By Amy Cavender. Writing — it’s one of the things we do a lot, and many of us here at ProfHacker are often on the lookout for new tools that can help us with the writing task. One of the most essential tools (other than some good ideas, of course!) for getting the writing task done is a good text editor. We’ve covered text editors before, of course, and have been particularly fond of plain-text editors, whose power Lincoln reminded us of last year. We also like being able to access our files from anywhere, so some of the editors we’ve looked at have been online: Jason introduced us to TextDrop, and George called our attention to Drive Notepad. More...
The Rise of the Machines Edition
By Erin E. Templeton. We at ProfHacker like books. Apparently so do many of you. The New York Times ran an article earlier this week about the “Allure of the print book.” Esquire followed with “The Revenge of the Printed Book.” Newsweek, which ended print circulation last year in favor of pure digital circulation, has announced that it will resume hard copy in February 2014. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Prime Air this week that consumers may begin to receive their purchases via drone as early and June 2015. Not to be outdone, UPS announced that they too are working on entering the drone delivery market. The New York Times reports that Google is also getting into the robot game. Slate claims that the drone-delievery idea is “hot air,” perhaps akin to those jetpacks we were promised in my youth . . . In a separate article, Slate takes a rather different tack by claiming, “Birds will attack delivery drones.” More...
There’s No Business Like Edubusiness
A Sense of Camaraderie
When the Old Rules for Success No Longer Apply
MOOCs as Neocolonialism: Who Controls Knowledge?
The following is by Philip G. Altbach, research professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are the latest effort to harness information technology for higher education. While they are still in a nascent stage of development, many in academe are enthusiastic about their potential to be an inexpensive way of delivering an education to vast audiences. More...
Google Reads Your Emails?
By Geoffrey Pullum. Microsoft’s astonishingly scurrilous campaign to damage confidence in Gmail is still active after nearly 10 years. Large ads in magazines repeat content from the Google-baiting website www.scroogled.com, which is dedicated solely to promoting fear of privacy invasions. More...
The Freshperson Problem
Reversing the Selfie
‘No Hangeo’
By Ilan Stavans. I’ve come across the expression on street corners, near pizzerias, outside grocery stores, always as a prohibition. The location is invariably in Latino neighborhoods. Needless to say, the expression isn’t registered in either the OED or in the DLE (Diccionario de la Lengua Española de la Real Academia), which doesn’t surprise me. Lexicons have been slow in incorporating Spanglishisms, even one as versatile as this one. More...