academia

Recently, one of our readers wrote me that she was “trying to figure out if there is a way to have new posts sent directly to my email… When I click on the [ProfHacker] RSS feed link I just get computer language that makes no sense.” If you’re unfamiliar with the acronym RSS and would like to learn more about it, read on for some helpful links. If, instead, you’d like to learn my answer to this question, I’ve managed to figure out a workaround that emails each new ProfHacker post to an email address. First, however, I’m going to provide a few links to posts we’ve published about using RSS feeds:

How to use RSS and RSS readers

We’ve featured several posts that demonstrate what you can do with RSS:

• In “Keeping Up Online,” Jason provides a beginner-friendly introduction to RSS.

• Lincoln has explained how to keep up with academic journals using RSS feeds.

• Mark showed us how to hack a library catalog with RSS and SMS.

• As I’ve pointed out, you can use RSS to keep up with your favorite online services.

• From Jason, we’ve learned that you can turn any page into a feed with “RSS scraping.”

Okay, if you’re persuaded that RSS is useful, then you might need an RSS reader. Here are some discussions of how to pick one that’s right for you:

• Back in 2010, Julie asked people to share what RSS readers they use, and

• Just last week Jason asked the same question, given that the very popular GoogleReader is shutting down.

How to send an RSS feed into your email inbox

For many users, unless they’ve set up a dedicated reader, RSS feeds aren’t of much use. Some people, as the reader’s query that inspired this post makes clear, prefer to receive their information updates via e-mail. Fortunately, this is not too hard to accomplish. Here’s a step-by-step guide, using the ProfHacker RSS feed as an example:

Step 1: If you don’t already have one, sign up for a free account at the web service IFTT, also known as “If This Then That”. I wrote an introduction to IFTT soon after it first appeared.) All you need to enter is a username of your choice, an email address, and a password:

Step 2: Once logged in to your account, point your web browser to this page, where I’ve created a “recipe” (what IFTT calls specific, user-created actions) for you to use. You should see a page that looks like this:

If all you want to do is receive each new ProfHacker post by email, then click the blue “Use Recipe” button. You’re done!

If, however, you’d like to choose a different RSS feed, or customize the way the emails appear when they arrive in your inbox, then read on:

Step 3: Click on that triangle to the right of the flag, and you should see two dialogue boxes.

The first one already has the ProfHacker RSS feed entered. (If you’d like to use this recipe with a different RSS feed, this is the place for you to make that change.)

The second dialogue window allows you to customize the subject line, if you like, or the body of the email you receive for each post that is published via RSS. Just click on the big blue plus sign to make any changes you like.

Step 5: Watch those emails start rolling in. Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge) of what my inbox looks like when the ProfHacker RSS feed is delivered by email:

How about you? What are your favorite RSS hacks? Alternatively, what are your favorite IFTTT recipes? Please share in the comments!

 The Flex wristband by Fitbit, released in May, is the latest personal fitness tracker to bring some aspects of the quantified self movement to the general public. I had pre-ordered the Fitbit Flex earlier this year and waited eagerly for it to arrive. I’ve now been using it for about a month and I’m very pleased with it.

Why I Chose the Fitbit Flex

I’ve been interested in personal fitness trackers for some time and had looked at the available options. I nearly bought a Nike FuelBand two years ago, but its activity tracking was tied to the Nike Plus site which I’m not interested in, and it doesn’t track sleep. The Jawbone UP tracks sleep and activity, but was only compatible with iOS devices when I evaluated it. (An Android app was released in March of this year, though it’s still not an option for me, as the app is not compatible with my Android phone or tablet.)

I know a lot of people who use and like other Fitbit trackers (including fellow ProfHackers Adeline and Anastasia), but I really wanted a device that I could wear on my wrist. During a typical day, I change clothes several times (for dog walking, teaching, yoga class, etc) and could easily forget a clip-on device in my pocket. So when Fitbit announced they were developing a wristband, I knew this was the tracker I wanted to try.

What the Flex Does

The Fitbit Flex wristband tracks the number and speed of steps you take throughout the day and when you set it to sleep mode, it monitors your wakefulness and movement during sleep. The Flex synchronizes this data with your Fitbit account via Bluetooth. A wireless Bluetooth USB adapter is included with the device so you can synchronize using any computer and the Flex synchronizes in the background for Bluetooth 4.0 phones, including recent Samsung Galaxy and iOS devices.

From the mobile apps or the website, you can log:

• additional details about your activities, including those that the wristband doesn’t adequately measure, like yoga or weight lifting

• additional periods of sleep if you forgot to set it to sleep mode

• foods eaten (with calorie and nutritional info from the Fitbit database)

• amount of water consumed

• body measurements, including weight, measurements, heart rate, blood pressure, glucose

• a journal of your mood and other health factors

For many of these logs, the online app gives more options than the mobile app does. Graphs of your activity and other logged items are displayed in a graphical dashboard. More sophisticated reports and analysis are available with a premium account (which I don’t yet have, but will probably sign up for).

You can connect your Fitbit account to a variety of other tracking tools and apps, such as MapMyRun or SparkPeople. Fitbit also has its own social features, including badges for reaching certain milestones, message boards, and the sharing of your statistics with friends.

The Flex Experience

The Flex comes with two sizes of a lightweight soft plastic wristband, the synchronization dongle and a USB charging adapter. The tracker must be removed from the wristband to charge its battery. The app alerts you when your battery gets low, about every five days or so. I’ve found synchronization of my data with my Fitbit account to be very easy, using either Bluetooth via my Samsung tablet and or with the Fitbit dongle attached to my computer.

After about an hour, I completely forgot that I was wearing the wristband, as it is comfortable and doesn’t snag on things or get in my way. (Fitbit recommends wearing it on your non-dominant hand for more accurate measurements.) By default, the tracker is set to a daily goal of 10,000 steps, but you can change the number or set it to a distance goal instead through the website. During the day, you can tap on the wristband to see your progress towards that goal, displayed as a sequence of 1-5 lighted dots. When you reach that step goal, the wristband lights up and vibrates briefly.

Personal Tracking, Personally Speaking

As I’ve suggested before, logging information about something, whether it’s time, diet, or physical activity, automatically raises your awareness. The Flex is not a substitute for a heart rate monitor or GPS runner’s watch, both of which I’ve used for specific training goals. Rather, the Flex is great for assessing and perhaps increasing your level of physical activity throughout the day. Many researchers point to the health benefits of integrating activity into your daily life, and the Flex helps you see how much difference parking futher away from the office or taking an extra walk in the evening can make.

