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CFP: ‘Accessible Future’ Workshop in Lincoln, NE

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Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published a number of things over the years about accessibility in digital environments. And regular readers will remember that last September we announced the first Accessible Future workshop, which took place in Boston last semester. After Boston, we led a workshop in Austin, Texas.

Now we’re accepting applications for our third workshop, which will be held on November 14 and 15, 2014 in Lincoln, Nebraska. If you are interested in digital environments and accessibili…

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Open Thread Wednesday: Trying Anything New in Your Teaching?

By now, most of us are at least a week — if not two or three — into the new academic year. If we’re experimenting with anything new in our courses, by this point we might have at least an initial sense of whether the change is having the effect we’d hoped.

So let’s hear from you: Are you doing anything new in your classes this term? If so, what, why, and how’s it working out thus far?

[CC-licensed photo by Flickr user Lokesh Dhakar]

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Commit to Your Calendar

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When you glance at your calendar for next week, what do you see? Is it mostly empty except for a couple of meetings on Thursday, but you know that you have classes to teach on Monday and Wednesday? Or maybe your calendar looks completely full, but you know that you won’t really get to half the tasks you’ve filled in the days with. Many of us either carry commitments in our heads that we have to think about when scheduling other events, or we have to sort through the mixed list of appointments a…

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What Twitter Changes Might Mean for Academics


If you’re a regular user of Twitter, as many of us at ProfHacker are, you’ve no doubt seen the many posts speculating on Twitter’s impeding demise. Twitter, along with every other social network, gets declared dead on a regular basis. However, earlier this year Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer wrote “A Eulogy for Twitter” in the Atlantic and observed:

“ Twitter’s earnings last quarter, after all, were an improvement on the period before, and it added 14 million new users for a total of 255 …

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Weekend Reading: September Already Edition

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Another Labor Day is behind us, and I saw the first few autumn leaves this week, incongruous amidst temperatures in the upper 80 degree range. we hope you’ve have a good week and look forward to an even better weekend.

This week, Yale launched a massive web-based platform called Photogrammer that allows users to search and access a collection of 170,000 Depression-era photographs. The actual collection is housed in the Library of Congress and contains work by several prominent photographers …

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Visualize Your Promotion Portfolio with Cmap

[This is a guest post by Janine Utell, who is an Associate Professor of English at Widener University in Pennsylvania. She teaches composition and 19th and 20th century British literature; she has also facilitated a number of on- and off-campus workshops on writing, critical thinking, and general education. Previously at ProfHacker, she’s written on “Practical Wisdom and Professional Life” and “How to Study Your Own Teaching (And Why You Might Want To).” You can follow Janine on Twitter: @jan…

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Playing In The Classroom With The Ivanhoe Game

[This is a guest post by Stephanie Kingsley. She holds a Master's in English literature from the University of Virginia, where she specialized in 19th-century American literature and textual studies. She was one of this year's Scholars' Lab's Praxis Fellows, and she plans to work in digital editing, publishing, and project management. For more information, visit http://stephanie-kingsley.github.io/. --Ed.]

This past April, the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab‘s Praxis Fellows released their…

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Weekend Reading: Back in the Classroom Edition

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Today’s image is a tableau titled “Classroom with Three Figures” by Lavern Kelley, painted white pine, plywood, brass, and plastic, 1979, 1984–87. I originally had something else in mind for this space, but when I came across it in my Creative Commons searching, I couldn’t not use it.

TGIF ProfHackers! This was the first week (back?) for many of us, and we hope it went well for you. For those of you who start after Labor Day, savor these final hours of freedom.

Like many of you, my social media…

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Making Games with GameCreator


I’ve never been a Mac user, so when I walked into my HILT 2014 workshop earlier this month and saw row upon row of Apple computers, I admit I panicked. Fast forward three weeks later and I’m writing this on a Mac laptop, thanks to my new university and their decidedly non-Windows campus. My biggest concern with switching to Macs has never really been the hardware (which is admittedly gorgeous). Instead, software has been the limitation. At HILT, we tried to work with Construct 2, a Windows-only…

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Five Ways to Say No

say no to yes Do you ever find yourself attending an event or participating in a project that you don’t really have time for, aren’t interested in, or won’t benefit from in some personal or professional way? It happens to all of us. It can usually be traced back to that moment when you agreed to do the project, or attend the meeting, even though you already knew you didn’t want to. Or maybe you did think you wanted to attend – it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, or you wanted to support the person or gr…

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