GradHacker

I'm inclined to leave the technical aspects of online pedagogy and teaching tools to those who, like Zellner and Katherine O'Flaherty (whose piece on Blackboard you can read here), have greater experience and expertise than I. What I want to talk about here is whether or not online teaching makes sense for you as you strategize your trajectory through graduate school and into whatever professional future compels you. So this is not about how to do it better, this is about whether, as a graduate student, to do it at all. As with most questions you encounter in this business, there is no definitive answer—merely a disjointed collection of more questions and things to think about.

The last several semesters, I have been incorporating Twitter into my teaching style and lessons, and it has quickly become an inextricable part of my teaching tool box. Twitter allows me to stay in touch with my students quickly and easily, it fosters discussion in the classroom, and it helps to create a community among my students. I am able to engage students 140 characters at a time, and it makes sharing cat pictures way easier.

We hope that everyone had a wonderful thanksgiving, whether that meant flying home to see family, staying in with your friends, or just having the day off from work. This year, this is what we were thankful for in grad school.

Markdown, a text formatting syntax designed for easy readability but also transformability, gets a lot of love from geeks. Lincoln Mullen has written a great introduction to Markdown for Profhacker if you are unfamiliar with the syntax. My big question when I made the shift away from traditional word processors and began using plaintext and markdown was if it would be flexible enough to support the conventions of scholarly work.

About a year ago a colleague recommended some free courses being offered at the university, one of which was Foundations of Project Management. I’d considered it, but felt I didn’t have time. A few months later, a commenter on my post about managing deadlines in grad school noted that my description for managing project deadlines was similar to the basic principles of project management. It had me thinking that I should look more into this, but never did. Then I started to organize my thesis projects and all I could think was, “You know what I wish I knew more about…project management.”

So it's come to your attention that, *gulp*, you are going to have to learn to code something. This is happening more and more across disciplines: be it the explosion of interest in digital humanities, robust software or support data analysis, more and more graduate students are finding themselves moving beyond the WSYIWYG toolbars and menu items. It's akin to driving a car; you can hop in, turn the thing on, and be on the road in a few minutes.

We've reached that point in the semester that can become oppressive for TAs and grad students teaching their own courses. Those essay assignments that seemed like such a good idea back in September are seeming distinctly less so as teetering piles of ungraded papers on your desk. Just as your own semester workload is increasing and deadlines loom for conference abstracts, job applications, travel grants, and summer internships, here comes the dreaded stack of unmarked papers, some of which you know will consume more of your time than they did of their authors.

As grad students, we face numerous pressures – from academic deadlines to family commitments and maintaining our own health and well-being. However, as many have written before, we struggle to find a balance, tend to give up those things that are healthy but aren’t “productive” and even feel guilty when we take a little time for ourselves.