Prepare, for the End (of the Semester) is Near

Posted on by

You know it’s coming.

You’ve been through it before.

But that doesn’t make it any easier.

I’m talking about the end of the semester. Or, not exactly the end — but the week or two leading up to the semester’s close. Crunch time, stress time, or whatever you might call it on your campus.

At most U.S. colleges and universities, the fall semester winds down by uncomfortably sandwiching a week or two of classes plus final exams in between Thanksgiving and the start of the winter break. Not only do most instructors have final projects, papers, and tests to grade before giving and grading final exams, but the end of the semester also creates deadlines for administrative reports, committee projects, and student theses.

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written several posts with good suggestions for the true end of semester, including May 2011′s From the Archives post on Getting Through the End of Term and Ethan’s End of Semester Checklist.

But how can you best get through the next couple of weeks until the end arrives? The same way people in apocalyptic movies survive:

  • Gather Supplies
  • Form a Group
  • Be Tough

Gather Supplies: It’s worth it to do whatever you can right now to make your life easier for the next three weeks. One easy way is to make sure you stock up your household with nonperishable supplies so that you won’t have to be running errands when you’re already feeling overwhelmed. Having some healthy snacks on hand can help balance your energy when you’re grading. Consider preparing and freezing some meals now so that you’ll have less cooking to do in a couple of weeks. Obviously, unless you’re already pretty well prepared for the apocalypse, you won’t have time or space to prepare and freeze three weeks of meals. But a big batch of soup or chili can go a long way and make things just a bit easier later on.

Form a Group: This is, of course, a standard plot device in apocalypse and disaster movies: acquaintances, friends, or strangers find themselves in a situation in which they have to work together to survive (though usually one or more get eaten by mutant sharks or whatever the threat is). Even though we each have our own reports, grades, and paperwork to complete, being supportive and understanding of colleagues can help ease tensions at this busy time of year. Sitting with a friend at a coffee shop and grading together can make it a bit more enjoyable. Instead of just complaining with colleagues and friends, imagine how you could band together to help everyone get through this time with a little more ease.

Be Tough: You’re not surviving the wipe out of all electrical devices or an alien invasion, but you still need to draw on your inner resources to make tough decisions, tackle things you’d probably rather not do, and sacrifice some of your usual habits or pleasures to get through the next few weeks. Sometimes being tough simply means figuring out how to take care of yourself so you don’t get sick or overly exhausted. Who knows, your inner resilience might surprise you when you’re tested. (And if it helps your attitude to put on a certain pair of boots or imagine yourself leading a polar expedition, then why not.)

Just remember, it’s temporary. We all just have to hang on and get through.

What’s your favorite strategy for managing the crunch at the end of the fall semester? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed image by flickr user mikelehen]

Followup: Basecamp for Organizing Student Research

Posted on by

Moleskine Notebook

It has been over a year since I posted about my experience in using Basecamp for organizing student research. Since then, a couple of things have happened: I ran another summer’s worth of research for two students, and Basecamp has made some changes itself.  In this post, I will followup up about how Basecamp’s applicability to my need has changed.

First of all, Basecamp no longer offers a free version. (Pricing is available here.) In March of this year, the company announced a migration to a new version (while keeping the previous version running, at least for current users of it, and calling it “Basecamp Classic.” Find out more information about the transition and associated costs here and here.) The least expensive plan is currently $20/month for managing no more than ten projects. I fully understand the need for sites like this to have funding, but for my application – organizing two separate research projects that can involve several students over time and primarily using the site to help my students get used to more public accountability for work, not to mention the penny pinching I need to do to pay for research costs – I just couldn’t swing it.

So what did we end up doing? We went to classic paper-and-pencil. In my trusty Moleskine notebook, I reserved a page for each week of the term. Each of those pages were drawn off into a three columns – one for me and one for each of my students. Then rows were reserved for each day of the week. To organize the work of my students and me (who was working on other projects in addition to the students’), I simply put the information that needed to be tracked (plan for the day, things we were waiting on, experiments in progress) in the appropriate block, usually generating that information from the daily meeting I had with each student (and with myself in the morning.) Then I used the information to check back with the student (and myself) the following day to make sure we were staying on target.

Fancy? No. Effective? Yes. In the future, I probably will archive our notes by using Evernote’s Page Camera app (if it ever makes it over to Android phones, currently iOS only.) But for now, our paper-and-pencil system worked fine.