I already work out regularly and take active breaks throughout my day, but even so I’ve found the Flex has encouraged me to be even more active, which helps counteract the sedentary nature of academic work. I’ve been using a standing desk for about 18 months (like fellow ProfHackers Ryan, Konrad, and Lincoln), and often walk in place while I’m working. Since wearing the Flex, I’m more likely to walk a bit more during light-attention activities. (And I’ve even begun eyeing a TreadDesk, though my current setup is working well for now.) It’s very motivating to see how small bits of activity throughout the day really add up.

I haven’t used any of the social features of the Flex, so I can’t report on that. I also don’t use it to track my diet, as its food entries are always linked to calorie counts. I prefer using a free-form journal space to log food when I need to. I do like using just one app to keep track of body measurements, blood pressure, etc along with activity, where I used to use several different ones.

I was particularly interested in the sleep tracking aspects of the Fitbit Flex. I am a polyphasic sleeper by nature and I was very curious to know more about the quality and quantity of my sleep. The Flex is comfortable to wear while sleeping (I don’t notice it at all) and the data I’m collecting confirms that I have better sleep quality when I follow my natural sleep patterns. I can also examine how my sleep patterns correlate with other aspects of my work or exercise schedule.

Overall, I’m very happy with the kind of information the Fitbit Flex offers me about my activity and sleep behavior. It’s non-intrusive and easy to use, and although some of the data may not be as detailed as one could collect with a heart rate monitor, for instance, I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing my HRM all day, which requires a chest strap. I’ll continue to use the HRM for specific workouts, and wear the Flex throughout my day for general data collection and motivation.

Do you use a personal fitness tracker? Let us know in the comments!

[my CC licensed images of my Flex.]

We’re now well into summer, when many of us have ambitions of getting a fair amount of writing done. As seems to be not uncommon, a good number of the members of Team ProfHacker find regular writing both a pleasure and a challenge, so we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink on the subject. Here’s a rundown of past posts that may be of interest:

Getting into the writing habit

Trying to kick-start a summer writing habit? Check out Billie’s Writers’ Boot Camp: Summer Writing Edition 2012. Better yet, check out the whole Writers’ Boot Camp series.

Collaborating

Readers looking to do some collaborative writing (and who are looking for something other than Google Drive) might want to peruse Konrad’s Wish List for a Powerful Collaborative Writing Platform, and check out his review of Draft.

Tools

Whether writing solo or in collaboration with others, it’s important to have tools that work well for you. In addition to the standard word processors, there are several other options that may be suitable, depending on your needs:

• Ryan’s covered Scrivener, which is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It can be very useful for long-form writing—especially when working with small segments that may need rearranging.

• Those who need to produce text that can easily be converted from one format to another might want to peruse Lincoln’s introduction to Markdown and Mark’s Writing in Markdown with Gonzo.

• Finally, Lincoln provides a list of the advantages he sees in using a text editor for composing, rather than a word processing application.

How’s your writing going this summer? If you have any motivational tips or favorite tools to share, let us know in the comments!

Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Pete O’Shea.

The latest thing that has everyone buzzing in higher education are MOOCs—Massively Open Online Courses. MOOC companies like Coursera, Udacity and Harvard edX courses offer free content to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. MOOCs have been criticized on many counts: for being an ineffective mode of instruction; for their high attrition rates; and their problematic handling assessment. Yet its supporters claim that MOOCs are an important intervention into the skyrocketing rates of college tuition, and champion the ability of MOOCs to offer much-needed instruction to impoverished people around the world. MOOCs have also thus far been limited to elite institutions. Bringing things to a head is San Jose State University’s controversial move to offer college credit for MOOC classes, which has fanned fears of a growing turn by state institutions to use MOOCs instead of regular classes. Its detractors fear  that MOOCs will lead to the future unemployment of faculty at non-elite colleges and universities, leaving face to face education to be the privileged preserve of the elite.

In this Weekend Reading, I catch ProfHacker readers who may have missed the debate up on the MOOC debacle. This Reading focuses on some of the most significant posts and articles that I’ve come across. The Reading is not meant to be comprehensive, but to give an overview to the major issues within the debates.

• “The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform.” Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) has been a significant critique of the MOOC movement. In this comprehensive essay he gives some background to the original history of MOOCs in terms of an original class by George Siemens and Stephen Downes where a class of 25 students was opened up to 1,500 online participants, and which “was part of a long-running engagement with connectivist principles of education.” Unlike this original vision of the MOOC, however, Bady argues that “If the MOOC began in the classroom as an experimental pedagogy, it has swiftly morphed into a process driven from the top down, imposed on faculty by university administrators, or even imposed on administrators by university boards of trustees and regents.”

• “What Can MOOCs Teach Us About Learning?” On her HASTAC blog, Cathy Davidson talks about what she finds hopeful about the future of MOOCs: “We are taking baby steps with the medium right now, and, fortunately, a lot of dedicated, earnest, serious thinkers are asking what MOOCs can teach us about learning so that these first steps will help us taking gigantic, important leaps in the future.   We are collecting the data, keystroke by keystroke, that will help us understand more and more about what modes of learning work in what situation and for whom.  We will soon know more about what motivates students to stay in a course, what makes them drop (the MOOC drop out rate tends to be very high), what motivates them to learn in the first place?  What motivates them to form peer discussion groups, online or off, around course content?  How many go from an introductory course to a deeper one–and why?  In other words, the quantity of data and the increasing sophistication with which we, aided by the machine, can read and analyze and parse and visualize data, means that we are learning more about the minutia of learning now than we have ever known before.    If we get over the hype of the MOOC at this moment, if we can think about this as an initial foray into a major breakthrough in knowing how we know, in metacognition, great new forms of interactive learning are possible.”

• “An Open Letter from the Philosophy Department at San Jose State to Michael Sandel” Sandel is a Harvard professor who created a MOOC SJSU faculty were encouraged to use in their curriculum. In response, the Philosophy program writes: “In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience, we believe that having a scholar teach and engage with his or her own students is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.”

• “Coursera’s Contractual Elitism.” This Inside Higher Ed article reports that Coursera has admitted to being “contractually obligated to turn away the vast majority of American universities”: “The Silicon Valley-based company said to be revolutionizing higher education says in a contract obtained by Inside Higher Ed that it will “only” offer classes from elite institutions – the members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America – unless Coursera’s advisory board agrees to waive the requirement.”

• “Coursera Jumps the Shark.” In which Coursera admits that MOOCs are not a sustainable business model, and it will plan to instead compete with Learning Management Systems such as Blackboard: “Remember when Coursera – the world’s largest purveyor of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – was going to disrupt higher education, and put hundreds if not thousands of public institutions out of business? I know it’s hard to cast your mind back all of eighteen months, but try. Actually don’t.  Because it’s all over. Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it’s going to start competing with Blackboard instead.”

