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How’s your semester going?

Do you need advice or feedback about something related to life and work in higher ed?

Do you have advice or feedback to share about something related to life and work in higher ed?

What would you like to see covered at ProfHacker?

Let us hear from you in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user floeschie.]

Some of us do it more than others, and most of us do it more often than we probably admit.   Get your minds out of the gutter, people! I’m talking about eating fast food.  Spring break is here for many of us, and that means a change in routine.  Sometimes, spring break is an excuse opportunity to eat fast food.

A study done by the University of Minnesota claims that, not surprisingly, “convenience” is the most common response to the question, “Why do we eat fast food?”  “Hating to cook” was the second most common reply.  As someone in higher education, I can attest to the convenience factor.  I’m busy and even though I write this column every week, I do admit to eating fast food more often than I’d like.  It is convenient.  It’s interesting, though, how we often excuse our choice:  “I’m busy!”  That kind of excuse can imply that we are ashamed of our choice to consume a burger.

However, fast food isn’t evil and if you consume it, you aren’t morally suspect.   In fact, in moderation and with some planning, it can be a fine lunch.  The steps are quite simple:

• Make careful menu selections (grilled instead of fried, small instead of large, water instead of soda)
• Watch portion size (avoid that value-sized bag of fries; a small bag is probably sufficient)
• Skip the fries (many fast food restaurants have begun to offer apple slices or yogurt, for example, as alternate sides.
• Choose the kid-meal (often this is enough food, and you get a toy!)
• Choose the salad option if there is one.
• Forgo the bun and just eat the meat with lettuce/tomatoes.

These suggestions can seem obvious, but we don’t always follow them as we should.   Here are some other links that might be useful to you as you decide what to have for lunch (fast food edition!):

• A fast food nutrition calculator
• A fast food explorer (finding fat and calories in fast food)
• A quiz (unhealthy fast food)
• A fast food toxicity chart (from BoingBoing)
• A comparison of fast food ads versus the reality of fast food (photograph)

When you choose fast food for a meal, how do you decide what’s the best option for you?  Please leave suggestions in comments below.

Image by Billie Hara, used under Creative Commons license.

In February, media hysteria about sexting seemed to recede somewhat as a new beast slouched onto the scene: ChatRoulette.  ChatRoulette connects you with random people–potentially anyone with a video camera, giving you a “next” button as your gong: If the person you’re talking with is boring or offensive, just shuffle off to the next person.

This technology has been pretty exciting, as guys are now able to show their penises to unsuspecting people from around the world, as opposed to just their neighbors.  The media coverage has been so overheated that John Stewart–no social media enthusiast–mocked it:

Casey Neistat takes a more data-driven to ChatRoulette, complete with stopwatch and pervert-graph:

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

(I love this line: “If you can ignore all the masturbators . . . you’re left with this: something that transports you around the world.”)

danah boyd has the best non-video response to ChatRoulette, sticking up for sites that interject a little randomness into our carefully tended social networks.

ChatRoulette doesn’t have much appeal to me–let’s face it, I’d get nexted in a heartbeat, and who needs that kind of rejection?  Plus, I spend an awful lot of time having genuinely random and unexpected conversations in real life. (“Doesn’t academic freedom mean X”?  “You said I could coach . . . so I’m going to coach MY WAY!!”)  I’m plenty weirded out by that, without actively seeking even more randomness.  And while I can imagine all sorts of classes for which a site like this might be genuinely useful, most of those classes don’t involve Victorian lit.

But I wanted to write about this for ProfHacker because ChatRoulette–or, at least, a suitably modified version thereof–could be a fascinating way to think about one of the most distressing pedagogical problems I face: How to improve the paper that’s technically fine, but terminally boring.  A student who’s a competent writer but a disengaged reader typically produces writing that can’t rise much above a B-, and can’t always recognize why.

As a thought experiment, it’s interesting to contemplate an environment in which students could “next” each others’ papers ideas in real time.  This isn’t quite the same as “workshopping paper topics,” which sounds very earnest and improving. Sometimes, though, what you need is just a quick judgment: is this interesting enough to bother with?  Some paper ideas, after all, aren’t worth improving.

It’s closer in spirit to an “elevator pitch,” but the point of that conceit is that the pitcher gets to complete their pitch!  While you have to compress your idea dramatically, the pitchee can’t, after all, climb out of the elevator.

