Take My Advice: If You Have Trouble With Tech

Sometimes technology betrays us! It’s happened to us all, usually at a point when we are actively trying to seem competent. If you ALWAYS have problems, however, there might be something on your end you could change. There are some common problems I’ve identified from my time supporting faculty and graduate students with technical issues; these issues not only also affect students (and thus could be usefully passed on to them for their own tech needs) but also characterize a decent portion of my own issues when I stop to reflect. Some of the biggest below:

You’re going too fast. Technology can often allow us to go faster! But going too fast with a technology can not only lead you to make mistakes (guilty), it is also sometimes simply too fast for the tool to keep up. For example, Canvas often needs a refresh to show an updated grade when grading quizzes– it simply won’t update its view for you immediately upon the updating of a quiz grade. And, it’s of no use to start reviewing New Analytics in Canvas immediately; it takes time for it to analyze student activity and grade data and present it to you. It can help if you think of technology not as an instant communicator, but as a collaborator who might take a little time to get back to you. 

You’re using the wrong browser/old hardware. Imagine the software you’re trying to use is a gold-plated, top of the line refrigerator. It’s very nice, it functions perfectly, and it has a lot of features that you’re looking forward to using. Now imagine you give that refrigerator to a Pekingese and tell it to carry it up the stairs, install it, and get it functioning.

A Pekingese who would try really hard, though. Image by No-longer-here via Pixabay.

Not only is that Pekingese not going to be able to lift that refrigerator, it’s also not going to have any idea of what you’re talking about. Using incompatible hardware or software to get your tool working is similar– generally, it’s either not strong enough to carry the task, it doesn’t have the capacity to understand what it would need to understand to carry out the task, or both. 

You’re using a nonstandard tool for the job. Imagine that refrigerator again. It has a door, right? It plugs in. You put food in it. All these qualities are very similar to a microwave, but if you try to use the refrigerator as a microwave, you’re going to be disappointed. Similarly, looking at what a tool was designed for and evaluating if that is in line with your ambitions for the tool can be helpful. That’s not to say you can’t use a tool at sideways purposes– I would argue half of my discussions of Twine are sideways to its intent. (Incidentally, the medium of Interactive Fiction also has a lengthy history of using tech in ways contrary to its intention for creative purposes, so I feel I’m part of a rich tradition.) However, you’ll experience less frustration if you do so intentionally, rather than realizing that you’re trying to give feedback with a software that’s really only meant for file sharing, or facilitate group collaboration with a tool that only allows one or two users at a time. 

I’m in an interesting predicament at the moment where I’m trying to use AI tools to complete some data analysis. I am reading about good prompting strategies and trying to use them. I’m trying to build a foundation and then build on top of it. I’m trying multiple different strategies to see if I can come to some different results, even if only to give me some insight into how to better get the results I want in future. Yet, at the moment, it’s been more time checking and evaluating and figuring out where it’s getting its ideas than actual time saved in the analysis from the way I normally do it. 

I don’t think I’ve been going too fast, although I admit sometimes I see the demos of how quickly AI can pop together information and read reports of how it’s dramatically cutting time spent on certain tasks and I’m like “shouldn’t it just be able to do this for me already??” My hardware and software don’t seem to be the limiting issue– it’s not that it’s too slow, it’s that the conclusions are incorrect or partially correct or inventing some information that is not quite there. And the tool by all reports seems to be the tool for the job (see above demos), although perhaps a lesson I may end up learning is that some parts of the job are beyond it. I think the issue is actually a number 4, which is that the tool is more complicated to use than I am treating it as, and I don’t know enough yet about using it effectively. Straightforward and simple UX is powerful, but it can come at the expense of tailored, expert usages– think about what can be achieved by a pro using HTML to create a website versus a novice using Blogger or WordPress, or by a musician versus the prerecorded tracks on a child’s toy keyboard. The problem I’m trying to solve, then, may simply be one that is more “improvisational jazz” than “Old MacDonald.”

