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ProfHacker

Teaching, tech, and productivity.

ProfHacker 2015 Holiday Gift Guide

Hopefully you’ve noticed the subtle change in the air: the giving way of the aroma of pumpkin spice latte to the onset of the peppermint mocha. With that blessed change from decorative gourd season, mothers everywhere want to know what you’ll be getting them for the slew of holidays that close out the year. Not to fear! It’s the annual ProfHacker gift guide! Whether you’re looking for ideas for mom, your kid, the board gamer, or the reader in your life, we’ve got you covered.

And if for some re…

December 9, 2014 by Brian Croxall

ProfHacker 2014 Holiday Gift Guide

Round trees at night, lit with holiday lights Why is this post different from all other posts? Because it’s the annual ProfHacker gift guide! If December is a busy time for most people, it’s always seemed that much busier to me since becoming an academic: there’s finals, grades, and all those department parties competing for my attention when what I really need to do is figure out what I should get my wife. That’s where this guide comes in. We’ve got the recommendations you need for the coffee / exercise / tech enthusiast in your life, as …

January 6, 2014 by Brian Croxall

Ten Tips for Tweeting at Conferences

It’s no surprise that we here at ProfHacker like Twitter. We’ve covered how to start tweeting (and why you might want to) and practical advice for teaching with Twitter. I’ve found Twitter to be a tremendous boon to developing my professional networks and helping me stay on top of what’s happening in my fields of scholarship. But there’s one place where where Twitter perhaps ends up being more valuable for me than other place: at conferences.

Tweeting at conferences is a great way to share what …

December 19, 2013 by Brian Croxall

Lighten Your Inbox in 10 Minutes with Unroll.Me

With the close of the semester, you’re probably doing what you can to get your email inbox under control now that some of your colleagues have left the campus and your students have finished their finals. Email is, of course, the gift that keeps on giving. So it’s perhaps appropriate as we approach the end of the year that I make a gift to you of a fabulous new (and free!) service I discovered that will radically reduce the number of emails you receive on a daily basis: Unroll.Me.

The basic pre…

December 13, 2013 by Brian Croxall

Simple Journaling on Mac or iOS with Day One

Here at ProfHacker, we frequently talk about how to get your writing done. After all, for many of us, writing is an important part of (keeping) our jobs. We’ve frequently discussed writing software like Scrivener or Google Docs; more recently Konrad covered Draft for collaborative writing and Adeline talked about using Gingko, which is a horizontal outline and writing tool. We’ve covered methods for getting your writing done, from Billie’s look at 750words.com and Erin’s personal Rule of 200 (wo…

December 11, 2013 by Brian Croxall

Get Real-Time, Social Driving Directions with Waze

When I was planning to move to Atlanta for graduate school, one of the first things that I bought was an atlas for the United States. How else, in 2002, was I going to know how to get from one state to another? When I finally got to Atlanta, the very first thing I did was drive to a CVS to buy an umbrella and a big multi-page map of the city. In 2007, when I was attending my second MLA conference in Chicago, I went with a small folder full of printed-off directions from Google Maps to help me ge…

November 27, 2013 by Brian Croxall

Get All Your Financial Statements Automatically with FileThis

Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the United States, I’m going to say that one of the things I’m thankful for is the Internet. It turns out that it makes a lot of things easier. One such thing is how much simpler my bill paying has become since all of my financial institutions adapted to the Web. Ten years ago I was still writing checks to different organizations on a monthly basis, but now I can either use direct draft or pay the bills online through my bank. I’m even saving paper by…

November 26, 2013 by Brian Croxall

Portable Peace and Quiet: A Review of the Bose QuietComfort 20

One of the things that we love here at ProfHacker is our music. We’ve had posts about using music to inspire student thinking; a discussion about the music you teach with; coverage of how Jog.fm can help you create a playlist to run with; a review of Your Playlist Can Change Your Life; and, of course, Jason’s love of all things Hold Steady. My own passion for music—both listening and playing—led to my completing a music major in college and seriously considering graduate school in musicology…

November 8, 2013 by Brian Croxall

Flying with the New FAA Rules

If you read my bio here on ProfHacker, you’ll see that I never go anywhere without USB cables or a novel. The latter has been especially important when I get on airplanes. We’ve written previously about how to hack your travel—by car or by plane. But it’s been difficult to be as productive as possible when you’ve had to turn your electronic devices off for big chunks of the flight. Hence, the need for a good novel to take up my time from the gate to 10,000 feet.

Last week, however, the FAA annou…

October 15, 2013 by Brian Croxall

Fix Almost Anything with Sugru

Last week, I somehow put a gigantic tear in the plastic insulation on the cord that charges my phone. Against all odds, however, I was excited about the discovery. Instead of a $20-trip to an Apple Store, what this torn cord represented was the opportunity to play with one of my new favorite objects: Sugru.

What’s Sugru? According to their website, it’s a “new self-setting rubber for fixing, modifying and improving your stuff.” But if I was describing it, I’d tell you to imagine it as a clay tha…

Jason B. Jones

@jbj

Jason B. Jones is Director of Educational Technology at Trinity College.

George H. Williams

@GeorgeOnline

George H. Williams is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate.

Amy Cavender

@acavender

Amy Cavender is a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, and Associate Professor of Political Science and interim Director of the Center for Academic Innovation at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana.

Ryan Cordell

@ryancordell

Ryan Cordell is Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University.

Brian Croxall

@briancroxall

Brian Croxall is the Digital Humanities Strategist at Emory University's Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) and Lecturer of English.

Erin E. Templeton

@eetempleton

Erin E. Templeton is the Anne Morrison Chapman Distinguished Professor of International Study and an associate professor of English at Converse College.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

@kfitz

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is director of scholarly communication of the Modern Language Association and Visiting Research Professor of English at New York University.

Natalie M. Houston

nmhouston

Natalie M. Houston is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a personal productivity coach for academics and professionals.