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

Category Archives: How-To

Where’s the Prof?: Twitter Feeds for Your Office Door

March 16, 2010 in How-To, Productivity, ProfHacker by Jeff McClurken

In this post, I look at a software/hardware setup that allows you to update students and visitors to your office about your availability.

International Travel: ProfHacker Style

March 12, 2010 in How-To by Erin E. Templeton

One of my favorite parts of life as an academic is the occasional opportunity to travel and see the world, whether a conference in Italy or a research trip to an archive in England. But the downside of these possibilities is that international travel can stress an already fraught budget and that it can be difficult to keep track of ever-changing rules and regulations about luggage and security, etc. What’s a traveler to do?

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?

Standing Out on the Job Search

March 11, 2010 in How-To by Nels P. Highberg

There are a lot of articles out there on ways to handle the job market. I’m sure, though, that each of us could think of people who broke each of the “rules” offered by such articles and succeeded anyway. What works for one person does not always work for another, which is what makes the process so stressful.

Campus Visit: Tips and Tricks

March 2, 2010 in How-To by Erin E. Templeton

So you’re on the academic job market, and you’ve managed to land a campus visit. Congratulations! Now what?

A Few Ways to Back Up Your Website

March 1, 2010 in How-To by Julie Meloni

Backing up your primary workstations is important and has been the topic of several ProfHacker posts. But in this post I discuss some methods for ensuring that your website content is backed up and retrievable should your hosting provider have “issues.”

Scheduling 101: Using Acuity for Student Appointments

February 24, 2010 in ProfHacker 101 by Prof. Hacker

Guest author Todd Stanfield explains how to use Acuity Scheduling to simplify the process of scheduling appointments with students.

Got Milk? Using Remember the Milk for Task Management

February 19, 2010 in Productivity, Products, ProfHacker 101 by Amy Cavender

Remember the Milk is a web-based “to-do” list manager that syncs with applications on a variety of smart-phone or pda devices. It can also integrate with GMail and Google Calendar, and it’s possible to add tasks to it using QuickSilver or Twitter. This post covers how to use RTM to remember and keep track of all your tasks.

Scheduling 101: The Ideal Academic App

February 11, 2010 in Productivity, ProfHacker 101 by George H. Williams

Today I’d like to brainstorm with ProfHacker readers about what the ideal academic scheduling service or app might look like. I’ve taken the various comments that ProfHacker readers have shared over the last few months and combined them with some ideas of my own. So consider this an open letter of sorts.

Prof-Hacking the Phone Interview

February 9, 2010 in How-To by Erin E. Templeton

Telephone interviews are not the standard in my discipline (English), but they are typical in other fields, and even in literary studies they are becoming more common in the current economic downturn.  Many grad-programs provide guidance to help candidates prepare for conference interviews and campus-visits, but phone interviews can pose some unique challenges.  In what [...]

5 Easy Steps (and One Completely Crazy Step) for Surviving a Grant Proposal

February 8, 2010 in How-To, Productivity by Ethan Watrall

Now, to be clear, these strategies aren’t about writing a successful grant, they are about managing the grant proposal process so that you don’t end up in a mental institution. Because, and let’s be completely honest here, successful grants are as much about organizing and managing the actual process as they are about the proposal itself.

Scheduling 101: Using Tungle.me for Committee Meetings and Student Appointments

February 1, 2010 in How-To, ProfHacker 101 by George H. Williams

Since using scheduling & calendaring services Doodle and Jiffle, I’ve learned about Tungle. Conclusion? It combines the best features of the other two and offers some features they don’t, making it the best choice of the three for academics (though it’s not without drawbacks). In this post I explain why.