• “MOOC HQ” A curated page of links on MOOCs by Hilary Culbertson of HASTAC. “Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been making waves ever since Sebastrian Thrun and Peter Norvig’s course on AI enrolled 165,000 students in 2011. Key questions include: How does the massive scale of these classes impact the pedagogy? What is the place of a MOOC in a traditional higher education curriculum What kinds of learning can MOOCs supplement or replace? What makes a MOOC innovative (in other words, how do we leverage the MOOC form to innovate rather than perpetuate pedagogical practices)? How do we address the problems raised by MOOCs, such as unprecedented incompletion rates? (And — perhaps most importantly — are these problems really problems?) As the discussion around MOOCs evolves alongside the MOOCs themselves, the HASTAC community remains deeply engaged. This collection is designed to highlight posts on www.hastac.org about MOOCs, online learning, and digital pedagogy.”

MOOC Alternatives

• Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOC MOOC (@hybridped), a self-generated, learner-focused MOOC about MOOCs, in which anyone can participate. MOOC MOOC starts TOMORROW (June 15^th) at 12am EST and ends on the same day at 11.59pm EST. 24 hours of MOOCs about MOOCs: “MOOCification is really a kind of pillaging. You take what works about MOOCs, the best pedagogy they open up, apply it to more traditional classes, and then politely (or not so politely) spit out the rest.”

• FemTechNet’s DOCC, or “Distributed Online Collaborative Course,” an attempt to redesign MOOCs according to feminist principles: “In the following, Alex Juhasz and Anne Balsamo discuss FemTechNet, the network they have activated to produce the first distributed online collaborative course (DOCC) that demonstrates not only innovative thinking about emergent technologies, but also addresses — as its central topic — the long histories of feminist engagements with technology and cultural innovation.” Also see the DOCC information page on the FemTechNet website.

Image Credit: Hybrid Pedagogy

What are your thoughts on MOOCs? What other articles would you recommend? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Digital Distractions is an irregular series in which various ProfHacker writers introduce a little game or other pastime to divert your attention for a couple of minutes. Maybe you’re waiting for a bus, or for an appointment, or are on hold, and you would just like a little something to do.

From that point of view, it is perhaps a bit off-topic to include Kingdom Rush Frontiers as a a “digital distraction.” The original Kingdom Rush didn’t so much divert your attention briefly to help you pass the time as plunge you into a k-hole of intensely focused tapping as you build towers and deploy reinforcements in to prevent monsters and demons from overrunning the kingdom.

Fundamentally, Kingdom Rush is a tower defense game. What’s fun about Kingdom Rush is that choices and timing matter. You can build four different types of towers: mage guilds, barracks, artillery, and archer towers, each of which has a variety of specialized options. You can also periodically rain fire from the heavens or summon peasants freedom-loving men and women to your aid. The original combined simple goals (“keep the monsters from reaching their goal”) with a variety of engaging levels and with just enough tactics to stay fresh.

That was the old game–which, if you haven’t played, is absolutely worth it. The new game, Kingdom Rush Frontiers keeps the same basic structure–the same four generic tower types, but gives them new dress and slight variations on the powers. Here’s the trailer:

If you enjoyed the original, you will definitely waste hours and hours have a great time with Kingdom Rush Frontiers. You move from shipwreck-strewn beaches to deserts, jungles, underground caverns, and more. You face alien predators, shamans, pirates, lizard creatures, dragons, and angry gorillas, and you fight them with, among other things, mechanized walkers that deploy heat-seeking missiles. Is fun. In addition to the fresh towers, powers, monsters, and locales, there are some entertaining easter eggs sprinkled throughout. (You haven’t lived until a Tusken Raider shoots an enemy for you from a desert wasteland.)

Kingdom Rush Frontiers is $4.99 for the iPad version, $2.99 on the iPhone. Be sure to take breaks for food and sleep, though!

Do you have a game or other digital distraction you’re enjoying at the moment? Let us know in comments!

Photo is a screenshot of Kingdom Rush Frontiers.

Talking about planning for tenure seems very much like the ultimate Old Academe Stanley trait, since the vast majority of college and university faculty today are contingent. And to make matters worse, having recently given it up, I have probably ceded a certain amount of turf in talking about tenure. Still, I’ve been bugged by something for a few weeks.

Last month, on episode 43 of the CMD+Space podcast, Myke Hurley and Merlin Mann (who we love) briefly mentioned what they characterized as the flaws or irrelevance of tenure in a modern world. It’s outdated, it distracts from teaching, and so on. It was mostly rooted in a pretty tenuous anecdote from Merlin’s undergrad days, about a teacher who in effect seemed to be threatening to hold her department hostage by refusing to teach intro classes. I’m not going to beat up on the anecdote too much, because he admits he didn’t really have all the facts. But Myke and Merlin were in agreement that tenure’s a weird, irrelevant thing, and professors should basically give it up and just teach.

Not five days later, on episode 120 of his regular Back to Work podcast with Dan Benjamin, Merlin took up the topic of “safety nets,” asking listeners to imagine how their lives might change (or not) if they came into enough money to set themselves up for life. Curiously–and although he plugged his appearance on CMD+Space, Merlin did *not* return to the topic of tenure, which is arguably the ultimate safety net.

Part of the problem is that people (unfairly) imagine tenure as a hammock rather than a safety net. I think people lose track of it because the amount of money involved is so trivial relative to, say, winning Powerball or having Yahoo buy a startup you were instrumental in helping to launch. But tenure does imply a certain kind of job security that ought to be similarly freeing.

But it’s not. Lots of people report securing tenure as somewhat anticlimactic. To an extent, this is a consequence of the fact that you can usually–not always, but usually–figure out how the decision is going to go fairly early on in the process. But that’s only part of it. There’s another part that also thinks, “is this all there is?”

It turns out that this has everything to do with safety nets. Merlin’s point on the show is that people usually imagine that their lives will be utterly transformed–but only in good ways. (Our record deal hits, and we’ll be bigger than Elvis!) Not only do you get a whole host of new problems that you probably never considered, but you’ll also get to bring all the baggage that you had before your safety net arrived. To cite an example on the show, after Elvis became the King, he was still just a mama’s boy from Tupelo, Mississippi.

In the Back to Work episode, Merlin argues that we think about transformation all wrong. Instead of thinking, “well, I work like this now, but when I get my movie check, I’ll be totally different,” we need to plan and act now to prepare for the as-yet-unarrived happy event. It’s unlikely, he points out, that you’re likely to go from having a normal job to, say, painting or writing all day, and to have that be a rewarding experience, unless you already are the sort of person who paints or writes.