What I have in mind is, basically, IsMyThesisHotorNot.edu.  It’s too cruel to actually implement: The first time a student showed up tearfully in the office of a chair, dean, or ombudsman, the plug would be pulled quickly.  But there really ought to be a way to model for students the visceral part of responding to their work–just how quickly a reader decides whether something is likely to be interesting.  The ability to say something genuinely interesting is just about the only skill worth practicing, and we don’t have enough ways to engage those students who come into class disconnected.

Image by Flickr user gordontarpley / Creative Commons licensed

ProfHacker writes a lot about backing things up.  (Viz. “A Few Ways to Back Up Your Website.” “Prof. Hacker Reviews: CloudBerry Online Backup.” “Backup for Back-to-School.” “Stop E-Mailing Files to Yourself.” “Syncplicity: Syncing More than a Folder.”)  And here’s another post, albeit a quick one, to encourage you to set aside some time to review your backup strategy.  Spring is a great time to do such a review, because you can peg it to an annual rite: the onset of Daylight Saving Time, filling out your NCAA bracket, or even doing your taxes.  (Because fiddling with your offsite backup is still better than doing taxes, right?)

This month’s reminder is brought to you courtesy of John Gruber and Merlin Mann, both of whom have excellent advice for automated, redundant, and regularly-rotated backups.  It all started, as these stories often do, with a crash.  Thanks to Gruber’s obsessive backup practices, however, he was able to reconstitute his startup disk with very little hassle.  That led Mann to formulate the following general rule (his emphasis):

Perform automated, redundant, and rotated backups as often as you can afford to lose every single bit of information that’s been changed or added since your last backup. Because it’s going to go away.

Between them, Gruber and Mann agree on the following advice:

• One backup isn’t enough.  You should have several.  You might not need everything backed up multiple times–but certainly anything you regard as critical or irreplaceable should be.
• One place isn’t enough.  What if there’s a fire? What if you’re robbed?  You can handle this by rotating hard drives off-site (keeping a copy at work, or at a friend’s, or in–god help you!–a safety-deposit box), or by using a cloud-based service like DropBox or BackBlaze or Mozy.
• Manual isn’t enough.  You need something that saves automatically, preferably with versioning.  (DropBox, again, is your friend.)
• Condition yourself to swapping out your drives regularly.

I use a combination of Time Machine (to an external hard drive), BackBlaze, and DropBox.  Important photos are moving to Flickr, if they’re not there already. Most of my teaching stuff is online already.

As Mann says, the most important thing about backing up is to start.  And here’s his quick, 1-second tip to get started: “But, for now, right this second: go Gmail your kid’s baby pictures to yourself. Do it.”

What’s your backup regimen?

Image by Flickr user stargazer95050 / Creative Commons licensed

The Problem

I schedule at least five office hours per week. [I'm there a LOT more, but these are scheduled hours, the same from week to week throughout a given semester, when people can more or less count on me to be there.]

The problem is that as chair of my department, I’m involved in a number of on and off-campus committees, many of which, of necessity, conflict with those office hours.  Although I try to let students and department faculty know about these changes in advance, the fact is that sometimes these meetings are scheduled at the last minute, sometimes they just run late, and sometimes  I just don’t want to overwhelm my students and colleagues with a torrent of emails about my office hours that the vast majority will just delete and don’t need.

Also, as chair, there are a number of people who stop by my office, expecting me to be there, regardless of scheduled office hours (needing forms signed, questions answered, advice given, complaints heard, or just to hang out).

The Plan

So, early in 2008, after a year of having been on Twitter, I began to wonder if there was some way to use an account to update where I was.  Then, via my spouse, I ran across this post by an assistant principal who figured out how to keep a monitor in his office that he could update from elsewhere to let his staff and students know where he was.  So, I grabbed the Twitter handle, wheresthechair, as a test account until I could figure out how to do it.  The problem was one of hardware and location.  I didn’t want to leave my door open all the time (as the school principal did), but I also couldn’t figure out how to get a monitor outside the office without just leaving a laptop outside the door.

I played around with the idea of taking an old laptop and converting it to a digital picture frame that I could mount outside, but frankly I’m just not that handy.

So, I mostly played around with various ideas and kept looking for a solution that would meet my needs and my skill level.  And then I ran across this Samsung series of picture frames.   Like many other digital frames, they can play slideshows of images from internal memory (1 GB) or from SD or other memory cards.  Unlike most other frames, however, they also have a mini-monitor function which allows you to hook them up directly to a computer just using a USB port.  The frame then becomes an extension of your desktop.  [As far as I know, it's Windows only at this point, even in Samsung's newer models.]

