At the beginning of last semester, I wrote about my plans to integrate a digital project into one of my upper-level courses. I provided an update at the end of October. This will be the final post in the series: a brief reflection on how it went.

As the semester began, my hope was that students would gain three things from the project:

• Some familiarity with the person whose work they personally explore, and an introduction to the work of those covered by their classmates
• Practice in teamwork and in project planning
• An introduction to technical skills that will be transferable (WordPress is just a vehicle; if students encounter difficulties with it, we’ll work together on strategies for solving them)

I noted in the October post that the site didn’t develop in the gradual way that I’d anticipated, mostly because I didn’t clearly communicate expectations about that to my students…

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from ProfHacker » Amy L. Cavender, CSC https://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/integrating-a-digital-project-into-a-class-part-3-final-update/38090

Back in September, Lincoln introduced readers to the command line. Since then, we’ve run several posts on the subject.

Though this post isn’t officially a part of the “ProfHacker Guide to the Command Line,” it does offer one example of  how being willing to try using the command line can be useful, even if it’s not a tool that one’s likely to use with any great frequency.

I was fortunate enough to get a NOOK Color at Christmas. Guest author Eric Bubar wrote a post back in August about using the NOOK Color as an iPad alternative. I wanted to do much the same thing, including being able to dual-boot the device—but I didn’t want to have to remove the microSD card to boot into the stock software (those little cards are easy to lose!).

So I did some research, then followed these directions to create a bootable microSD card running CyanogenMod 7. The handy thing is that the card…

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from ProfHacker » Amy L. Cavender, CSC https://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/why-the-command-line-is-your-friend/38009

This was too good not to share:

As I write this, many of us—myself included—are in the midst of finals week. That means, among other things, that (a) there’s too much to do and (b) our schedules are likely quite different from what they are in a normal week. Those two things can combine to cause trouble.

A case in point happened to me today (December 15). While drinking that first, all-important cup of coffee, I took a look at my calendar. I was surprised not to see a meeting on it—one for which I’d helped set the time. I’d been thinking all week the meeting was today; as it turns out, it was yesterday—and I missed it. Sigh.

Thankfully, though the incident was embarrassing, it wasn’t a catastrophe. But it got me thinking about how to avoid a repeat performance. The two things that occurred to me are really obvious, but sometimes at semester’s end I need to remind myself even of the obvious.

1. …

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from ProfHacker » Amy L. Cavender, CSC https://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/new-years-resolutions-learning-from-mistakes-edition/37756

Back in November, Georgia Tech took down their wikis, claiming that they constituted a FERPA violation. This stirred up quite a discussion on Twitter, as well as on blogs and podcasts (see, for instance this and this).

Decisions such as the one taken by Georgia Tech are troubling, and undermine the kinds of work many readers of this blog do with their students. Nonetheless, student control of their work is important—especially when that work is (or may be) made public. Certainly there are ways (such as allowing students to use pseudonyms or to restrict access to their work, without taking it down) to meet legitimate student concerns, though, without backing away from having students present some of their work online, in public spaces.

So let’s hear from you, readers—what do you do to address students’ reasonable privacy concerns while continuing to ask them to work in…

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from ProfHacker » Amy L. Cavender, CSC https://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/protecting-student-privacy-without-going-ferpanuts/37437

The recent changes to Google Reader, which prompted last week’s post, call for more than a search for a new RSS reader. They’re a good occasion for us to think about “our” data, who controls it, and whether we’ll be able to maintain our own access to it.

Jason pointed us to a fine post in last week’s Weekend Reading: Steven Poole’s “Whatever Made You Think It Was Your Data Anyway?” Seriously, if you haven’t read it yet, have a look. Then go peruse Boone Gorges’ Project Reclaim, particularly his inaugural post.

To be sure, not everyone will be able or willing to take many of the measures that Boone’s implementing for himself. Still, we’d all do well to remember what Steven Poole points out in the post mentioned above: “If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow” (he calls it the “iron law of ‘free’ internet services”).

With that in…

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from ProfHacker » Amy L. Cavender, CSC https://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/protecting-your-data/37350

The good folks at Digital Campus have some thoughts on the recent decisions at Georgia Tech and the University of Missouri in their latest installment.

It’s more than worth the time it takes to listen to it. Check it out!

Last weekend I finally had the chance to see the much-acclaimed film, Of Gods and Men. The film tells the story of the Trappist monks from the monastery at Tibhirine, Algeria (they were kidnapped and murdered in 1996 during the Algerian Civil War).

Oddly enough, there’s only a bare minimum of graphic violence in the film. That’s because the film isn’t primarily about the war in Algeria.

Nor is it really a film about religion, per se.

Instead, it’s the story about the way the priests and brothers at the monastery made the decision to stay, though there were plenty of reasons for them to leave (and, given that all of them were French nationals, they had a much safer place to go). It was, to put it mildly, an extraordinarily difficult decision.

What, in the end, drove them to stay? A conviction that they were exactly where they were supposed to be, a loyalty to their neighbors in the village, and a commitment to honor that conviction and that loyalty, despite the possible cost. These guys weren’t seeking martyrdom. They simply wished to be faithful—and if martyrdom came, it came.

The film should be out on DVD soon, and it’s well worth the time spent viewing it.

Well, I was going to write my first blog post in far too long on the discomfort I’ve been feeling over some of the reactions I’ve seen to Osama bin Laden’s death.

But since Ari Kohen has already expressed it better than I could here and (at greater length) here, I’ll just direct readers to his site instead.

We had all kinds of snow in the South Bend area today—enough that a state of emergency was declared in the city. Still, it was beautiful, and a great day for getting some photos.

This lovely little lady was in the tree near my birdfeeder this morning.

A few minutes later, her mate also came to check out the feeder.

I got a few good shots from around campus, too.