels like some sites just go too fast for me. I don’t want to be an idiot who mentions something in a comment that came up in an earlier post that I skipped, so I tend to stop reading sites that just produce content that I can’t keep up with. It would annoy me if I got a lot of comments on my site that I’d addressed in earlier posts that someone clearly hadn’t read, so I don’t want to be that person on other sites.

I just assumed you’ll have fewer once the semester starts and y’all get busier, yes?

rats. No gravatar on that one. Anyway, I think like Mark – you can’t keep this up all semester or it’s true we may all tune out once we ourselves get busier.

I have a few concerns as I muddle my way through Project Bamboo, my large public MA-granting institute, tenure & promotion issues and “experimental” technology (both equipment, digital teaching tools and scholarly research tools). So, here’s my list of future Prof. Hacker topics:

Any comments on working with instructional technologists and/or special equipment rooms? It seems that academics are now straddling knowledge of the digital along with practical application of digital tools in the classroom. Does your univ. have an instructional technologist? (Why not?)

And what kind of hyper-spec room do you use?

Do the students receive laptops?

How does that impact learning the content (not for the prof, but for the student)?

And what to do when Tenure & Promotion committees don’t award bonus atta-boys for experimenting? How to get “credit” for this type of work — article? conference paper? book?

Is it outside your field of expertise and encroaching on pedagogy or comp/rhet publications?

There’s a battle going on about this everywhere; don’t be fooled by our Twitterverse, etc. choir. Upcoming grad students will also be forced to deal with this on the job market — many places say “yeah, a person who knows ‘digital [fill in blank]‘” and then won’t know what to do w/you once you’re hired.

Hmm. Very helpful, Gravatar-less Lorena. Thank you for such a generous contribution to the thread.

What would your advice to me be about how to proceed? Should I just suck it up and deal with the “pass around the photocopies” method? Or could we somehow come up with a better system, even it’s not my unicorn-and-ice-cream perfect vision of the future?

My $0.02 : there’s already a precedent for soliciting comments/info/suggestions/etc via email, after initial posts/conversation starters go up, and consistency is a good thing.

First, I want to say that I adore ProfHacker. Finding out about this site has been the best thing ever: in such a short amount of time, I’ve learned about TONS of wonderful resources and ideas.

Second, by way of introduction: I’m a fifth-year grad student in history (Washington University – St. Louis). I currently co-teach our workshop series for grad students on using technology effectively: in May we did a research-focused one, and this week we have our teaching-focused one (which has been around for 12 years now). In January, we’ll do one job search-related.

…hence my interest in all things ProfHacker. But I am one of the people who’s been a bit overwhelmed by the number of posts and have said so on twitter (@tanya_roth). Mostly, that comment has been because you have posted so many good things lately that it’s hard to keep up.

In general, though, keep up the great work! I’m showing you off today and tomorrow. We’re also (for the first time) running a twitter backchannel during the sessions this week, which will be an interesting experiment.

There are services that your library could subscribe to that would bring your unicorn-riding, ice-cream-for-everyone vision of an library acquisition tool a little closer to reality. One such product that I’m aware of is called OASIS (Online Acquisition and Selection Information System) and its available from Coutts: http://www.couttsinfo.com/Services/oasis.htm.

Please keep in mind that there may be very good reasons why your library is not subscribing to this type of servics – budgetary or otherwise. If you find that your librarians aren’t receptive to your suggestions to try them, maybe you can ask if you can get yourself access to the online version of Choice instead. Good luck!

I have to admit I’m confused about the audience of this site, too. It seems like it’s for the hip faculty who have iPhones and despise Blackboard for being too corporate and controlling. For someone like me who can’t afford an iPhone and who finds Blackboard to be fine for my classes, most of these posts seem way too advanced for me. I’m assuming that’s because I’m not the audience for the site, though I keep clicking back every few days to see if I’m wrong. Like the previous person said, if this site is for the tech-savvy, that’s fine. I’ll keep looking for something for people like me who aren’t.

I read those two posts when they appeared and they seem too advanced for me but that’s cool. Or maybe advanced isn’t the word. They just go in directions that don’t fit the places where I teach. I think anything I’d offer wouldn’t appeal to most of your readers.

Your points are well-taken, Kathy, and although “Team ProfHacker” hasn’t yet brainstormed anything about this topic, it’s one of many goals underlying our entire project: how to get more people on board the digital bus.

This is not to say that everyone needs to use the exact same tools (all of which must be digital) to do the exact same things; rather, we’d like to familiarize more people with what kinds of tools are available, how people are using them, why people are using them, and how to learn how to start using them if you want to.

And even if someone doesn’t find that digital tools work best for his or her needs, it would be great if more people would learn to respect the work of academics who do.

My thoughts about the frequency with which we’ve posted so far are this: We’re not exactly a news site, so the information we provide doesn’t expire after a certain amount of time.

In late December/early January, a reader can come back to the “Preparing for a new semester” series of posts and still find them helpful.

Of course, the discussions in the comments have (so far) tended to trail off after the initial burst of activity, but (since we’ve added a “recent comments” sidebar that appears on the main page) even comments on old posts have the potential to revive that particular conversation.

Furthermore, it’s entirely possible that a reader will only be interested in one particular slice of what we do, such as these:

The series on “Preparing for a new semester,” or
Ethan’s series on presentations, or
The “ProfHacker 101″ series, or
Everything that Jason writes.

That’s okay, too. We imagine our audience as fairly diverse (in terms of interest and expertise), and we don’t expect everyone to be interested in everything.

I believe it’s possible for audience members to up set their RSS readers so that only those posts they’re interested in are the ones that show up in their feed. Correct me if I’m wrong.

And it’s also possible that we’re not the site for you, which is a possibility within the realm of “That’s too bad, but these things happen and I hope we can still be friends.”

We’re always open to suggestions and comments. So if there’s some kind of content you’d like to see here–content related to productivity and simplification (whether it’s explicitly about digital tools or not)–please let us know.

Yes, I’ve done the sticky notes on the wall thing since Nels got me to read Bruce Ballenger’s work on teaching research writing a few years ago when I was reading his blog and asked for help (I’m not in Composition or Rhetoric and needed help teaching writing). I’m an adjunct with a day job who teaches for fun at night and by places I meant student culture. I can’t see the students I’ve been teaching being willing to do a lot of this stuff. Half of my students aren’t even on Facebook and can’t afford iPods. I can’t ask everyone to turn in typed work.

I took a leave and have been getting back to teaching this year, so I’m diving back into thee teaching blogs. Maybe I’ve just been away from this for too long, but all this talk of Smart Phones and all these websites and things to download and these things are just going over my head. But like you say up above, this site is not for everyone. I was just hanging out for a bit to find out if it was for me.

I think there’s been a misunderstanding: it’s not our goal to share information about teaching to students who all have smart phones, Facebook accounts, and non-stop Internet access.

Instead, we want to share information (and request information) about how to have a more efficient, close-to-frictionless life in terms of both the personal and the professional (in terms of the teaching, research, service trifecta of academia). Sometimes this involves “smart phones and all these websites and things to download” but a great deal of the time it doesn’t.

I hope that you and other readers like you find things here that are helpful.