Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics. This is a guest post by Miriam Posner (@miriamkp and miriamposner.com), Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in Emory University’s Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC); Stewart Varner (@stewartvarner), Digital Scholarship Coordinator at DiSC; and ProfHacker’s own Brian Croxall (@briancroxall and briancroxall.net), who also works with DiSC. This post is an extended recap of a recent DiSC workshop on creating a web presence. You can watch a video of the whole workshop at the Internet Archive. Finally, this post has been adapted from one we posted on the Library Blog at Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. —bc Thinking about how to create and maintain a Web presence might strike some academics as distasteful. After all, why should we go about marketing ourselves? Chances are, however, that if you’re reading ProfHacker, you understand that being visible on the Internet can benefit your scholarship, pedagogy, and even service.
The Basics Familiarity: What are you getting into? Return to Top. Doing Your Due Diligence - On Hiring. I’ve written here several times about how job candidates should check into the financial situation of institutions they’re considering. The recent financial disaster at Birmingham-Southern College, the demise of Dana College, in Nebraska, highlight, once again, how important it is for potential employees to find as much information as they possibly can about an institution before committing their careers to it. The problem with this advice, of course, is that not many private colleges and universities are models of fiscal transparency. It’s obviously not very comfortable for a candidate to grill the provost, president, or other official during an interview about the institution’s financial state.
(“Tell me, President Jones, is the college running huge deficits each year? Are you going out of business anytime soon?” A candidate who could ask that has a lot of guts, and not everyone appreciates that quality.) There is one partial solution to this dilemma, however. Return to Top. Pick Your Battles ... but How? - Manage Your Career. By David D. Perlmutter The advice that assistant professors receive about promotion and tenure can vary a great deal, depending on whether you teach at a community college or a research university, and on whether you study fruit-fly genetics or constructions of identity in the works of French playwright Jean Racine. But there are certain consistent counsels that apply to all disciplines, institutions, and situations that probationary faculty members might face. One bit of advice that I have both received and offered seems universal: Pick your battles. Many battles that confront us are obfuscated by the fog of war, just as for a military general in the field.
Making a decision about whether a particular provocation is a battle worth fighting is not something that should be left to instinct alone. Who is in the right? What is the timing of your response? Who will be your allies in a battle? Likewise, useful, powerful allies can help if you choose to fight a battle. David D. Welcome to My Classroom - Advice.
By Rob Jenkins Good morning, everybody. My name is Rob Jenkins, and I'll be your instructor this semester. You can call me Mr. Jenkins or Professor Jenkins, for now. After you get your first essay back, you might want to call me something else. Just kidding. I'm sure you'll do fine. Believe it or not, I've been teaching this course for 25 years. Over the years I've also learned a lot from my students, which has occasionally led me to change the way I do things. Probably. On the other hand, I do still use a lot of the same activities and assignments I used 20 years ago, because they work. Anyway, enough about me. Conversely, I expect you to act like adults. Nor will I penalize you for being late to class once in a while, or even being absent, beyond the natural penalties that accrue as a result of your missing class time and activities.
Along with considerable freedom, being an adult also carries a great deal of responsibility. And please don't ask "Is it OK if I'm absent on Friday? " OK. A Blended Librarian Talks Information Literacy - Wired Campus. It will surprise very few people to learn that having grown up in a computer age does not make today’s students automatically savvy consumers of electronic resources. “It’s almost like information overload—like there’s so much of it out there, they just tend to gravitate to what they’re comfortable with,” Mark McBride says of the students he works with at Buffalo State College of the State University of New York. “If they find a need for it, they don’t really evaluate it, they just start using it.”
Mr. McBride is a blended librarian at Buffalo State. “Blended librarian” sounds like some kind of power smoothie. It’s a concept designed for a campus climate in which librarians are called on to do many things besides staff the reference desk. That applies to librarians in the classroom, too. “First you have to understand the nature of information,” he said.
Mr. So Library 300 runs more like a workshop than a sit-and-take-notes class. Return to Top. Preventing Online Dropouts: Does Anything Work? - Wired Campus. Nothing works. That’s the disheartening suggestion of a new Kennesaw State University study about retention strategies in online education, soon to be published in the International Journal of Management in Education. Students drop out of online classes at rates 15 percent to 20 percent higher than traditional ones, according to earlier research cited in the study. Kennesaw State saw that problem reflected in its own classes, so a group of the university’s professors set up a study to find the best strategies that might improve retention. Using undergraduates in a business course as their test subjects, the professors experimented with lots of techniques that previous research had suggested could help. For example, they called students at home.
They quizzed them on the syllabus. Half the students got the extra effort and half didn’t. “If someone was going to drop out of the class, they were going to drop out of the class,” says Stacy M. It may not be that bleak. Return to Top. From the Archives: On Syllabi and Course Design. It’s the end of July. This means that you have already finished all of your course plans and syllabi for the upcoming semester, completed your course websites or CMS modules, written your assignments, quizzes, and exams, reserved materials at the library, and photocopied all your handouts, right?
I jest, I jest. Never fear, ProfHacker is here with an extra-large dose of goodness from the archives to help you approach the beginning of the year with creativity and calm. The day before the semester starts is not the day to suddenly think “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I completely overhauled my standard intro class and add a wiki, student blogs, and pecha kucha presentations?”
Well, of course you can think that if you like, but acting on it might be difficult at the last minute. Keep in mind, the first rule of productivity is “don’t fix what’s already working.” If you’re satisfied with the assignments, policies, and course plans you’ve used before, then there’s no need to do a big remodel. How to Run a Meeting - Do Your Job Better. By Gary A. Olson We all have experienced interminable meetings: the hourlong meeting to accomplish 10 minutes' worth of work, or the meeting that seems to have no purpose. Whether on the department level or the larger institutional level, inefficiently run meetings consume inordinate amounts of our time and energy. That is worrisome, given how much of our academic lives we spend in committee work. The key difference between an efficiently run meeting and one that wastes time is whether we conceive of the committee as a structure to accomplish something concrete or as an occasion to fill time.
I know a department chairman, for example, who was notorious for running meetings simply to fill time. Upon finally calling the meeting to order, he would amble through the subject matter with no apparent objective. That same pattern would be repeated with every meeting that this chair moderated. Some committee chairs will insist on meeting even when there is no business to conduct. Gary A. New (Academic) Year's Resolutions. I’ve never been a big believer in New Year’s resolutions, but up until a few years ago, I still made them every January, and still felt awful by about the beginning of February when it became clear that they’d all fallen by the wayside. Part of the problem, of course, was that January 1 falls at a terrible point for me, as a scholar with one foot in literary studies: inevitably, I’d just gotten through the insane rush of the end of the fall semester, the Christmas holidays with my family, and the MLA convention, and found myself feeling bloated and exhausted and looking at a mere two weeks until the next semester began, in which I had not only to get done all the research I’d been unable to finish in the fall but also get the spring semester’s classes on track and ready to go.
As it turns out, though, January 1 is the wrong date entirely for me to mark as the start of a new year. But this year’s resolutions? Eat like a vegan, most of the time. And that’s it. Return to Top.