The Project

Last summer, I got one of the 8-inch frames (SPF-85H) and set it up outside my office.  I needed to do the following to make it work:

1) Install the frame’s drivers (I used the updated ones from the Samsung site).

2a) Install Tweetdeck.  Although text layout on it isn’t quite as flexible as I’d like, the software automatically refreshes on a fixed schedule, and has been easy to set up and forget.

2b) I’ve also played around with using the Firefox add-on ReloadEvery so that my home Twitter page will refresh itself, but that setup was less reliable.

3) I used a 16-ft USB repeater cable and a 10-ft USB extension since the computer I’m using is nowhere near the door.  I also needed a power extension cord since the included one was not long enough. I was fortunate enough to have a door on my office that has plenty of room under the door for the power and USB cable to fit.  [Note that in at least one of the newer models from Samsung the frame can draw its power from the USB cable alone.]

4) I tucked the cables under the rug, along the wall and under the door.

5) I attached the monitor to the wall outside my door

6) I placed the URL for the wheresthechair account on my syllabi and office door.

The Results

Each morning I post to the account when I’m going to be in my office.  But, I am also able update my status on the fly. I can tweet from my computer or iPod Touch in meetings that I’ll be late and it will show up on the monitor outside my door.  [I could also set up updating of the Twitter account via SMS from my cell phone, though I haven't done that yet.]

After nearly a semester and a half of this setup, I’ve found that although ~30 people (mostly colleagues) follow the Twitter account online, the vast majority of students and others use the device outside my office to check and see if I’m going to be available.  Even if new visitors don’t know what to make of it, my colleagues know to tell people to check the monitor or my twitter account for updates of where I am.  The one drawback I’ve found is that the screen occasionally freezes and the computer has to be reset.  Still, this setup has become a valuable way to remain accessible to my students and colleagues despite my busy schedule.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

[Images are my own; the title is from Brian Croxall; an earlier version of this article was posted here.]

Today, as part of my administrative duties, I had to send out a series of emails to various individuals, each with an attachment. And around the third or fourth email I composed, I forgot to attach the attachment.

Who hasn’t forgotten an attachment at some point or other, and then had to send a follow-up email saying “oops, sorry, here it is.” Adding to my own list of tasks and increasing anyone else’s inbox clutter certainly isn’t my idea of productivity.

So lo and behold, my delighted surprise, when I hit “send” and up popped a little notifier that said:

Did you mean to attach files?
You wrote “I’m attaching” in your message, but there are no files attached.  Send anyway?

Now, I sometimes have mixed feelings about Gmail’s surveillance of everything I type, but in this instance I was grateful.

So I took a look around and discovered that this is a recently graduated feature from Gmail Labs, along with custom label colors, YouTube previews, and other good stuff. After testing new features (which you can opt into, if you like) Gmail Labs periodically “graduates” them to be part of all users’ standard implementation.

Has Gmail saved you from your own mistakes? Let us know in the comments!

(cc licensed image from flickr user Sea Frost)

ProfHacker has been tracking the Mozilla Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge since its announcement. (See previous entries: the call for participants; the announcement of Rubrick; plus two subsequent updates [one, two].]  This weekend, at Mozilla’s SXSW party, the winners were announced:

Three projects of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge were awarded special prizes at the Mozilla SXSW party today. Ten projects already selected as Design Challenge winners participated in a design camp in Austin, TX over the past three days. Today three of these projects were chosen for special awards: ClozeFox was selected as “best use case”; the project leader of Mupple received the prize for “sharing knowledge with others”; Expression Widgets was chosen as the “best web hack”. You can find more information about them and download all Jetpacks-based add-ons from the Design Challenge wiki.

The article also discusses the other 7 finalists.  And although Rubrick wasn’t a winner, we were still delighted to be a finalist! Patrick was especially delighted, I imagine, since he got to go to Austin on the Mozilla Foundation’s dime . . .

Congrats to all, and kudos to Mozilla for trying to bring browser extensibility into the classroom!

Image by Flickr user martinjetpack / Creative Commons licensed

Over the last several weeks, as part of a research project on braille literacy, I’ve been talking with various people who are visually impaired or completely blind. I’ve learned a great deal about living with a disability, and because many of our conversations have covered classroom experiences, I’ve also learned some things about what it’s like to be a student with a disability.

This is not to say that all disabilities are alike, mind you, or that all people with the same disability experience life in the exact same way. However, I’m pretty sure there are enough common elements to allow us to make a few general observations.