 

The strategy that's been most helpful to me so far is one that can be difficult for a lot of us to use: ask someone else to make an attempt at it, and learn from what they do. When in doubt, have someone else try! Either they have success, which you can learn from, or they don't, in which case you can at least feel a bit better that you are not alone.

Any of these tech issues plaguing you, or others? Let me know in the comments!

Plug and Play Miniseries Lesson Spotting with AI: Talking to Write

Photo by Işıl via Pexels.

Despite widespread enthusiasm about having AI help generate content, that's not in my experience the best way to use it. One, it's doubtful it knows as much about what you want to convey on your topic as you do. Two, conversely, you're probably better at the content than you are at communicating it clearly. In this post, I'll offer a few suggestions for how to use AI to help with writing and clarity, which could be useful for both instructors trying to create educational/assignment content and students attempting to frame their ideas for coursework.

I tend to think as I talk-- the talking is the thinking, and talking through a topic helps me write it down. When I'm preparing to lead a workshop or give a presentation, I often begin by recording myself trying to give it off the cuff based on the ideas I have right now before I start outlining or writing things down. Then, I use the talk-through as the basis for the outline or script or notes. Sometimes I do this in the opposite direction; a brief and sketchy outline that I talk through and then edit based on what I said. In the past, I've always done this using Zoom and then watching back the recording.

More recently, I've started using a combination of two technologies to begin creating written work. First, I speak the ideas into text-to-speech, like dictation.io. Then, I take that text and ask ChatGPT to make it grammatically correct and separate it into sensible paragraphs. This is so much easier for me than fully typing out all the same ideas-- I can talk just about as fast as I think, while I am a decidedly slower typer despite years of practice at Typing Tutor. This strategy works best if you speak in small chunks and confirm that dictation.io is absorbing it all; I've noticed dictation.io does not capture everything I say if I speak for a long time. It's also important to communicate clearly with ChatGPT or your AI chatbot of choice-- it will attempt to smooth the language and potentially add (too many) adjectives by default, so if you want language adjustments, give clear parameters; if you just want the text to be given appropriate puncutation and capitalization, say so.

Most recently, I'm intrigued by some of the AI offerings within Zoom to transcript and summarize meetings; in theory, this could mean that a recorded first draft could have a relatively coherent text component to work from. If you have a paid Zoom account, it's worth playing with these features and seeing if they do anything for your process.

Plug and Play Miniseries: Lesson Spotting with AI - Think Pair Share

Photo by Işıl via Pexels.

Think-pair-share-- it's the easiest, most go-to way to get a conversation going in a room of people. It works well in rooms that don't have flexible seating for gathering into larger groups, it's a low amount of investment in setup and explanation, and it gives literally everyone in the room a chance to talk (unless one half of the pair is either real shameless or charmingly enthusiastic). And if done well, it's an "activity" that makes such intuitive sense it doesn't have to feel like an "activity."

If you haven't done think-pair-share before as a leader or participant, this description of the activity and FAQ about it is a nice introduction.

Normally, think-pair-share is conducted by humans (for NOW), but an AI chatbot can be one half of your pair or a supplement to a human pair. This was one of the first uses of ChatGPT I wondered about when it became a popular subject of conversation, and I wasn't alone! Several pieces offer ideas about incorporating AI into your Think-Pair-Share time (for example, it's one of Ditch that Textbook's 20 Ways to Use [Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence] as a Tool for Teaching and Learning). Most treatments of this idea I've seen are riffing off of this widely shared tweet by Sarah Dillard.

[An aside: one of the really funny things to me about the surge in conversations about AI in teaching is how often I now see people talking, writing about, and sharing tweets as though they're academic articles in circles where that might never have been the case before. When something is very new, many standard expectations of what kinds of things are acceptable or useful to cite shift; I imagine this is less wondrous to folks doing more present-focused work, who have frequently encountered the wonderful world of citing social media before, than to those of us who spent seven years citing while fighting microfilm-induced nausea.]

