Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Konrad M. Lawson. In March, a fantastic new resource for studying the history of commodity trade was announced: Trading Consequences. The project is the product of several years of collaboration between York University, Canada, the University of Edinburgh, UK, the University of St Andrews, UK and the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. More...

By George Williams. Sometimes it’s the simplest little tricks that can make a big difference in our work. For example, I’ve written about using carabiners on my backpack to help me keep track of my keys. I like having this smartphone holster for my iPhone, keeping a simple little multitool on my keyring, and wrapping all kinds of things with velcro cable ties. And for a few years now, I’ve been using rubber bands with my colored whiteboard markers. More...

By George Williams. Whether you’re a Starbucks loyalist or a member of the rebel alliance, the chances are pretty good that you’re a regular consumer of coffee. I, for one, am certainly doing my part to keep the coffee business going strong. Recently, a great local coffee bar opened here in downtown Spartanburg, and it’s become my semi-regular hangout of late thanks to free wireless Internet access, low prices, and the high probability that I’ll run into friends and acquaintances there. To be honest, I’ve been a lover of coffee for most of my life. More...

By Jason B. Jones. Usually, when people complain about faculty and service, it’s along a few well-defined paths: faculty who shirk service; the resulting disproportionate service burden; or how nothing ever gets done. There is, however, another problem: the faculty member who won’t let go. More...

By Jason B. Jones. A perennial sore point in academe is the phenomenon of work-life balance. As Amy noted last year, there’s always something you could be doing. What’s more, there’s a good chance you like at least some part of the work, since it’s what drew you into the profession, and so you gladly take on more and more, until you realize that you’ve forgotten that you have a third child or sick parent, or your partner starts taking out personal ads in the campus paper, or your dog mauls you as a stranger when you come home before 7pm. More...

By Erin E. Templeton. It’s no secret that we at ProfHacker like GoogleDocs. Ryan Cordell has used Google Docs to run a peer-review writing workshop, and George Williams has previously written about using GoogleDocs to take collaborative notes at conference sessions. Guest poster Thomas Burkholder wrote about using Google Forms. I have used all of these, and today I’m going to share yet another use: for compiling a crowd-sourced study-guide. Google Docs is useful in this respect because it allows users to easily share documents. In my case, I can quickly distribute to an entire class, and students can then download or not as they wish. More...

By Erin E. Templeton. Happy Friday ProfHackers! A disclaimer: I’m writing this week’s weekend reading through pollen-induced haze thanks to a triple whammy of tree pollen here in the Southeast that has sent allergen counts through the roof from Virginia through parts of Florida. Last week, I included the news of David Letterman’s retirement. Yesterday, it was announced that Stephen Colbert will be his replacement. The LA Times argues that “Colbert is not a conservative choice.” Apparently Rush Limbaugh and other political conservatives agree: Limbaugh called the announcement “a declaration of war of the heartland of America.” More...

By Amy Cavender. There are a lot of benefits to doing much of our work online. Collaboration with far-away colleagues is easy, we can have ready access to our work no matter what device we’re using, and having our work backed up in the cloud can be reassuring. But there’s danger as well, unfortunately. In just the past two months, at least four universities in the United States have been victims of data breaches: the University of Maryland, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and the North Dakota University system. More...

By Amy Cavender. A couple of days before yesterday’s post was scheduled to run, we started hearing about the Heartbleed Bug. This is a nasty one. It’s been out for quite a while, and it’s a flaw in a software library that’s used by a very high number of websites. Check the link above for the details of just how nasty the bug is. More...