There’s a similar problem about tenure. It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “Well, I’ll do this for now, but when I get tenure, *then* I’ll do something awesome.” One problem with that is, as a noted philosopher has observed, “We are what we repeatedly do.” Spending six years as an assistant professor working one way, and then expecting things to be a different way, is a recipe for unhappiness.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote about one aspect of this a couple of years ago:

That kind of mentoring is our duty, but one that too few of us are fulfilling. Too many young digital humanists find themselves cautioned away from the very work that got them hired by well-meaning senior colleagues, who now tell them that wacky digital projects are fine on the side, or once the work necessary for tenure is complete.

In giving that advice, we run the risk of breaking the innovative spirit that we’ve hoped to bring to our departments. And where that spirit isn’t broken, untenured digital scholars run the risk of burnout from having to produce twice as much—traditional scholarship and digital projects—as their counterparts do.

You can’t count on becoming later the academic you want to be. You need to start laying the groundwork now, so that when you have tenure you are poised naturally to build on your success and to pay forward the mentoring debts you incurred along the way. It’s probably true that some projects are of such a scale that it’s hard to imagine undertaking them as a grad student, postdoc, or assistant professor–but even there you can always start now. Ambition needs to be exercised regularly.

And while I’ve framed this in terms of research, the same holds true for teaching. Junior faculty are often advised to teach just well enough to be promoted, but no better. This is defensible advice, certainly, but it also makes it harder than you’d think to improve your teaching post-tenure. Not only does it require fresh effort, but it requires you to unlearn everything you’ve spent six years telling yourself about your institution’s priorities. So not only are you out of practice at improving your teaching, but at some level you’re probably also convinced–quite possibly correctly–that your university doesn’t care.

The less said about service & governance the better. If you are largely screened from service work as a junior faculty member, then you are likely to assume it’s not important or to resent it as an imposition after tenure.

Having a tenure-track job is a position of remarkable privilege in the modern university, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Using some of that privilege to bring the future into existence *now*, rather than waiting for it to be arrive on its own, can be a forceful way to turn that privilege to good account. As always, Merlin has some helpful strategies for thinking through these issues, though they’re not really in an academic context, so give the episode a listen.

Photo “safety net” by Flickr user iamchad / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

GMail has received more than a few mentions in this space since ProfHacker first launched in 2009. Google has made a number of changes to the service since then, including the introduction of a new inbox that began rolling out to users at the end of May.

The primary feature of the new inbox is the automatic filtering of messages into tabs: primary, social (for notifications from your social networks), promotions (ads), and updates (for mailing lists). The updated apps for iOS and Android function similarly.

I’ve been using the new features for several days now, and I’ve been reasonably impressed so far. The categorization has been accurate, and the labels and filters I’d set up previously have continued to work well.

Though I still prefer to use Postbox when working at my own computer, I’ve appreciated using the web interface when using someone else’s, and I’ve definitely found the mobile version of the new inbox to e very helpful in sorting through my email quickly.

What about you? If you’ve given GMail’s new inbox organization a try, let us know what you think of it in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by crazyneighborlady]

We may not have reached the solstice, but by the academic calendar summer has well and truly begun. And summer means music! In this week’s Open Thread Wednesday, we invite recommendations of new-ish (or just new to you) bands/songs/albums that you’re enjoying so far this summer.

A few ground rules to start us off:

• By now, everyone probably has an opinion about the Daft Punk record, so we can skip that.
• Similarly, it seems likely that The National’s Trouble Will Find Me and Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City are adequately hyped.
• I think I agree with Al Madrigal about “Thrift Shop.”

iTunes asserts that my most-played recently-acquired stuff is from two records: The SoSoGlos’s Blowout (see “Son of an American” on Letterman), The Joy Formidable’s Wolf’s Law (try “Cholla”). Plus, it almost goes without saying, the Game of Thrones song by The Hold Steady. I also mostly like the new Jason Isbell record.

What about you? What are you listening to in these early summer days? Let us know in comments!

(Next week: summer books!)

Photo “The Hold Steady at Hartford’s Arch Street Tavern” by me. / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

For a long time, the photo hosting & sharing site Flickr has been instrumental to my work, both online and off. Four years ago I wrote about how we use Flickr and Creative Commons to find pictures for the blog, and just this spring I shared some tips from Brian and George about how to use Flickr to make better slides. But Yahoo! does tend to hate it’s most dedicated users, and the recent ad-driven redesign has a lot of people casting about for alternatives to Flickr.

I learned about TroveBox (formerly OpenPhoto) when Audrey Watters tweeted a link to David Wiley’s post about a post-Flickr world. TroveBox is an open-source photo-hosting site (more on this in a minute) that ensures you maintain control over your photos by letting you choose where they live: you can use TroveBox’s servers, or you can keep them on a variety of other platforms: Dropbox, Amazon S3, Box, CX, or DreamObjects. By design, it’s set up to be easy to import your photos from Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram, so that you can find all your photos in the same place.

If you like Flickr for photo hosting, there’s a lot to like here. I’ve taken a screenshot of the TroveBox interface, and you can see several familiar details (click the image for full-size):

Click for full size.

TroveBox offers everything you need to store your photos in a sane way, and makes it easy to get your data in and out. It also makes it easy to share your photos via e-mail or social media. And it’s only $29.99/yr for a Pro account, which gives you a nice automatic Flickr import tool, as well as expected features like unlimited uploads and so forth. There are mobile apps for both iOS and Android. As a photo-hosting site, it’s got a lot to recommend it.

But. Flickr always had two sides: photo hosting, yes, but also photo discoverability. One of the key ways I use Flickr is to find photos to use in other places, and it’s advanced search tools are pretty decent: I can search by topic, by camera, and more. I can limit my search to Creative Commons-licensed photos, the whole bit. And when I find those photos, Flickr makes it easy: it offers the photos in a bunch of standard sizes, with the licensing info and links right on the page.

At least for now, TroveBox seems pretty uninterested in this. As far as I can tell, there is no way to search across TroveBox for photos taken by other people. (And, obviously, there’s nothing like the Flickr Commons. TroveBox also doesn’t have a community of groups and so forth, so if that’s important to you, then TroveBox isn’t for you. Photos on TroveBox will be harder to find than photos on Flickr. That may be fine, obviously–but it is worth thinking about going in.

And then there are all the different scale issues. A lot of things plug into Flickr automatically. Skitch, the screenshot widget, will automatically export to Flickr. The Eye-Fi card in my wife’s camera wirelessly puts one copy of every photo in her iPhoto library and one copy in my Flickr account, the better to have pictures of the kid and the dogs everywhere.

TroveBox’s open-source basis, and the ability to easily create ways to access its data, mean that it should be possible for folks to add clever features relatively painlessly. (One hopes, one hopes.)