How about you? How has project management software worked (or not worked) for you in academia? Let us know in the comments.

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user jamesbastow]

Reacting to the Past: An Open Game Based Pedagogy Workshop at Duke, January 19-20

Posted on by

In June this year, I found myself screaming at the Ming dynasty Emperor Wanli for wanting to anoint his third born son in place of the first born. For all my remonstrations, I was executed as a Confucian martyr on the next morning. The following day, I entered a chaotic meeting between illustrious American citizens desperate to uphold slavery and a team of Abolitionists. All in all, in the last week I travelled between five centuries in a matter of four days.

I was not in a time machine. I was at the Reacting to the Past Institute at Barnard College, one of the most exhilarating new methods of revolutionizing higher education that I have experienced. Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is a series of elaborate games, set in the past, where students take on the roles of historical characters, and through arguments and gameplay, have the potential to reshape history. In order for students to “win” the game, they have to thoroughly master literary and historical texts for their games’ time period, and to be able to fight against their in-game opponents through a series of oral presentations and written work. In other words, students in Reacting to the Past have to basically do everything their professors want them to do in a college class—read and analyze texts, learn about historical contexts, learn how to construct forceful and convincing arguments—but in the guise of a game. I played two characters in two games—a follower of the Ming Confucian extremist Hai Rui in Confucianism and the Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, set in 1587, and an undiscovered, young Walt Whitman in 1845 in Frederick Douglass and Abolition.

I was astounded by how participating in the games completely changed the way both my fellow gameplayers and I learned. Like many of our students, most of us had come to the workshops less prepared than we should have. But the intensity of the gameplay drove us to comb The Analects the night after the first game to find evidence to thwart our foes; and to thumb through Douglass’s autobiography to make claims against the scientific racism of the nineteenth century. I can only imagine what Reacting to the Past does for the undergraduate classroom.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Reacting, join us at Duke for an open Reacting workshop January 19-20.  The registration fee is $75 for faculty and administrators and $25 for graduate students. The fee includes tuition, materials, and most meals. The costs are so low because the workshop is being generously supported by the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke and by the Teaching and Learning Center at Wake Forest University. At the Duke workshop, participants will learn about RTTP by experiencing the games as would their students. The program will consist of two game tracks, along with a series of plenary sessions: one will feature Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945; and the other, Frederick Douglass, Abolitionism, Slavery, and the Constitution, 1845. Both Mark Carnes, the brainchild of Reacting pedagogy at Columbia, and Mark Higbee, game designer of the Douglass game from Eastern Michigan University, will be joining us.

We hope to see many of you there! Sign up today here!

More information about Reacting:

1. Another review of Reacting pedagogy in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

2. Descriptions of all the games, links to peer-reviewed studies and publications, and other instructor resources are available on the main Reacting web site.

3. For a 60-second introduction to RTTP, check out the exchange between Alex Trebek and professor Stephanie Jass.

4. For additional testimonials by veteran RTTP instructors from around the nation, visit here.

**Parts of this post were originally posted on my own blog.

A Quick Look at Pocket for Mac

Posted on by

Reading BunnyWe’ve all had it happen: while browsing the web, we come across something really interesting. Or someone in our Twitter stream posts a link to an intriguing article. The problem is, we don’t have time to read it just then. But we don’t want to forget about it, and we’d like to have a nicely-formatted version to come back to.

Fortunately, there are services like Instapaper and Pocket (formerly called Read it Later, which Brian first wrote about a few years ago) to help us keep track of those links.

Lincoln updated us on Read it Later in April, when it rebranded itself as Pocket. It’s been available for mobile devices and as a web app for some time; toward the end of October, a native Mac app was released.

I’ve been using the iOS client for a while and liked it, so I thought I’d give the new Mac app a try. (I’d previously been using the now discontinued Read Later, whose developer worked with Pocket to develop the new app.)

Thus far, I like the Mac app—a lot. It has the same clean, attractive interface iOS users will be familiar with, but takes advantage of the Mac’s screen size to allow you to view an article and the article list simultaneously:

Pocket

(I think it would be a nice touch if Pocket would add this feature for the iPad in landscape mode.)

As you’d expect, it’s easy to switch between your current articles, favorites, and archive. As with the iOS app, it’s easy to share articles via Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, or email. It’s also possible to send articles to your Evernote account. That last feature is really handy for me, since one of the (many) things I use Evernote for is to save articles that I want to keep, but that I don’t think belong in my Zotero library.

