Tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

Author Archives: Brian Croxall

How to Google Yourself Effectively and What to Do About It

March 11, 2010 in How-To, Productivity by Brian Croxall

What do you get when you Google yourself? More importantly, what can you do about it if you aren't happy with the results?

Expand Your Academic Network in 5 Minutes

February 26, 2010 in Productivity by Brian Croxall

One of the many things that academics need to do but are seldom trained for in graduate school is networking. In this post, I suggest a simple way to not only accomplish this goal but make others happy.

Digital Office Hours

January 22, 2010 in Pedagogy, Productivity by Brian Croxall

Many of us use instant messaging in our professional and personal lives, and we can pair IM with different tools to offer digital office hours.

Shifting The Days of Your Syllabus

January 8, 2010 in Pedagogy by Brian Croxall

At the beginning of the Fall semester, ProfHacker authors provided a number of tips for how to quickly improve syllabi. Today, we explore the difficulties of shifting a syllabus from one schedule of teaching days to another.

Tips for Hacking Your Academic Interview

December 22, 2009 in Productivity by Brian Croxall

If it's conference season, it must also be time for the first-round of academic job interviews. In this post, ProfHacker shares tips for making the most of this admittedly stressful experience and asks our readers for any tips we missed.

How to Hack A Conference (AKA Attend One Productively)

December 21, 2009 in Productivity by Brian Croxall

It's conference season for some of the largest academic associations, and ProfHacker shares tips for making the most of these experiences--as well as asking our readers for more tips.

Getting the Most out of Your Evaluations

November 16, 2009 in Pedagogy, Productivity by Brian Croxall

It's that time of the semester again (or will be shortly): the moment when we ask our students to tell us what we do well or at least what they think we do well. This post explains two tried and true approaches for stimulating better (and more useful!) participation from your students.

Writing in the Internet’s Margins

October 2, 2009 in Productivity by Brian Croxall

Over the last year, several academic manuscripts have been posted online to allow for commenting before the are ever sent to the press. ProfHacker takes a quick look at two of the tools--CommentPress and digress.it--that power such projects.

So now you’re a teacher…

September 8, 2009 in Pedagogy by Brian Croxall
I recently participated in Emory’s teacher training program, which is intended for all of the Graduate School’s students immediately before they begin teaching for the first time. One of the mini courses that I taught several times over the three days that the program runs was titled “What I wish I’d known.” The idea was [...]

Being Yourself Online (of usernames and avatars)

August 24, 2009 in Life by Brian Croxall
In the last two years or so, I’ve made a radical change in how I use the Internet: I try to be myself. This doesn’t mean that I’ve been shy about my love of Twitter or that I’ve tried to pretend to be something other than an academic who likes music. What being myself online [...]

Simplifying Tenure

August 17, 2009 in Productivity by Brian Croxall
Ah…tenure. The hope. The dream. The grail. And Stephan Pastis understands why: Something to look forward to. So I was intrigued last week to read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the move toward digital tenure files at Kent State University, Virginia Tech, and others. It’s a fine article about a practice that has [...]

Simplifying Email

August 14, 2009 in Productivity by Brian Croxall
As I’ve been transitioning from one email system at my old institution to another at the new–to say nothing of doing my daily juggle of my personal email accounts–I’ve been reflecting on some good advice I’ve read in the past about handling email effectively. Perhaps the phrase that has most stuck in [...]