Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Julie Schumacher. From August 2013 to January 2014, I—a humble, workaday professor of English and creative writing at the University of Minnesota—received more than 1,600 letters of recommendation. In August, I vetted 56 applications for an administrative position in creative writing, each dutifully accompanied by three reference letters. More...

By Adeline Koh. At ProfHacker, we’ve written a lot about using Twitter in the classroom. Mark has written a framework for teaching with Twitter; Ryan about disposable Twitter accounts for classroom use; Erin on choosing hashtags. I’ve used Twitter in the classroom for some pretty successful assignments; particularly in the case of live tweeting films (see one of my previous assignments here). Unlike the typical passive viewing sessions, live tweeting allows instructors to directly engage in the student’s learning, by directing attention to issues that they might otherwise miss. More...

By George Williams. I suspect we’ve all been on the receiving end of poorly-designed documents: pages drowning in enormous gray oceans of text with no navigational cues whatsoever; emphasis indicated by text that is bold, all-caps, italicized, and underlined*; color choices that threaten to damage retinas (or that make text practically unreadable); text so small and margins so narrow that it’s obvious the desire to save paper has trumped the desire for clear communication. More...

By Anastasia Salter. This semester marks a first for me in teaching: a fully online course. While every course I teach is hybrid to a greater or lesser extent, I’ve always relied on in-class discussions and activities as an anchor. The course is a graduate seminar on Information Culture, so it definitely lends itself to meta-reflection on the very nature of doing this type of work online. It’s also synchronous, so we’ll be using video chat (Adeline just suggested lots of possible systems, I’ll be using GoToMeeting) to keep some of the immediacy of the classroom online. It’s my first time teaching the course, so I have no “physical” version in mind to compare it to, which has actually been helpful as I’ve been thinking about every assignment as virtual-first. More...

By Brock Read. By now you might have happened upon a few articles from Vitae, The Chronicle‘s newish academic career hub. If not, a brief introduction: In addition to job-search, dossier-management, and networking tools, we also post daily news and career advice—-much of it tackling matters of teaching, research, career development, and personal productivity. More...

By George Williams. Launched in September of 2010, Digital Humanities Questions & Answers is a joint venture of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and ProfHacker. (See Julie Meloni’s launch announcement.)
Digital Humanities Questions and Answers (@DHAnswers on Twitter) is designed to be a free resource where anyone with an interest in the digital humanities can pose a question to the community of folks working in the field. More...

By George Williams. Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written a number of posts over the years about Creative Commons licenses, which are intended to “give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.” For example, I’ve explained how to find free online content that you’re allowed to re-use. Jason showed us the basics of searching the photo site Flickr for images with Creative Commons licenses. And Julie discussed using Creative Commons licensed material in the classroom. More...

By Ilan Stavans. I’m saturated with Obama’s rhetoric. I’m not talking about his politics, which, in and of themselves, have been disappointing. The list of miscalculations, overreaching, and unfinished business is staggering: immigration reform, drone use, NSA, a stumbling health-care reformulation. More...

By William Germano. “And the Canaanites slew the Amirites, because they had done evil in the name of linguistic brevity.”
That punishing thought may not actually show up in any of the Biblical accounts, but in recent months the amirites  have invaded my social media. My first reaction (I’d been looking at a lot of Italian librettos recently) was that an amirite  was some Italian or Latin second-person plural I didn’t get. But of course it isn’t, it’s just am I right reduced to its bare forked essence. This realization did not make me a happy man. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. The writer Bich Minh Nguyen posted a question on Facebook the other day that drew a swell of discussion:
Grammar dilemma over here. According to grammar sites we’re supposed to write “Hi, Jane” rather than “Hi Jane” (because “Hi” is different from “Dear”). But this just doesn’t sit right with me. I dislike the two commas involved: “Hi, Jane,” looks cluttered compared to “Hi Jane.” I’m starting to feel a little anxious whenever I start an email. Will the person I’m writing disapprove of my (lack of) grammar? Which path should I take?
Responses ranged from the euphonic (“’Yo Jane!’ has a nice ring to it”) to the technical (“Personally sometimes I use the comma, other times not; the not being when I am using Siri on a I-device and Siri does not always understand it is supposed to insert a comma rather than spell out the word ‘comma’”). More...