For some real zaniness, and for more insight into the tools themselves, you could have students fire up two chatbots and give them instructions, then feed their responses to one another. This can take careful prompting that will depend on the topic of discussion; it also may shed some light on the boundaries of the chatbots-- it's likely that their conversation will become a bit circular, as they tend to declare everything up front rather than have an evolving conversation (similar to some of the worst human small group activities I've been part of, really).

For more complex use of a Think-Pair-Share type framework, I love this set of options from Acadly, which suggest alternatives to insert into the process like think-write-pair-share, which encourages fuller consideration of the issue before the pair stage, and think-vote-pair-vote-share, which would work well for a question on which minds are likely to change after some collaboration or conversation on the topic. Generative AI could easily be incorporated into these steps to provide some real value; for example, comparing the written thoughts in think-write-pair-share with how ChatGPT might respond to the prompt, or asking the chatbot for reasons why someone might disagree with one's original vote in the think-vote-pair-vote-share framework.

Plug and Play Miniseries: Lesson Spotting with AI

Photo by Işıl via Pexels.

If you're part of the educational space, you've probably noticed the tumult about artificial intelligence and AI chatbots and what they mean for how we teach. I'm not going to round it all up here because there's lots of other places to read about it, but suffice it to say there's a lot of chat about what the surge in AI tools and their availability, particularly natural language processing tools like ChatGPT, means for things like academic integrity, assessment, and what it means to be well-educated, or to produce good and ethical writing. 

Naturally, nobody is more into AI than historians! Just kidding, they hate it. At least, that's what I've observed in an entirely unscientific study in which I read an article about this issue and observe what people with "History" in their job titles tend to say. Obviously this is not true across the board, but it does feel as though the novelty of the past several months has been recieved as a harbinger of doom rather than anything at all helpful. 

Undoubtedly skepticism is justified, even beyond the issues of plagiarism and equity and  scary future dystopiae (ChatGPT told me the correct word here is "dystopias," which I agree with and have also rejected for reasons of vibes). For example, I gave ChatGPT-3 Jourdan Anderson's letter a while back, and it's not great at understanding satire-- it read Anderson as deeply sincere, which is, as you may know, not the best reading of this source. Read it yourself if it's new to you and see what you think the author intends! Moreover, it also makes stuff up, which as you might have guessed, can be a problem. It's great at assembling a bibliography, for example-- I tried it for sources about one of my main subjects of my disserations, Joe F. Sullivan, and it came up with a handy list. However, as Aaron Welborn notes on the Duke University Libraries blog, it's also wildly capable of making up sources out of thin air! So, great at making a bibliography, not so great at making a bibliography of sources guaranteed to actually exist. It also can't always be trusted even just with making a list-- for example, of presidents. That's just how it works. So it's only really a starting point you then need to guess and check. And let's not forget "Historical Figures Chat", which attempted to make AI chatbots of notable historical figures based on ChatGPT, thus incorporating some ahistorical and incredibly odd "PR nonsense" into responses from multiple architects of historical atrocities. (This tool would have been an interesting concept to ponder in my iteration of the Fiction and the Historical Imagination class, in that  many of the less valuable approaches to historical fiction that we looked at dealt with a cultural penchant for believing we can know a person in the past, and mythologizing them based on the image we've created of them, and also in that this thing is effectively creating very specific little historical fictions). 

But! As you probably know, my wheelhouse is less locking down and preventing people from using stuff and writing dramatic take-downs of concepts and more about poking into and exploring what things can be good for, even if I, you, and/or the profession in general isn't psyched about them immediately. So, throughout the rest of the year, I'll be releasing a grab bag of AI-related options-- things teachers can do with the current AI tools without either totally forbidding them or making them central to your course creation. Some will help you plan to teach or create teaching materials, while others will be ways you can assign AI usage as part of the learning process. Some I've come up with, while others I'll feature have been suggested by others. 

I'll note here that due to my own biases as a trained humanist, I've avoided options that mostly boil down to "have the thing create a thing"-- I tend to find that the writing that text-focused AI tools produce is a little uninspired; many of them literally work by stringing together words in the manner and order that they are frequently strung together, so that's not terribly surprising. It's also the opposite of what I'm usually trying to accomplish in my classes. I've always tried to teach and to get students to find new connections, words that haven't been put together that often, ideas not commonly associated. As a result, the more the tool is creating something toward some sort of final product, the less the options for creating material are interesting to me, though there are undoubtedly uses in that line you can find recommended elsewhere.

