By Audrey Watters. For the fourth year in a row, I’ve asked educators to tell me which technology they’re most eager to bring with them into their classrooms this fall. Hardware or software. A new technology, or just something that’s new to their classroom. And here are the results:
2013’s Top 3 Tools
1. iPad
2. Google Apps for Education
3. Smartphones. More...

By Lincoln Mullen. About a month ago, I came to the sad realization that my six-year-old white plastic MacBook was not going to see me to the end of my dissertation. Among the more serious of its ailments, its hard disk was about to fail, and doing any task took at least thirty seconds of waiting. (Going through the metal detector at an archives last summer, one of the security guards said, “I remember you; you’re the guy with the old laptop.”) Fortunately the funds for a replacement were at hand, and I needed to decide which computer to buy. There were two considerations. First, Macs of all varieties are expensive. If my budget were unlimited I’d buy one of the new Mac Pros with three Cinema displays, and compute in style. More...

By Brian Croxall. I’ll be honest: there’s not much I like more than a good software update. When I get a pop-up telling me that there’s a new version available, I tend to click “Install and restart” faster than our new puppy hops onto the table when my back is turned. My general feeling is that new versions of things I like will be even more likely to be likable. And for the most part, I tend to be right. But there’s an exception. I’ve been a huge fan of the screenshot tool Skitch ever since Jason reviewed it in September of 2009. More...

By Amy Cavender. With smartphone ownership becoming increasingly common (according to a study released earlier this summer, 56% of all adults in the U.S. own a smartphone; among mobile phone owners, that figure climbs to 61%), it’s no great surprise that many of us are now regularly using a smartphone as part of our workflow. Each smartphone platform has a dizzying array of applications available, but has stock applications for the functions most people use most frequently (email, calendar, camera). If the stock applications fit the way you work, great. More...

By Anastasia Salter. Many of us at ProfHacker rely on WordPress. I use it for everything from managing my academic web presence to hosting online course materials and communities. This means I have a lot of out-of-date sites that serve their purpose for one semester and live on only as archives. Ever since WordPress 3.6 came out (ok, and for a year before that) I’ve been planning on taking a day to update all these installations and manage my server. Last week, I opened my email to find a message from my hosting provider entitled “WordPress Attack.” I checked my website and realized the scripts had been shut down entirely. Thankfully, it was before the semester started. More...

By Rick Anderson. The loss of the commercially published books and recordings held in the library’s general collection is truly unfortunate - but the loss of the archive is tragic. The tragedy of the train wreck and oil fire in Lac-Mégantic, Québec is, first and foremost, a human one, with close to 50 people killed and the homes and businesses of many survivors destroyed. But a smaller tragedy has also come to light, one that should give pause to libraries and the institutions (academic and political) that sponsor them. A recent article in Library Journal reports that one casualty of the explosion and fire in Lac-Mégantic was the village’s library and its collection, “which included more than 60,000 books, CDs, and DVDs, and a local history archive.”
The loss of the commercially published books and recordings held in the library’s general collection is truly unfortunate — but the loss of the archive is tragic. More...

By Joshua Kim. Why are we pushing ahead into mobile learning? One possibility is that we are all making a huge collective mistake. That we have drunk the iPad / iPhone / Android Kool-Aid. That we will look back on all this talk about mobile learning the same way we look back on netbooks and MOOCs (did I just say MOOCs?). We will wonder why we did not ask the mobile learning evangelists the hard questions. Why did we see mobile learning as an ends, rather than a means in which to accomplish our educational goals? Read more...

By Joshua Kim. I've been spending lots of time thinking about mobile learning. Why am I so excited about designing online and blended learning environments around the phone? Isn't this yet another case where the technology is driving the approach to teaching and learning, exactly the opposite of what we all say we should be doing?
The number reason to be excited about mobile learning is that mobile learning will force us to edit our online and blended courses.
The lack of screen real estate will push us to think about what is really important in our classes. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Apparently, this is turning into “begging for ideas” week. Please forgive the dreadful manners. I know juuuuuust enough about IT to be dangerous. I recently heard an IT idea that strikes me as obviously great, but experience has taught me that ideas that look obviously great at first blush can hide great sins among the details. So I’m hoping that some folks who have been through this can shed some light. The idea is “virtualization,” and my bowdlerized understanding of it is as follows. In traditional on-campus computer labs, every computer has its own CPU and performs its own calculations and processes. The computers are networked to each other and to the internet, for obvious reasons, but each is capable of doing some pretty serious internal processing. If you want to run a program on all of the computers in a lab, you have to install it on each computer individually.  Although much of what computers do is online now, we still pay for and maintain all those separate computer brains within each station. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. My goal is to read a book a week. You?  The majority of my book reading is audio, and nowadays my preferred reading platform is an iPhone 5 and the Audible app. The Audible app is interesting because it demonstrates both the advantages and limitations of a mobile and app-centric approach. There may also be some lessons in how Audible has designed the app, and how audiobook listeners interact with the app, for mobile learning. The most important advantage of the Audible app is that I can utilize the device (the iPhone) that I always have with me. Consuming audiobooks from my phone means I never need to remember to take another device, never need to worry about syncing, charging, or managing yet another piece of technology. Read more...