Data
There are times when using AI isn’t appropriate; for example, I would never want it to write material for me. I’ll do my own thinking and writing, thanks. But there are things that it’s very good at — things that I could do myself, but that don’t
Data
I had some fun today throwing together a Tableau dashboard showing travel and immigration visa status by country for those wishing to come to the United States.
Data
Last week, I explained how I used a combination of macros in Google Sheets to clean up class lists for a project I’m working on. With that part of the project complete, the next step was to combine the individual class lists into one consolidated list that I could
Data
Students often ask me, “What can I do with a degree in Political Science?” There are many things, of course, but one of the best ways to give students ideas about what they might do with a Political Science degree is to let them know what former students are currently
Teaching
Just before the academic year began in late August, I found myself looking through the Shortcuts application to see whether I had any shortcuts I needed to update for the new term. I found that I was missing one: a shortcut for creating random groups of students for small group
Tech
Earlier this summer, I spent some time creating Python scripts to copy files and folders. Why do that? For me, the most common use case for copying files is that I want to have a marking sheet for each student. The starting point (the blank sheet) is the same for
Data
One of my projects over summer was to learn Shortcuts. I’d been hearing about Shortcuts ever since Apple first released it for iOS in 2018; a lot of the podcasts I regularly listen to mentioned it. I played around with it, but it didn’t really click for me.
Tech
Last week, I wrote about Python scripts for duplicating files and folders. Those scripts work well. However, not everyone is comfortable working with Python, and they might not want to learn how to use it just for the purpose of being able to copy files and folders quickly. For those
Teaching
Calling on students in class is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the things I find challenging. I’ve never been wholly comfortable cold-calling on students, but always calling on volunteers limits opportunities for more timid students to contribute. One way to make cold-calling less off-putting is to call on students randomly.
Data. Tech. Teaching.
A while back I listened to Episode 151 of the Focused podcast. David and Mike had Francesco D’Alessio on, and they discussed Francesco’s new iOS app, Bento. Francesco has a good overview of the Bento method on Medium, so there’s no need for me to go into
This is a script I wrote to accompany a short video I created for users of our campus’ WordPress installation, which I set up and managed until it was shut down at the end of January 2021. The video was intended to help users migrate their content prior to the
This is a script I wrote to accompany a short video I created for users of our campus’ WordPress installation, which I set up and managed until it was shut down at the end of January 2021. The video was intended to help users migrate their content prior to the
Date: September 1, 2021 Tags: reading Some thoughts on Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! I recently read Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work!. Two passages in particular stood out for me: “…if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.” (Kindle edition, loc. 511)
If you’ve found a theme you like for your Ghost site, but you want to change the typography to better suit your branding or personal style, you can easily customize your site with Google Fonts. Choosing your font(s) Head over to the Google Fonts page. There are a
Several months ago, I purchased a Raspberry Pi. I had three principal uses for it. I wanted to use it as a Plex server. I was also interested in a Homebridge server, to enable some of my smart devices to work together more effectively. Finally, I wanted to see if
A course planning template I’ve been experimenting with Notion on and off for quite a while, and during the Fall 2020 semester I began exploring how I might use it for course planning. Could I use it to see how the various parts of a course fit together as
What a difference a year makes. In mid-February last year, I expressed some doubt to a colleague about my campus’s decision to recall our students from Italy. Don’t misunderstand — I knew that there was a Level 3 travel advisory for Italy at that point, and I would certainly
This is a script I wrote to accompany a short video I created for my colleagues a couple of years ago. The video is available on YouTube: I’d like to demonstrate a way of providing handwritten feedback to students in a paperless environment. To provide such feedback, you’ll
This blog post originally appeared on the ProfHacker blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education on October 4, 2012. This semester, I’m in an enviable position. I get to take courses I’m really enjoying, simply because I want to learn what’s being taught in them. There’s
This blog post originally appeared on the ProfHacker blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education on January 10, 2017. A good number of us here at ProfHacker prefer to avoid paper whenever possible. When I teach my writing course each fall, I have my students use Google Documents so that
This blog post originally appeared on the ProfHacker blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education on November 17, 2016. Sometimes it happens: someone sends us a document in Word format, and we’d really rather it was a PDF. The reasons can vary. Maybe we need to post it on