Thus far, I’m impressed.

What about you? If you’ve tried Pocket’s Mac client, what do you think of it? If you use a different client that you like—whether for Pocket or a similar service—let us know about it in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by toms]

Setting up a Local Folder Backup Sync On Your Mac

Posted on by

folder by Tim Morgan, on Flickr Hopefully most our readers here have a good backup routine in place. After learning the lesson the hard way, I now I use an obsessive combination of a cloud-based system (I use SpiderOak, which we introduced here and here), time machine, the mirroring of important files between two computers with the help of SpiderOak, regular backups to a hard drive and more irregular backups to a medium-term storage medium. This, in turn, is deposited at a safe location in a country not likely to be destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse at the same time as the country I live in.

One common task needed for this variety of backup procedures is the syncing of a folder, especially when I back up to my external hard drive. I have tried lots of different folder syncing apps over the years, many of which can now be found on the App Store, but I’ve noticed that, since the coming of OS X, some leading sync apps (such as Carbon Copy Cloner) are running a simple open source command line utility to perform their task behind the scenes. Today I want to introduce one of these that I have recently started using: rsync. Rsync has been around since the late 1990s as a way to synchronize folders from the command line (Read Lincoln’s introduction here) of Unix and Mac OS X. If you use a Mac, rsync should be already installed.* When used for uni-directional sync (I won’t cover bi-directional sync here), it copies folders and files from a source location to a destination, and optionally can remove files that no longer exist at the source from the destination.

Please use this at your own risk. Try it first on a test file or folder first, for example, so you see what it does.

To keep a collection of my primary sources synced with a folder on my backup drive I open up my Terminal application in the Applications->Utilities folder and enter:

rsync -a -v --delete /Source/BackMeUp/ /Volumes/BackupDrive/BackMeUp

Tip: Drag a folder from the Finder and drop it onto the Terminal to find a folder path easily but add the trailing “/” in the source.

Why is this better than simply dragging the folder in the Finder to the destination location on my backup drive? Well, using a command like rsync only copies the things I need over (new or modified files), and only deletes the files I no longer need. It can change a 20 minute copy-and-replace operation into a 2 minute one if you have many gigabytes of files that have only a few files that need updating.

Let me explain the command in a bit more detail. You can read this yourself in the manual for the command if you type “man rsync” at the command line, but briefly, “-a” is “archive mode” which is explained in this great MacLife overview of rsync found here. It preserves timestamps and permissions on your files. The “-v” option increases the verbosity of the command. I like to know more about what is going on when the command is run. The “–delete” command, which looks frightening, is used to delete files in the destination folder that no longer exist in the source. If you change the name of a file in the source folder and run the command without –delete, for example, you will get both a file with the old name and the new name in the destination folder, and any files you have deleted will remain as ghosts in the backup destination folder.

Now, obviously, I am in no mood to type this command every time I want to perform my backup. Hackers among you who spend a fair bit of time on the command line may want, at this point, to add an alias for this backup routine to the .bash_profile file that lives in your home folder or schedule a regular backup using launchd or cron. However, for those of you who don’t spend much time hanging out in your Terminal, you can easily save your backup routine by creating an Automator application:

1) Open the “Automator” in your Applications folder
2) Create a new “Application”
3) In the search bar on the left find “Run Shell Script” and drag-and-drop this into the blank pane on the right.
4) In the text box for the code (it may say “cat” as an example, delete that text) enter the rsync command you used for your backup (Again! Please use with care and test it in the command line with a test folder so you see what the command does)
5) I like to see the output of the command, so I drag-and-drop another “New TextEdit Document” command under the “Run Shell Script” command so that the output of rsync will get dumped into an empty text file, that opens upon completion of the sync.

Save this application and then you simply run it every time you want to perform your backup from that particular source folder to a destination (which can be an external drive).

Have you ever used a command line sync utility like rsync or ditto? Are there other free or commercial folder sync applications you like?

* I believe Mountain Lion comes with the outdated version 2.6.9. I have seen notes here and there that the newer 3.0.x versions are better at capturing some file attributes (see here, for example) and resource forks on old pre-OS X files. I haven’t experienced any problems without making this update, but if anyone understands this better, please share.

Folder Image:
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  Tim Morgan