I definitely agree with folks like David and Audrey: There’s no reason to trust Flickr as owned by Yahoo!, and there are good reasons to think about sites like TroveBox that give you more control over your data–and that don’t seek to monetize your photos by surrounding them with ads. Having said that, Flickr is probably still the champ for discovering photos and repurposing them.

Photo “My Old Film Photos” by Flickr user Mr. T in DC / Creative Commons licensed BY-ND-2.0

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a new born-digital book project, Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, co-edited by a team of Trinity College faculty: Jack Dougherty, Dina Anselmi, and Christopher Hager. Since then, the editorial team has grown by two other Trinity folks: Tennyson O’Donnell, and me.

The book’s aims should be familiar to ProfHacker readers:

This born-digital, open-access volume integrates why questions with online examples and tutorials to illustrate how faculty and students are doing this work. Topics include: Why should we integrate the web into our teaching of writing? How does student engagement and faculty pedagogy change when we post our ideas online? Which tools deepen (or distract from) thoughtful learning? What strategies can help the liberal arts to address these digital-era challenges and opportunities?

I hope that if you have ideas on any of these topics, you’ll be interested either in contributing a piece to the book, or in commenting on the book as it evolves online. The book will take shape in CommentPress, much like Jack’s previous co-edited volume on Writing History in the Digital Age. So, please do participate! We’ve even got some small subventions.

If your institution participates in NITLE, then you can join Jack and me in a free online seminar [you can't make me say webinar!] next Tuesday at 2pm. In addition to soliciting more participation in the book, Jack and I will do some hands-on crowd-writing exercises to focus on some of the pedagogical possibilities involved in these practices. Again, the seminar is free to anyone at a NITLE institution.

While the seminar’s participation is restricted, participation in the book project is much less so: Chris, Dina, Jack, Tennyson, and I are interested in proposals from across the liberal arts. If you’ve got an idea that might work, come by our site and let us know!

Photo “Light Writing — Spider Web” by Flickr user forcefeed:swede / Creative Commons licensed BY-ND-2.0

As news nerds everywhere will remember, a couple of months back Google announced (also see George’s post) that they would be closing down Google Reader, which many people used as their RSS reader, and many more used as the backend for their dedicated feed readers. Reader will go away on the first of July.

A July 1 deadline makes it an “after-the-semester” problem, and so I put away thoughts of RSS replacements until after the academic term. But it turns out that the first is only two weeks away–and I do need an RSS replacement! I know that the done thing is to discover news and such via Twitter, but I also use RSS (still!) to keep up with more-infrequently updated sites, often without any sort of social media presence.

Simplifying matters for me is that I use a RSS app called Reeder, which works across the Apple ecosystem. So, the thing that governs my decisions is basically going to be “what API will Reeder support”? Currently it looks as if Reeder is going to support at least two services, Feedly and Feed Wrangler. I’m leaning a bit toward the latter, but am trying to temporize a little until Reeder makes a formal announcement. (And, by the way Reeder is free on the Mac and iPad right now, until the sync solution is resolved!) Another option is to install Fever, a self-hosted RSS aggregator, and which Reeder supports.

At any rate, the point of this post is less to record my own decision-making process, and instead to point to Hrishi Mittal’s near-canonical list of Reader replacement alternatives (via Robert Agcaoili), which, in addition to enumerating the alternatives, also provides cost (if any), platform constraints (if applicable), and any known special sauce. It’s a very handy way to identify possible solutions to your RSS needs, if you still have them. Check it out!

Have you settled on a Reader replacement yet? Please share in comments! (No, for real! Only two weeks to go!)

Photo “Book Shelf Overflow” by Flickr user Andrew Comings / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

Gantt charts are a widely used project management tool that visualize the start and end dates of projects, sub-projects, and tasks using horizontal bars. Gantt charts are often used to plan and track large-scale projects with many people and/or sub-projects and deliverables.

At their best, Gantt charts provide a clear overview of the dependencies and timelines of the component parts of a large project. They can also be used to track progress completed on those tasks and projects. At their worst, Gantt charts are cluttered, hard to read, and time-consuming to create.

Gantt Chart Tools

Today, many different tools exist for creating Gantt charts, ranging from basic charts in Excel to online Gantt tools, to project management software. Some options include:

• Create a Basic Gantt Chart in Excel (video)

• Gantter (free cloud-based tool that integrates with GoogleDrive and GoogleApps)

• Tom’s Planner (limited free account available)

• TeamGantt (30 day trial; starter account at $10/month)

• Smartsheet (free trial; personal account currently $15.95/month)

• GanttProject, an open-source cross-platform desktop tool for project management

Why I Like TeamGantt

I’ve been using TeamGantt for about a year now to plan and manage my research and writing projects. At any given point in the year, I have multiple commitments and ongoing projects with intersecting, overlapping, and dependent time frames. A Gantt chart is the best way I know to get a clear visual overview of the relationships among those projects and how they fit into the calendar.

After trying a few different tools, I selected TeamGantt for its ease of use and attractive design. It’s organized around a hierarchy of Project, Task Group, and Tasks. I keep all of my research projects as Task Groups under one project heading of Research so that I can see them all together.

To create a Gantt chart as in this example, you simply name task groups in the left hand pane and drag the bar ends to select the calendar datespan. (You can choose a 5-day or 7-day display of weekdays). Tasks are defined the same way. Once defined, tasks and task groups can be easily edited and moved through drag-and-drop selection. You can also define the colors for tasks and task groups to visually reinforce categories or importance. Milestones like submission dates appear as diamonds.

(click to see larger image)

In this example, I defined two dependent tasks which can only begin when a particular task is completed; these dependencies are easily created by connecting dots that appear when you highlight the task bar with your mouse.

For me, TeamGantt’s drag-and-drop interface allows me combine some of my reflective project planning with the act of creating the Gantt chart. Many other tools are a bit more cumbersome and make the chart-building an entirely separate activity.

TeamGantt’s simple, uncluttered aesthetic is another big reason I’ve been using this tool over others which have similar functionality. As I’ve written before, one of my personal productivity rules is find tools that you like to use, and use them. I like creating and using the project planning charts I can build in this tool, so for me it’s well worth the monthly fee.

Do you use Gantt charts for planning your projects? Let us know in the comments!

Last month, Adobe announced that they will no longer be “selling” tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and After Effects and instead will be offering a “Creative Cloud” software subscription model not unlike what Microsoft is trying with Office 365. Those programs are all among the more powerful accessible platforms out there for building and remixing digital content, although they’ve always been pricey. I rely on a lot of Adobe tools in my workflow already, so I’ve migrated to the subscription model, in part to try out some of the Adobe Edge tools as potential ways to more quickly create web animations and interactive content for my current play with alternative scholarly forms.

