Do you really want to be your own hacker?

I find the ProfHacker columns at the Chronicle of Higher Education both useful and disturbing. Useful because they do often contain info on the newest tools, tips you can use (backup your files and TEST your backups!), and pointers to great resources that faculty don't often find on their own.

They're disturbing to me as well, though, because I have a belief that faculty don't want or need to be techies. Maybe I'm wrong, but I really don't think most faculty have the time to try all these new tools and methods, and it creates an unnecessary sense of stress to imply that they should. Other articles the Chronicle of Higher Education and other news sources frequently (and unnecessarily) frame the division between faculty who do use technology and faculty who don't as combative. If it's combative, it's at least partly because some faculty feel defensive about the fact that they don't spend whatever spare time they have testing out the latest Zotero features or loading up an iPad. And they shouldn't have to feel defensive about it, because they shouldn't have to do it. It's not their area of expertise.

In our Faculty Computing Services department we try almost everything. If we read about it, we try it, limited only by the time we can squeeze from all our other responsibilities. And we're nerds; we like testing new technology products.

When we find something that we think is stable, mature, widespread, affordable, cross-platform, easy to use, and useful in more than one academic discipline, we take it to our faculty to try it out. We ask for pilot volunteers, we show it at department meetings, we send out flyers, we offer our support services for it. Some products take off and some don't. But I think of us as advocates for our customers, trying out all the latest so that they don't have to. We're frequently wrong about what our faculty will actually want. I was surprised in one Boot Camp that the mathematician didn't care about the SmartBoard at all (finally!, I thought, a way to write but save equations! She didn't care. She had a working method already,) but the musician was very excited at the idea of an infinite supply of new staff paper, also savable for future classes. So we try to show you more than we think you will care about. But we try to limit ourselves to things we know will work.

Moreover, we try to focus on things that give the students new learning experiences. We never want to increase administrative overhead for our faculty. There are a lot of tools that can support the inevitable record-keeping function of teaching, and we try to support those. We have many faculty who ask us how to do weighted grading in Excel, for instance, or do quizzes online to reduce the time to collect and return them. But we try to focus on tools that let the student, more than the instructor, do something new. The faculty member may have been to the Louvre - but for a student the online tour is still new. Students blogging, we think, is more instructionally relevant -if it's core to the course and graded - than faculty members blogging. Having students create a shared research database is perhaps more to the instructional point than a faculty member's own Zotero database - though that tool is great for its own purposes as well.

So I guess I'm saying that I certainly see why some profs want to be their own ProfHackers. If that's your thing, I hope you'll let us know in Faculty Computing when we can spread the word to your colleagues that some particular tool or methodology is super-great. I try to gear our services toward the faculty who have new teaching ideas but aren't as interested in the techie side of how to do what they want to do, and we help them with that. I hope none of our faculty feel like they aren't up-to-date as teachers if they aren't testing Twitter dashboards or PowerPoint alternatives. And if you want to develop your own personal OpenCourseware Strategy, I hope you'll call upon the consultants in FCS to help you with that. We can loan you tools, help you wade through copyright issues, and perhaps even suggest resources to include. We're the nerds. We're like that.