Below, I suggest 5 ways in which we can better meet the needs of our students with disabilities.

1. Try to understand more fully what it’s like to have that particular disability

Specifically, what is it like to be a student with that disability on your campus? Talk with your student(s), talk with your office of disability support services, and talk with your library staff. There are a handful of really simple things to keep in mind.

Get a better understanding of what it takes for your students to get from one classroom to the next. Braille signage is important, for example. (Have someone proofread the braille. Trust me on this one, okay?) Students who use canes, or wheelchairs, or leg braces, or who have asthma might need a little extra time, so be tolerant of chronic tardiness in these situations.

Blind or visually impaired students need access to course texts in a format that will work with a screen reader (software that reads aloud electronic text) or with screen enlargement software. Note that scanned PDF’s will be useless with a screen reader; publishers sometimes provide these PDFs, but if they’re just images (rather than text) there’s no easy way to turn the written words into sound electronically. You should also know that BlackBoard is all but impossible to use for people who access the web with a screen reader. And Flash animations are not recognized by screen reading software, so any publisher sites that have quizzes or other information delivered through Flash aren’t going to be helpful to your blind students.

Deaf students need sign language interpreters, and you’ll need to position yourself so that the interpreter can hear you clearly and (perhaps) so that the deaf student can see your lips move as you speak. If possible, make sure any videos you assign (or show in class) have captions.

Students with mobility issues will often need a special desk or more room around their desk than your other students. Ideally, disability support services will make the necessary adjustments, but in case they don’t you should be aware of these needs.

2. Don’t expect anything less from the students with disabilities

It’s important for us to abandon the idea that students who claim to have a disability (documented or not) are somehow trying to scam us or get by through doing less. Again and again, the people I’ve spoken with about braille literacy have told me how much they’ve disliked being treated as any different than the other students with whom they’ve taken classes. It’s awkward, and it feels patronizing. Instead, they just want an environment that meets their needs as well it meets the needs of other students.

That said, sometimes you’ll be asked to provide students with additional time to complete an assignment. Why? Consider the standard research paper assignment. Your library may or may not be equipped with the assistive technologies that students with disabilities need, which makes using academic databases and other digital resources difficult. For the sighted student, finding and reading an article from JSTOR (to pick one example among many) is not especially time consuming. For the blind or visually imapired student, however, every step takes significantly more time: a PDF image will have to be read aloud and recorded by someone else or else be OCR’ed, then proofread, then converted to synthezized speech by a screen reader.

So recognize that students with disabilities will not necessarily complete the assignments in the exact same way as other students, but they should still be expected to complete the assignments. Anything less is condescending.

3. Think creatively about how best to respond to the students’ needs

Maybe you could come up with assignments that fulfill the same learning outcomes but through different means. Talk with your office of disability support services, your colleagues, and your students to see if they have ideas for alternative assignments. For example, could you partner a sighted student with a blind student to make the research process go more quickly? Could you partner a hearing student with a deaf student and ask them to share their notes from class lectures and discussions?

4. Stop worrying about the “documented” part of the disability

This is the suggestion I’m least confident about because I think you could get into trouble if you take it too far, but here goes. Usually, the campus office of disability support services will require official medical documentation from students who make use of their services. This is good institutional practice, certainly, but it rubs me the wrong way even as I understand the necessity.

Not everyone can afford the kind of medical coverage that will result in an “official” status as disabled through the testing and diagnosis provided by a medical professional. This is especially true when it comes to cognitive disabilities like dyslexia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and affective disorders like depression. If we only accommodate the needs of students with “documented” disabilities, then we’re not accommodating the needs of our students from certain socioeconomic background where such documentation is out of reach.

Speaking only for myself, I’d work with any student who came to me, regardless of their “documented” status, and asked to have their needs accommodated within reason. For the most part, I believe, we do this anyway: extending a deadline here, allowing an extra revision there. But I expect all students to tell me up front and at the beginning of class about what kinds of accommodations they need; I am less tolerant of last minute (or after-the-deadline) explanations or requests.

5. In some situations, have fun learning about all the cool gadgets

My research into braille literacy has opened up an entire world of hardware and software I never knew existed, and much of it is pretty darned cool. If asked just to name two, among many, I’d point to the KNFB mobile devices (essentially cellphones that do a great many useful things for blind users) and refreshable braille displays.

In the video below from DingoAcess, Bruce Maguire demonstrates a refreshable braille display and explains why it’s his preferred method for experiencing electronic text.