Adobe used to be known for animating the web with Flash, a program now so behind-the-times that it’s relegated to the “also included” list of the software package. But Adobe is trying to build its replacements using native web tools that allow animations to work on anything, including Flash-adverse iOS devices. I’ve been playing with one part of this new toolset, Edge Animate. Edge Animate is essentially a timeline-based tool with some very basic drawing tools and good support for importing images and adding JavaScript interactivity to web production. It reminds me of the early versions of Flash: not perfectly user-friendly, but very solid for getting simple animations built quickly. As you can see in the interface below, the coding elements are mostly concealed, and the layout is organized around layers and properties in a way that users of other Adobe products can pick up pretty readily. I had some problems with corrupting my project files when I started adding a lot of layers of text and experimenting with fonts, and some things aren’t supported well yet–to add sound, I needed to import the Edge Commons library. I can see pointing my students towards Edge Animate particularly as a way to build online portfolios of their creative work or to create visual stories, but there will definitely be a learning curve and some bug-fighting along the way.

So is Edge Animate a seamless tool for jumping into web animation? It’s free to try, but in the long-term given how pricey the Adobe package is, the Edge tools are currently more appealing as an added perk. If you or your institution is already investing in the Creative Cloud subscription, it’s worth a look. It’s still a ways from being Flash, but it’s one of many advances towards making platform-neutral web animation and interactivity creation as accessible to newcomers and non-coders as Flash used to be. There’s an update coming soon with the full launch of Creative Cloud that might solve some of its current limitations.

For creating animations without coding, there are several other platforms in the works. Some worth watching are Radi, currently in beta, and Purple, aimed at visual storytelling on Mac and iOS devices. Construct 2 is also worth another look for more game-like applications. The HTML5 Canvas has the potential to be a framework for doing just about anything within a browser, from animation to game-making. But it’s definitely not easy for non-coders, and since it’s still evolving there are lots of choices for libraries to build with, none of which offer a great universal toolset. Among those, I’m partial to KineticJS, which works particularly well for games; Paper.js, which offers some really cool ideas for playing with geometry; and oCanvas, which changes how objects are referenced once they are on the screen, but neither of these are beginner-friendly. Processing.js is a great option if you already know Processing or want to pick up something simpler to get started with coding.

What are your top tools for building interactive web content? Will you or your institution be trying out Adobe’s Creative Cloud? Share your experiences in the comments!

[CC BY 2.0 Photo by Flickr User Fabrice de Nola]

Last month, Google announced a rebuilt version of Maps for the desktop. In keeping with most Google announcements, it’s cool (integration with Google Earth, photo-generated walkthroughs of locations, etc.) and creepy (more social, learns about you as you search) in equal measure.

If you are interested in finding out about the new Maps, and in ways to build simple maps for research or class purposes using the Google Maps Engine Lite tool, then you might be interested in Mapping with Google, a free self-paced course that starts today and runs for the next two weeks. It is similar to the Advanced Power Searching course Brian wrote about in January.

It is about as gentle an introduction to online mapping as there is.

Photo “An Old Tube Map” by Flickr user Matt Seppings / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

Last week, a wave of good news about acceptances of panels for the Modern Language Association to be held in Chicago in January 2014 (#MLA14) were announced over Twitter. The program is full of fascinating digital work that ranges from discussing alternative forms of academic jobs (#alt-ac) and feminism; the notion of digital counterpublics in pedagogy; revisiting the notion of the database in electronic literature, and more. In this Weekend Reading edition, I showcase what I found to be some of the most thought-provoking panel descriptions (full disclosure, postcolonial digital humanities is on the list!). If you have a digital-related panel accepted, please add your panel and a link to the open Google doc here.

• Alt-Academic Feminism I: “Teaching Outside the Classroom through Digital Humanities” :Women in academe frequently evaluate their place in this (virtual) space, asking how online communities are realizing long- term promises of open access—technically, socially, and politically. This roundtable considers how digital/public humanities might redraw boundaries that shape studies by and about women in art and culture. What support are women faculty, instructors, and students receiving for digital work, especially in smaller language departments and humanities departments? How are women finding their way into coding, systems architecture, and design? Will Alt-Ac careers mean opportunities or greater service burdens (in departments and IT centers), inspired collaborations or labor inequities? Are women, people of color, LGBT communities, generations, and differently abled women done in by DH or doing DH across unjust divides? How might digital tools and practices serve feminist pedagogy and/or feminist critique? Can we self-consciously, strategically, non-destructively, and generously create networks inside and beyond the classroom? How might DH re-situate feminism within and outside the academy? 
• Critical Making and the Digital Humanities : “For Ratto as well as practitioners such as Stephen Hockema, critical making “is an elision of two typically disconnected modes of engagement in the world—‘critical thinking,’ often considered as abstract, explicit, linguistically-based, internal and cognitively individualistic; and ‘making,’ typically understood as material, tacit, embodied, external, and community-oriented” (52). Following Ratto and Hockema, this panel asserts a hybrid making practice that sees no sharp distinction between programming and making, conception and execution, cognition and embodiment, the hand and the mind.”
• Deletion, Erasure, Cancellation: Negative Textualities:“This roundtable offers a new approach to textual and media studies through close consideration of practices such as deletion, erasure, and cancellation—acts that might collectively be termed “negative” textual operations. Recent critical trends in media studies have drawn crucially necessary attention to the materiality of media, expanding scholarly attention within the field beyond its early focus on narrative and representation. Our conversation seeks to build upon and extend this attention to materiality through a specific focus on texts, practices, and histories that hinge on various forms of textual removal. In attending to these negative operations, we intend to foster discussion of a framework in which qualities such as absence, removal, residuality, blankness, and illegibility become essential criteria for critical analysis as well as for authorial and artistic production.”
• Early Modern Media Ecologies: “This special session takes on the profoundly interactive relationship among diverse media in early modern England. Bringing together young scholars who specialize in Renaissance literary studies and the digital humanities, the panel will use new media to reflect on early modern media hybridities. Our presentations show how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is at once biological and technological – how actors, printers, musicians and needleworkers participated in literary processes that cannot be limited to writing.”
• Hard Mode: Games and Narratives of Marginalization: “In this panel, Hard Mode: Games and Narratives of Marginalization, we seek to discuss some of the ways in which games and game narrative can be marshaled for socially conscious purposes–particularly in the hands of creators and critics operating outside this mainstream game culture. We seek to continue the conversation begun by Mark Sample’s “Close Playing: Literary Methods and Videogame Studies” roundtable at MLA 2012, which began the discussion of video game studies as media objects of interest for their place in the discourse of narrative and storytelling. We propose this focused exploration in light of this year’s presidential theme, “Vulnerable Times,” invites exploration of the role of art and narrative in promoting social change.  Games produced in dialogue and outright confrontation with this mainstream, normative discourse of gaming culture are a powerful example of this potential, particularly as the visibility of marginalized groups as players and designers increases.  As Gonzalo Frasca once said, “If videogames are indeed persuasive tools, then they can be used for conveying passionate ideas…games will allow us to model our ideas and let others play with them and vice versa.”
• Decolonizing DH: Theories and Practices of Postcolonial Digital Humanities: Our roundtable addresses these opportunities by outlining the shape of contemporary “postcolonial digital humanities” and interrogating how postcolonial studies has evolved. In its development, postcolonial digital humanities reflects changes in digital media, from original Web 1.0 postcolonial websites, to what Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White have identified as the transmedia shift beginning in the mid-2000s, to the later move to Web 2.0 and rise of social media cultures. The mid-2000s transmedia shift began changing digital practices by eliding boundaries between media producers and consumers. Such shifts have raised questions of possible epistemological differences in the articulation of identities in digital spaces. However, scholars including Alan Liu, Anna Everett, Jessie Daniels, and Nakamura herself, have observed that problematic racial and ethnic categories persist within digital cultures.

