By Brian Mathews. Yesterday I posted this tweet and it received a lot of attention so I’ll expand my thoughts. About a year ago we opened our Multipurpose Room in the library. We framed it as a gathering place for creative, cultural, academic, and social experiences. The one major rule is that everything has to be public: no private events. More...
By George Williams. Here at ProfHacker we’ve written quite a bit about Twitter over the years (as our archive of posts with the 
twitter tag reveals). One Twitter topic that we’ve addressed often is how best to maintain an archive of Tweets, whether your own or those associated with a particular hashtag. In two different posts, Mark introduced readers to what is, arguably, the best free solution for this: Martin Hawksey’s TAGS, “a free Google Sheet template which lets you setup and run automated collection of search results from Twitter.”By Jason B. Jones. As I understand it, virtually every faculty member in the US is currently grading their fingers off right now, or procrastinating by prepping for midwinter conferences. (Except for those on sabbatical during the fall . . . they might well be quietly weeping at what remains to be done in the time remaining of their leave!) So I won’t prattle on in this space, but will simply wish everyone very well indeed, and the strength to get through whatever challenges you’re facing right now. Read more...By Prof. Hacker. Much digital ink has been spilled on ProfHacker about using Twitter in academia, and Mark Sample has offered practical tips for using Twitter in the classroom. Taking a page from his playbook, in my history classes, I have students do part of their class participation through Twitter. Using a course hashtag, they're supposed to send five tweets a week, commenting on course material, asking and answering questions, and sharing relevant resources for around the web. Read more...
By Allan Metcalf. So on a rainy Monday in D.C. last month, at the Pavilion Café in the sculpture garden on the National Mall, I was lunching with Joan Hall, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. That’s the committee that oversees the society’s annual choice of Word of the Year. And we agreed 2014 hasn’t been the greatest year for a WOTY (as we familiarly call it). More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. A century ago this year, just before the First World War began, the grammarian George O. Curme published a short but remarkable paper entitled “Origin and Force of the Split Infinitive” (Modern Language Notes 29 (2), 41–45). It has deep roots in the 19th-century tradition of critical analysis of English grammar. And it is sobering to compare his paper’s meaty content with the thin gruel that passes for discussion of English grammar today. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. They arrive now, in a flood, the end-of term papers. For the most part, they are beyond revision at this point, and the task ahead consists mostly of assessment. Still, I find myself clinging to my Luddite position of accepting papers only in hard copy, regardless of the risk of germ transmission by paper, regardless of deforestation, regardless of the printing costs or the various excuses the demand engenders. More...
By William Germano. Recently I was at a dinner party where people were using the words awful and awesome, possibly as antonyms. Awful was, I thought, used to describe something very bad, awesome something very good. The words awesome and awful have been doing do-si-do with one another for a while. So are they the same word? And if so, what word is that, exactly?
The Oxford English Dictionary records awful as medieval. Since the ninth century, it’sbeen the high-toned term of choice meaning “awe-inspiring,” in the sense of “causing dread; terrible, dreadful, appalling.” But awful is also “worthy of, or commanding, profound respect or fear,” and has been in that sense for almost as long.
Awful seems to sustain a body blow at the beginning of the 19th century, when it takes on the meaning “frightful, very ugly, monstrous; and hence as a mere intensive deriving its sense from the context = Exceedingly bad, great, long, etc.” A mere intensive? Say it isn’t so. More...
By Ben Yagoda. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The new paradigm for creative folk, that is. Dispense with jobs, with their soul-deadening cubicles and time clocks (metaphorical or literal) and bosses looking over your shoulders—but also, admittedly, with their clockwork paychecks and medical benefits—and become your own brand. More...
By Rebecca Koenig. At the end of a semester plagued by offensive social-media posts, professors at Colgate University on Friday started a campaign to bring some positivity to digital communications on the campus. Using the smartphone application Yik Yak, which allows people to submit anonymous comments visible to other nearby users, professors posted positive messages to students, wishing them luck on their exams, praising their work, and infusing an uplifting tone into the digital discourse. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)