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  • Monday, May 28, 2012

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 21, 2012, 8:00 am

Lessons Learned from Student Evaluations?

By Ryan Cordell

The semester is over. Grades are submitted. Summer approaches. And student evaluations are complete and ready to review. Student evaluations, as most professors know, are an imperfect arbiter of teaching excellence. Nonetheless, student evaluations can point to aspects of classes that need development and improvement, especially when many students point to the same issues in their evaluations.

This semester, for instance, I taught a course for the first time. It was a course I was excited to teach—an upper-division course, squarely in my areas of interest—and for the most part it went well. As with any new course, however, the semester was an experiment, and parts of that experiment worked better than others. In my student evaluations, I noticed several trends that I will consider closely as I revise the course to teach it again in the fall:

  • The relationships between the course…

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May 18, 2012, 11:00 am

ProfHacker: Projects with Instructables

By Billie Hara

So. How are you going to spend your summer?  Writing that book?  Finishing the article?  Recreating that course?  Spending hours upon hours in the stacks at your university library?   Sounds like fun.  How about activities that are less-than academic?  Remodeling the kitchen?  Canning vegetables from your garden?  Finishing that quilt?  Making your own backpacking food?  Building a heavy-duty sling shot?  Learning basic break dancing moves and freezes?  Throughout the year, we spend most of our time working.  We even work during our vacations.  Yet to have a balanced life, we must make plans to play and have some fun.

Building a heavy-duty sling shot is fun.  So is building an inexpensive terrarium or making strawberry and banana whoopie pies.  We just have to make plans to do them.  We also, at least for most of us, need know how to do these things.

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May 17, 2012, 11:00 am

Managing Email with Postbox

By Amy Cavender

PostboxSince we launched in 2009, we’ve written a lot about email here at ProfHacker. No doubt that’s a reflection of just how much email is involved in our day-to-day work. And whether you love or hate email, whether you use your inbox as a task manger or strive for Inbox Zero, the stuff’s got to be managed somehow.

Those who prefer a desktop client for managing their email might consider giving Postbox (available for Windows and Mac; alas, there’s no Linux version available or planned) a look. After hearing about it for quite a while, I recently decided to give it a try, and so far, I really like it. (I was actually a little surprised that it hasn’t received much mention here, though it did make Ryan’s list in the 2011 Holiday Gift Guide.)

Here’s what I’m really liking about it:

  • It has a nice interface, with some options for customization.
  • It plays well with GMail, including…

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May 17, 2012, 8:00 am

Announcing the Digital Humanities Winter Institute

By Brian Croxall

multicolored tents in the snow

Earlier this week, the fine folks at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)–friends of ProfHacker, all–announced a new initiative, the Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI). DHWI will run from Monday, 7 January through Friday, 11 January 2013. The event will be a companion to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), which takes place at the University of Victoria annually. Julie provided a great report from this “Academic Summer Camp”  in 2010.

Like its cousin, DHWI is a week-long, training opportunity on different topics in the digital humanities. Each participant will take a week-long course on a single topic, getting intensive training from experts in the field. The courses are broken up into differing skill levels: Core Courses, Intermediate Courses, and Advanced Courses.

If you’re new to the field of the digital humanities, you…

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May 16, 2012, 10:00 am

And That’s a Wrap? Ending Your Semester

By George Williams

When an academic term comes to a close, there’s often a great deal of chaos: committee reports are due, final projects need to be graded, panicked students need to be reassured, work-related paperwork needs to be submitted.

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published a number of things about how best to handle this busy time of the year. Ethan provided us with an end of semester checklist. Natalie has advised us about wrapping up the semester. And we’ve published two relevant collections of posts about getting through the end of term and ProfHacking the end of your semester.

How about you? What are your strategies for finishing up and looking ahead? Where are you currently in your calendar? Please share in the comments.

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo "Present from Evan!" by Judson Dunn]

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May 15, 2012, 8:00 am

Pinterest and Link With Love

By Natalie Houston

Founded in 2010, Pinterest has rapidly grown in popularity over the past 18 months. Pinterest is a social network based on image sharing. User “pin” images they like to “boards,” and can comment and follow the collections of images created by other users. Some of the popular uses for the site include collecting ideas for major purchases, event planning, and theme boards (because the internet needs more pictures of kittens!). As Erin mentioned in her post on Pinterest, she found herself using it not only as “a fun way to pass time” but also “to collect ideas for my home office . . . to gather recipes, and as a place to get inspired for various creative DIY projects.”

Many Pinterest users describe their image collections as “inspiration boards” and it’s a useful tool for writers, designers, and teachers to be familiar with. But several concerns have been raised in recent months about…

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May 14, 2012, 11:00 am

Simplify, Simplify!

By Ryan Cordell

I have confessed before my appreciation for Henry David Thoreau—an odd thinker, perhaps, for a ProfHacker to esteem. Nevertheless, I think Thoreau can be a useful antidote to unbridled techno-lust. As I wrote in that earlier post, “I want to use gadgets and software that will help me do things I already wanted to do—but better, or more efficiently, or with more impact.” I don’t want to acumulate things for their own sake.

In one of my favorite passages from Walden, Thoreau recalls, “I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.” When I teach Walden, I often ask my students to reflect on this extreme reaction: “Why does Thoreau have such an adverse reaction to such a seemingly simple task? Is he lazy? Is he crazy?” They sometimes…

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May 14, 2012, 8:00 am

Tweetster for WordPress and Omeka

By Cory Bohon

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published several posts about WordPress and Omeka, two great content management systems designed to make it easy for you to publish and organize your online content. How you let readers know when you publish new content, however, is up to you. One strategy is to use social networks like Twitter to send out short blurbs about new posts. However, managing an online profile and manually sending out these updates can be time consuming. While some Twitter plugins already exist for WordPress to Tweet automatically a link to a new post, I haven’t found one that worked especially well. And as far as I could tell, there was no such plugin for Omeka. Until now.

They say that if you want something done right you should do it yourself. So I created a Twitter plugin for WordPress and Omeka and called it Tweetster.

Tweetster was born out of necessity. Managing multiple …

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May 11, 2012, 11:00 am

Writers’ Bootcamp: Disaster Preparedness

By Billie Hara

You’ve probably heard the old adage:  Often the best way to prepare for an emergency is to plan for one.  When I lived on the Gulf of Mexico, where the threat of hurricanes each year is very real, many people taught me how to prepare for such a natural disaster.  These kind folks told me to keep cash on hand, to keep the gas tank in my car filled, and to keep a stock-pile of food and water in the house.  They also encouraged me to create an emergency supply kit that would include a can opener, additional (charged) cell phone batteries, a battery-powered radio, some regular household tools, area maps, and garbage bags.  With these supplies, I’d have the means to evacuate the area if I needed, or if I couldn’t evacuate, at least I wouldn’t starve.  It was good advice that luckily I never had to heed.  I was prepared, though, just in case.

Now, this is a post in the Writer…

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