All this exciting work certainly bodes well for #MLA14 reversing the idea that conferences cannot be fun, as Jorge Cham of PhD Comics well illustrates below…

First image credit: zigazou76 on Flickr

Comic credit: Jorge Cham of PhD Comics

[This is a guest post by Kimon Keramidas, Assistant Professor and Director for the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center. Kimon teaches about the design and material culture of technology and is tasked with integrating and implementing digital media within the curricular and research goals of faculty and students. He also leads the development of digital media and interactives for the BGC's Focus Gallery exhibitions. Find him online at http://kimonkeramidas.net and follow him on Twitter at @kimonizer.--@BC]

One of my favorite parts of ProfHacker is the idea of subtly hacking tools for educational purposes. By subtle hacking I mean not changing the code or structure of a tool, but using it for a purpose it may not have been originally intended for. One tool that I have found is readily hackable in this sense is Prezi. (Editors: See our previous posts covering how different ProfHackers have been using Prezi.) Prezi is marketed as a presentation tool, a killer app for the frustrated hordes of PowerPoint users who are looking for more dynamic and visually compelling modes of presentation. It accomplishes that task quite well with a digital canvas design structure, a user-friendly interface for adding text, images, and multimedia (it even cannibalizes existing PowerPoints well), and the capacity to create a step-by-step path through materials for presentation purposes.

But if you start to think more creatively about what Prezi’s toolset offers, you begin to realize how powerful a tool it can be for designing a wide array of visual compositions. If one looks past the presentation use case, the combination of the flexibility of a nearly infinite digital canvas and easy-to-use design features makes for a powerful and highly accessible tool for developing thought maps, prototyping designs for digital interfaces and physical spaces, creating bespoke visualizations, and as a platform for comparative visual analysis and annotation.

At my institution, the Bard Graduate Center, we’ve come to realize the range of Prezi’s possibilities through a variety of different projects. Interestingly, the tool was first introduced to me by a student who was looking for a tool that would reveal detailed craftsmanship in highly intricate metal works. He wanted to be able to show the whole object and then do a zoom into the fine details. This would have taken multiple slides in PowerPoint, but by using Prezi he was able to travel from a view of the whole object to a detail and back much more fluidly. In one of his early projects, he laid out about seventy of these high-res images along five radial arms and was able to organize them visually and accompany each image with metadata. (Click on each image below for a larger version.)

From those early Prezis, students, and later faculty, have used the tool for a variety of projects, as it became clear that Prezi’s ability to highlight and make flexible the use of visual materials suited much of the work we do studying decorative arts, design history and material culture. We’ve had students create dual-axised graphical layouts of materials along theme and time.

We have also used Prezi to generate wireframes for digital project prototypes, including an early draft of our first digital-born qualifying project.

In our exhibitions, we have used Prezi to work on concepts for interactives and to mock up designs for gallery spaces. As a resource for students I created three Prezis with a combined 2000 images that acted as a visual syllabus for a course I taught on scenic design.

One of the best things we have found along the way is that Prezi has a collaborative system that is very simple to use and manage. The result is that faculty and students are often contributing to and editing single or multiple Prezis over the course of a semester.

Because of these robust features Prezi has become an important part of the toolset at my institution and has become equally accepted by our faculty alongside PowerPoint for in-class presentations. It is also an easy tool to learn and teach, meaning that students can quickly feel proficient in the process of adding images, videos, texts, and shapes. This allows them to begin to think creatively and to experiment across the digital canvas with little instruction. For our institution, it has been a great example of a tool being hacked beyond it’s perceived range of functionality and has been a great entry point for many community members interested in working with digital tools. If you’re interested in seeing some more of the Prezis we’ve been working on feel free to contact me.

Lead image: live spirograph 3 by Flickr user tadekk”> / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

In February, Ryan reviewed Mailbox, an iOS app with a fast, triage-based approach to handling email on a smartphone. Mailbox uses a nifty swipe-based approach to managing e-mail actions such as deferring, deleting/archiving, or listing e-mails, and it wasn’t hard to see that others would follow suit. And sure enough, later in the spring came Triage, pitched as “first aid for your inbox,” with a cool flick-based interface. This week, there are two new email clients for iOS–Boxer (formerly Taskbox) and Dispatch (from, in part, the programmer behind Due)–that build on a swipe-based interface, but that do so to focus on actually doing things with your e-mail, not just quickly reviewing it until you can get back to a real machine.

Beyond stylish swipe-based interfaces, Boxer and Dispatch offer strikingly different approaches to similar problems. Both apps, for example, recognize the value of quick, canned responses. Boxer relies on templates, either built-in or self-generated, while Dispatch relies on Text Expander-style snippets (while not literally the TextExpander SDK, you can import simple snippets). Similarly, both apps want you to get your to-do items out of your e-mail inbox and into a to-do list. Boxer has an integrated to-do list built right in, as well as a system for tracking stuff you’re waiting on other people to give you. Dispatch, by contrast, uses the automation scheme behind apps such as Draft and LaunchCenter Pro to provide integration with: Omnifocus, Things, Evernote, Instapaper, Due, Asana, Chrome, and 1Password, as well as standard iOS apps such as Safari, Maps, Message, FaceTime or the phone.

Here’s the promotional video for Boxer:

and the one for Dispatch:

After a couple of days of use, I can say that both apps make a great first impression, and seem as though they’d be strong candidates for your primary e-mail app. Both strike me as massive upgrades over iOS Mail. That said, there are some clear points of differentiation.