For a geek like me, this is heaven.

What about you?

How would you rate your campus office of disability support services? Does your library have adequate assistive technology? What suggestions do you have for how to better meet the needs of your students with disabilities?

[Creative Commons licensed image from http://icons.anatom5.de/]

Happy Pi Day, everyone! Why not celebrate with a song?

Here’s what you may have missed on ProfHacker this week:

• Guest author Ryan Cordell returned to explain Scrivener, the Mac word processing app. Julie introduced the microblogging tool Status.net, discussing along the way the difference between teaching a concept and a tool.  Brian noted “How To Google Yourself Effectively.”
• I learned about the value of lectures by learning about forthcoming toys. Alex and I considered the “Creepy Treehouse Problem.” Alex wondered how to motivate attendance at training workshops.  George observed that the rhetoric around “digital natives” continues to be overblown.
• I urged people to call, not simply e-mail, their legislators about higher education funding. Guest author Heather Munro Prescott pointed out that, trendy contrarians notwithstanding, there really is a “Downside to Depression.” Nels had strategies for “Standing Out on the Job Search.” Erin guided us into “International Travel, ProfHacker style.” Amy wrote about “Distraction, Productivity, and Being Attentive,” which was naturally a hit on Twitter!
• In standing posts, Billie asked what’s for lunch, and answered with “Tomato Salad and Pesto Pasta.”  We must have finally sorted academic life for good and all, since there were no requests on “Open Thread Wednesday.” Weekend reading had a video of David Allen himself, plus links about sharing, intergenerational tension around education, and more.

Have a good week, everybody!

Image by Flickr user brhefele / Creative Commons licensed

At my school, we’re a week away from spring break, which couldn’t come at a better time.  Of course, this year spring break means “taking 18 students to London as part of a course with a colleague.” It should be fun (and educational!), but it doesn’t sound like a break!  (Pro tip for London in March: Make sure everything’s waterproof!)  But that’s a week away still.

• David Wiley’s posted his notes from his recent TEDxNYED talk on openness in education: Education has to some degree lost its way; forgotten its identity. We’ve allowed ourselves and our institutions to be led away from our core value of openness – away from generosity, sharing, and giving, and toward selfishness, concealment, and withholding. To the degree that we have deserted openness, learning has suffered. (The slides are available, too!)
• Jim Groom draws on The Wire to explain what any child should grasp–the impossibility of doing more with less: And herein lies the crux of my argument, we cannot effectively do more with less, rather we need to re-think our relationships as thinkers, learners, and teachers apart from the institutions rather than within them.
• We are awfully fond of Mozilla’s JetPack project, so seeing this story about their poaching a design was distressing (via Daring Fireball)
• Mimi Ito has posted a smart talk on social media, playing to learn, and intergenerational tension/anxiety: Instead of shutting out these out-of-school experiences through regulation and monitoring, instead of complaining about the corrosive effects of entertainment media and kids peer culture, we need to work proactively to close this gap and change the role that schools play in kids’ learning. (via Clay Shirky on delicious)
• New from Google: Public Data Explorer lets you visualize public information in interesting ways.

Finally, for this week’s video: David Allen, whose Getting Things Done methodology lurks behind a lot of this site, explains the essence of GTD:

All this productivity stuff is moot, though–in the long run, we’re all DOOOMED.

(Image by me.)

Ever have one of those days at work in which you know you’ve been busy all day, but you can’t quite point to just what you’ve accomplished? Regulating (not eliminating!) media use may be worth considering.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a heavy user of technology and social media. I’m a big fan of All Things Google, I use an Android-based smartphone for keeping track of both the personal and professional aspects of my life, and I run my course blogs on a WordPress MU installation.

Heck, I even got connected with Team ProfHacker because of my use of social media.

But sometimes, digital media just get in the way. Last weekend, I finally took some time to watch PBS’s recent Frontline feature, Digital Nation. There’s lots to think about there, and the program does a good job of portraying both the benefits and the drawbacks of our near-constant use of technology.

What stood out for me were the downsides (perhaps because the upsides are so obvious to me). In particular, I got to thinking about the points the program made about:

• attention and productivity and
• connecting (or even just the ability to remain quiet and focused)

The second of those is really worth thinking about. I’ve known parents who limit their children’s use of media, not because they think those media are necessarily bad, but because they want to foster their children’s attentiveness to other members of the family. And digital media can certainly be addictive, even for adults. (Case in point: each summer, I usually make an eight-day retreat up in Wisconsin. That should be a time for disconnecting with media and for being quiet and introspective. Could I get through a measly eight days last year without using my phone to check email? Nope. I got twitchy fingers, and just couldn’t resist.)

