YouTube is amazing. With nearly 1 billion hours of uploaded video, the site hosts an impressive array of content germane to many topics in my courses. But YouTube is also a rabbit hole of distraction. I’ve gone to YouTube to watch a four-minute video on mitosis and left over an hour later having watched eight…
Author: agraesch
Google into Moodle
About a year ago, I shifted my course syllabi to Google Docs as a strategy for more nimbly handling the inevitable hiccups and improvisational changes to scheduled meetings during the semester: snow days; opportunistic class visits by colleagues and other scholars; newly published research addressing course topics; etc.. As a result, any updates to syllabi…
Dish Up Your Syllabi with Google Docs
A couple years ago, I did away with the static PDF files and began presenting my syllabi as dynamic web pages on Moodle. This approach allowed me to more efficiently update the parts of my courses that inevitably evolve during the semester, build in links to content on my Moodle course sites, and make a…
P-Card Accounting On the Fly (or in Vietnam)
Institutional credit cards, or purchase cards (‘p-cards’ for short), are quickly becoming part of the routine work habits of some faculty and many staff in higher education. Although the adoption of the p-card has obvious benefits to an institution, it can also create more work for more people, resulting in a net uptick in time…
Easing the Time Demand of PCard Accounting
Higher education is rapidly transitioning to purchasing card programs as a means of streamlining the process by which services and goods are procured by employees. With recent growth of the credit payment industry, colleges and universities are embracing purchasing cards, or “pcards”. Pcards are meant to reduce transaction costs, allow access to supplier discounts, eliminate delay…
Social Media in Academia: Connecting with Local and Global Communities
For better or worse, social media is entrenched in the routine lives of our students, our colleagues, and the communities in which we participate. With over 70% of American Internet users engaging its pages, Facebook still dominates as the most popular social media site. Close behind, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest fall somewhere in the…
Presenting Syllabi and Course Assignments as Pages in Moodle
The semester approaches, and I can’t help but tinker with the design of my courses. I know better than to reinvent the wheel, and much good advice has been proffered with respect to the first rule of productivity: don’t fix what’s already working. Nevertheless, my inner (and somewhat pathological) perfectionist compels me to tweak. For…
Going Paperless V: Paperless in Practice
In our post introducing this series, we mentioned that there are many possible tools and workflows you can employ to achieve a paperless office. We asked Anthony Graesch, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Technology Fellow, to share his favorite tools and to describe how they fit into his own workflow. Here are his recommendations. 1….