On March 28, 2012, this blog crashed and burned—as did all the other sites hosted on this domain. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, but I couldn’t fix it. Since I was nearly at the end of my contract with my current hosting provider and had been planning to change providers at the...
Read more →Since 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...
Read more →Academics seem to travel a lot (at least, more than a lot of people). Whether that travel is for professional or personal reasons, we seem to travel with a fair amount of tech gear, including (usually) a laptop. Though laptops usually weigh no more than about five pounds—and netbooks and machines such as the...
Read more →A student’s lament: “One professor refuses to accept assignments electronically. Another only accepts assignments electronically. One professor wants me to use Microsoft Word for all my writing assignments. One doesn’t want to see anything with a .doc or .docx extension. One professor thinks that ‘electronic submission’ should translate to ‘send as an email attachment.’ One...
Read more →It’s no great secret that many of us here at ProfHacker are huge fans of the THATCamp series of unconferences; we’ve written quite a lot about these gatherings—and there’s really no reason to change that pattern, is there? This past weekend I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s Great Lakes THATCamp, which was held...
Read more →Meetings, meetings, meetings. They’re part of many people’s lives, and there’s no exception for those of us in academia. Often, when we attend meetings, we need to keep notes about them. One way, of course, is to do it the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper. Those who prefer to take notes electronically, however,...
Read more →Email. It often seems we’re inundated with it, like it or not. We’ve written a lot here at ProfHacker about managing it, including scheduling it with Boomerang, which works with both Outlook (free for the first 30 days, $29.95 to keep) and GMail (available in free, $4.99/month, and $14.99/month plans). For me, the ability...
Read more →Last weekend I finally had the chance to see the much-acclaimed film, Of Gods and Men. The film tells the story of the Trappist monks from the monastery at Tibhirine, Algeria (they were kidnapped and murdered in 1996 during the Algerian Civil War). Oddly enough, there’s only a bare minimum of graphic violence in...
Read more →