Of the three apps mentioned here, Boxer is the only one that supports Exchange. So if you have a work account that’s Exchange-dependent, and you want all of your email in the same client, then Boxer is pretty much your go-to choice. (And the developers of Dispatch have already said they have no plans to support Exchange.) Also, Boxer integrates Dropbox support, for saving attachments, and is more socially aware, by connecting with Facebook and LinkedIn to gather more information about your contacts. Boxer also brings the “Like” button to e-mail, by creating a special button that quickly sends a message noting that you’ve gotten a message and you approve. One drawback is that Boxer’s inbox is a unified view. While you can access your various accounts separately, via a view called the Dashboard (which also gives you access to your to-do list, your requests, and so forth), this means that if you have the unread messages counter turned on in Notifications, then the number of unread messages you’re seeing is for all your accounts.

Dispatch is for IMAP e-mail, and supports Gmail, iCloud, AOL, and Yahoo. Moreover, it only provides access to the inbox of such accounts, nothing more. It also does not provide any way to attach files, or to search through your inbox. Dispatch emerged when the developer of Due, Lin Junjie , wished he could more easily respond to support requests on his phone using Text Expander, and that focus is absolutely clear. In other words, if your primary mode of dealing with e-mail on your phone involves fairly standard messages to others (either replies or new messages) and then processing to-do or reference items into other apps, then Dispatch is going to be great. That said, the power of Dispatch arises from the support for other apps, rather than adding yet another batch of to-do lists, and they really are remarkably convenient. (My favorite other little touch: Dispatch pre-populates the salutation of each e-mail with the recipient’s first name.) Federico Vitti has had access to Dispatch for a while now, so you should read his detailed review.

I do have both an Exchange account and a Gmail account, and so for now have both Boxer and Dispatch on my home screen. So far, I think I slightly prefer Dispatch’s interface, and I *definitely* prefer the integration with other apps, but I also like Boxer’s facility with Dropbox and its ability to serve as a full-service e-mail client.

Boxer is $4.99 in the app store, although the first 100,000 are free. (At upload time Thursday morning, there were still 40,000-odd free copies left, according to the in-app counter.) Dispatch is currently $2.99.

Photo “Hoping for Steak” is by me. / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0.

Each Wednesday, ProfHacker hosts an open thread discussion. Sometimes a specific topic is announced, and sometimes the discussion is completely open. Please remember to abide by our commenting and community guidelines. Thanks!

Even before evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller hit “send” on his idiotic Tweet, I’d been thinking about asking people what kind of social media policy might be in place on their campus.

I (quite literally) just did a quick search on the site for the University of South Carolina Upstate, where I work, and found these :

• “Getting Started with Social Media“

• “Social Media Policy and Procedure Guidelines” (PDF)

That first link is a page of advice; the second specifies what is and is not allowed by the university and includes this paragraph:

The purpose of the Social Media Policy is to ensure accuracy, consistency, integrity and protection of the identity and image of the University of South Carolina Upstate by providing a set of required standards for social media content from any department, school, facility, organization, entity, or affiliate.

I also see that this policy reads “Approved May 2013,” but I haven’t seen any announcements about it (nor do I recall anyone being solicited to help create it).

Hmmm… I’m not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, yes, it makes sense “to ensure accuracy, consistency, integrity and protection” of the image of the university.

On the other hand, what about academic freedom? According to this document, USC Upstate “adheres in principle to the American Association of University Professors Statement on Academic Freedom” and “[t]he university’s policy shall be to defend academic freedom against any encroachment.”

In this new social media policy, does “entity” or “affiliate” (see above) include individual employees? If so, am I really expected to get permission for my own social media accounts, several of which I’ve been using for close to a decade, before I was hired by this campus? Social media is a publishing platform; so is, for example, print, but it would be bizarre to create a campus policy that required all faculty publications of traditional print books or journal articles to first be approved by some central authority on campus.

Right? Am I overthinking this? Perhaps overreacting?

What’s the social media policy like where you work? Do you even have one? If so, who was responsible for creating it? What kind of input did faculty have (if any)? Is it widely known? Is it available online? Please share in the comments (including links, if possible). Thanks!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Rock Cousteau]

I guess people noticed this weekend when an evolutionary psychology professor decided that fat-shaming grad students was an excellent use of his Twitter account. (And by noticed, I mean went deservedly ballistic online. Jezebel helped.)

But yesterday Collin Gifford Brooke wrote a really terrific piece on, in effect, internalized fat-shaming and all the different humiliations and stressors that the obese face on an hourly basis. Here’s a sample:

I did want to make one more point, though. While I was gratified to see the speedy, collective outrage over Miller’s tweet, it made me think back a couple of weeks to a conversation that happened on Twitter about how academics should dress. Once upon a time, I was told (quietly) that if I expected to receive tenure, I would need to dress better. The thing is, when you’re overweight and wearing clothes that aren’t tailored to your body’s shape, your body puts different stresses on those clothes. Dress clothes in particular tend to assume the “norm,” and while it’s funny to watch Chris Farley split a jacket or the rear seam on a pair of pants, imagine doing it while you’re teaching a class bending over to retrieve a pen or a piece of chalk. And then imagine that the simple act of dressing one’s self every day carries with it that extra layer of anxiety over whether today will be the day that your body betrays and humiliates you. Most ties are manufactured with certain assumptions about the size of the neck around which they will be worn; for a fat person, a regular tie often doesn’t fit. Sports jackets often assume a particular shoulder to waist ratio. I normally teach in jeans, because for a variety of reasons, they tend to be manufactured to handle more stress and wear than dress pants. In this Twitter conversation, however, the idea of teaching in jeans was one of the things that was considered unprofessional among faculty of a certain age. I don’t mean to call anyone out about this, but I will say that I felt no less shame seeing this conversation than I did seeing Miller’s remarks. I didn’t see all the responses to the thread, but I’m pretty sure that most people didn’t think of it as fat-shaming, or respond to it with the same outrage. It probably didn’t register to them.

I guess my point is this: my wish would be to take a small piece of the outrage, and apply it to awareness.

When I was younger, I was pretty fat–fat enough that one of my colleagues brought it up when I said I was leaving my university a couple of weeks ago: “One thing’s for sure: you got yourself into shape over your time here.” There’s photographic evidence and everything.) It has been a long time since I carried that kind of extra weight, but it still governs the way I think about buying clothes. I shop as an embarrassed 30-yr-old fat guy all the time, regardless of my actual size, and you couldn’t make me try on clothes most days.

(Just typing that innocuous paragraph made me a little self-hate-y, as well as disappointed that the new comfort/shame food of the month isn’t out until Friday.)

Anyway, Collin’s piece is well-worth a few minutes of your time, even if you have no body shame issues at all, in part for the classy suggestions he makes at the end for ways we can all understand one another a little better. Read the whole thing!

Photo “Shame the Devil” by Flickr user Neal / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0