And it’s not just attentiveness to others and to what’s going on in our own lives that warrants consideration. We also need to be attentive to our work, which brings me back to the first point about productivity. I have indeed had days like the one I’ve described at the top of this post: I’ve been at my computer and busy doing something all day, yet it’s hard to point to any concrete accomplishments at day’s end. When I have a day like that, I can usually point to the culprits: email, Twitter, and the web.

To be fair, it’s sometimes hard to shut out those sorts of distractions. After all, practically speaking, much of my work necessarily involves the use of media. But most of the time, no major disasters are going to happen if I shut down my email or my Twitter feed for a few hours.

Apparently a lot of people get distracted by constant electronic connectivity–especially when trying to write. Meghan Ward offers some suggestions for staying focused and productive (including using MacFreedom or Self Control* to shut down your computer’s networking) at her blog, Writerland, in a post aptly titled “Butt-in-chair stick-to-it-iveness.”

Do you find yourself needing to manage digital distractions in order to remain focused, attentive, and productive? Do you have any strategies to share that you’ve found helpful? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

*Both of these applications are for Mac OSX; suggestions of comparable software for Windows and Linux users would be most welcome.

This post’s CC-licensed image is by Flickr user dougbelshaw.

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?

First, make sure that you have your passport, you know where it is, and that it is not about to expire.  As of this moment (10 March 2010, 8:00PM), the State Department estimates that it will take between 4-6 weeks to process an application.  Expedited service is available, but it is expensive and still takes 2-3 weeks.  Also, the State Department suggests that you renew your passport nine-months before expiration.

Once you have your passport squared away, the next step is figuring out how to get to where you’re going.  This article from the NY Times has lots of suggestions about how to save money booking your plane ticket.  There are several search engines that you might consult: Sidestep, Kayak, Yahoo, Bing, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz. . . .  and if you have time, it is worth checking more than one of these.  It is also worth making sure that you are comparing apples to apples, rather than say, apples to mangos.  Put another way, make sure that you are comparing like terms.  Some of the sites only quote airfare while others include fees and taxes in their prices.  And if your head isn’t spinning by now, Sidestep and Kayak both with run concurrent searches with up to 4 other search engines to insure maximum information overload.  It is also worth checking Student Universe, a travel site that offers special fares and deals for students and faculty of accredited colleges and universities.  You do need to register with Student Universe, however, and they will verify your status.  In a recent search for flights to Dublin (my international destination of choice), Vayama led me to Booking Buddy which led me to a flight that was substantially less expensive than the other options I found ($580 vs $1065).  The same search on Student Universe led to a $740 fare, which was less expensive than most options, but it was not the least expensive fare.  The moral of the story: actually there are two.  1) It can pay to shop around. 2) When you find a great deal, book it. You could spend days if not weeks searching for the ideal fare.  Don’t let this consume your life.  When you find an itinerary that works for both your calendar and your wallet, stop.

If you are travelling to a conference, you might decide to stay at the conference hotel.  If you aren’t going to a conference or opt to stay elsewhere, be sure to do your due diligence on location.  You might read reviews at Hotels.com or Travelocity to make sure that you are staying somewhere that suits you.  Sometimes reference libraries will provide visitors with information about travel or nearby accommodations.  Also, if you are travelling to do research, be sure to check the requirements for accessing the materials.  Some libraries like the Bodleian require a letter of recommendation, while others like the National Library of Ireland require an application, current identification, and two passport photographs.

I’m going to save packing for another post because that is a topic to itself.  For now, suffice it to say that wherever you are going and whenever you are travelling, be sure to check with your airline and with TSA a few days before your scheduled departure.  These days it seems like every airline has a different baggage allowance and fee structure.  International flights used to be immune from these fees, but that is no longer the case.  Be sure that you know how many bags you can check, and how much they can weigh before you get charged a penalty.  Some airlines will waive these fees for passengers with elite status in their frequent flier programs, and some will offer discounts if you pay the baggage fees online rather than at the airport.  But each airline has its own policy and allowances, so be sure to check your airline in the days before you travel.

Lastly, if you are lucky enough to have some or all of your expenses reimbursed by your college or university, be sure to save your receipts!

Bon voyage!

But before you go, please share tips and tricks for international travel in the comments section.

[Photo by Flickr user jondoeforty1 and licensed through Creative Commons.]