ChronicleVitae: What You Might Have Missed This Month

[This is a guest post by Brock Read, an editor for The Chronicle of Higher Education. One of Brock's most recent projects has been developing and maintaining The Chronicle's Vitae, an "online career hub that makes it easier and more rewarding for faculty and administrators to do their jobs each day." Today's post is the first of an ongoing, monthly series in which ProfHacker will highlight some of the content from Vitae, and Vitae will--in turn--highlight what we've been up to here at ProfHacker. -- GHW & JBJ]

By now you might have happened upon a few articles from Vitae, The Chronicle‘s newish academic career hub. If not, a brief introduction: In addition to job-search, dossier-management, and networking tools, we also post daily news and career advice—-much of it tackling matters of teaching, research, career development, and personal productivity.

Not surprisingly, we’re big ProfHacker fans. Jason and George were kind enough to invite us to post a monthly roundup of our highlights here, and we’re excited to run a monthly guide to ProfHacker‘s greatest hits on our site.

Here’s some of what we’ve been writing about recently:

“Smartphones in the Classroom? Let Students Decide.“

David Gooblar, proprietor of Pedagogy Unbound, offers one way to sort out the proper role for personal technology in the lecture hall: Leave it to your class to make the call. You’ll absolve yourself from playing iPhone cop, and you might end up sparking a useful discussion or two.

“Do You Really Want to Use a Commercial Learning-Management System?“

Jonathan Rees takes ProfHacker’s advice and uses WordPress to manage his online class needs. With so many free tools available, he asks, “why would any face-to-face professor want to interact with her students through a commercially-mediated space?”

“What Comes Before Crowdfunding?“

What do you do if there’s no money on offer for the research you’re working on? Dan Royles has been there—earlier this year he cobbled together funding for an oral history project—and here’s his advice: Don’t just jump on Kickstarter and expect miracles.

“Digital Humanists: If You Want Tenure, Do Double the Work“

Sydni Dunn asked a bunch of DH practitioners—including ProfHacker’s Brian Croxall and Adeline Koh—how digital work gets factored into tenure and promotion decisions. The consensus: Evaluations haven’t caught up with DH yet, but some departments are making progress.

“From Predator to Pet: Three Techniques for Taming Your Next Writing Project“

Joli Jensen explains why she begins every project by creating a “ventilation file”—”a confidential space for every hostile, resentful, negative thing that comes up when I try to write.”