Tag Archives: best practices

April 5, 2013, 11:00 am

New MLA Guidelines on Digital Authorship and IT Support

This week, the Modern Languages Association‘s Committee on Information Technology released updates to two 2000-era guidelines that will interest many ProfHacker readers: one on authoring digital resources, and another on how institutions might support humanities IT work.

The “Guidelines for Authors of Digital Resources” does not try to explain how to markup a web page, or code a mobile app. Instead, it aims to “help authors create resources that can be easily discovered and used, fairly evaluated, and adequately cited.” It reminds authors about important issues such as accessibility, privacy, and security, while also providing guidance about giving credit, providing for fair use, types of metadata to include, and more.
The “Guidelines for Information Technology Access and Support for the Modern Languages” has suggestions about three related, yet distinct areas: what…

October 3, 2012, 11:00 am

Open-Thread Wednesday: Best Practices for Live-Tweeting at Conferences?

By Adeline Koh

Over the last few days, a big debate over the appropriateness of live-tweeting conference panels has taken place over Twitter under the hashtag #Twittergate. Participants shared concerns of bad backchannel behavior, the accuracy of tweets, and whether tweeted research will be able to find a publisher. On the other hand, others raised points about how livetweeting conference panels increased access to research for those unable to travel to these conferences, and that tweets could work to increase visibility for scholars. Readers may be interested in

my early Storify of #Twittergate,
Tressie McMillan Cottom’s (@tressiemcphd) blog post about the subject,
Roopika Risam’s (@roopikarisam) blog post,
Jessica M. Johnson’s post on race and #Twittergate,
a report from Inside Higher Education on #Twittergate, and
Alexis Lothian’s (@alothian) response.

While the concerns …

April 28, 2011, 3:00 pm

Security and the Cloud, Again

By Jason B. Jones

As George noted a few days ago, recent weeks haven’t been terrific for cloud computing services, as many seemed to learn about security problems or user tracking, or to have outages of various sorts. And then there’s what happened to Sony . . .

This is just a quick follow-up to recommend two security-related links:

YouTube product manager Rick Klau runs down what he takes to be Google Account Security Best Practices. The most important, after finding a strong password, is to turn on two-step authentication, which requires you to know your username+password, *and* to have your phone with you. Klau also recommends using GDocs to manage file sharing, rather than sending sensitive files as attachments.
Late last night, Dropbox released an experimental build of their desktop software, one that addresses the security problems identified last week (including stealing…