Finally, if you have an AI usage for teaching you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you! This series will be percolated on and added to periodically for as long as I keep thinking of or coming across uses that seem useful and exciting to me. 

Enough About Me: Putting Your Source Analysis Template to Work

 So, you’ve created a source analysis activity using this template– congratulations! Now you’re ready to make it available to others so they can, you know, analyze the source. 

Regardless of which method you choose, the first step is the same: From the story view, you’ll click the title of your activity at the bottom left, then click “Publish to File” in the menu that appears. This will bring up a window where you can confirm what you’d like to name the file and where it should be saved; an HTML file will then be created.

The menu that appears when clicking the title of your Twine story. 

The nifty thing about an HTML file is that, if you open it in a browser like Google Chrome or Safari, it will open as your game, playable and looking just as you designed it to look. If you open it in Notepad or something similar, however, it will be code– code that you can use! 

This possibility gives us a lot of options for how we might wish to share our activity. I’ve talked about mechanisms for doing this a bit previously, but it’s worth revisiting here to address one of the spaces almost all teachers already have access to: an LMS space. If you don’t already have one, you can usually create one for free, and many receive these spaces from their institutions automatically.

Here is a quick walkthrough on how to incorporate a Twine activity into the Canvas LMS, with concept and code courtesy of Laura Gibbs:

1. Create your HTML file. 

2. Pop that file into the Files space. You could make that file visible to your class, but would probably rather hide it from students.

3. In a new tab, open the Edit view of the Assignment or Page you’d like to add an activity to. 

4. Click the </> button at the bottom right hand side of the Rich Content Editor in order to open the HTML view. 

5. Copy and paste this code into the text entry field:

<iframe src="https://___/courses/___/files/___/download" width="100%" height="600"></iframe>

6. Go back to the tab in which you have Files open. Right click on the HTML file you just uploaded and select “Copy Link Address” from the dropdown menu that appears. 

7. Go back to the tab in which you have the Edit view of your assignment open. Select the bold text, right click, and paste the link you’ve just copied. 

8. Save and publish. 

To see this in action, enroll in this demo Canvas space and experiment with the items available in the Source Analysis Activity module (feel free to use a pseudonym). Into this space, I’ve added some examples of what the Source Analysis Activity can look like incorporated into an LMS as a page or an assignment. In the process, I’ve taken the opportunity to update things that were or have broken (for example, the link to the Arbella Speech that I used in the first iteration of the Source Analysis Activity has since become defunct). More significantly, I edited some of the language to apply more clearly to the Canvas environment– students no longer need either so many or so vague instructions about how to turn in their answers if the activity is embedded within an assignment, for example; the activity also no longer needs to collect their name to associate with their answers, but it does still need to instruct students on how to collect and turn in their answers into a format that can be delivered to the instructor by Canvas. 

One of the beautiful things about distributing your activity via an iframe in an LMS is that it works well on mobile– even the process of copying and pasting my answers into the text box was relatively straightforward when testing this on my iPhone.

 

I hope this inspires you to try this out in your own courses, even if only on an unpublished demo page. If you need a Canvas space to experiment in, you can create a Free-for-Teacher account. 

If you have questions or get stuck at any of these steps, feel free to reach out in comments, or schedule a quick chat with me via my Calendly. 

Enough About Me: Source Analysis Template Walkthrough

As promised when I introduced the Source Analysis Template, I have also created a walkthrough to using it. If these steps seem like a lot, don’t worry! This is a pretty granular breakdown, and some of these steps are repeats from the download process in the first post.

Setting Up

1. Download the Twine desktop app from Twinery.org and the HTML file for the template. 
2. Once you reach the Story Listing in Twine, click “Import from File” on the Side Menu. Click “Choose File,” then select the template file. 
3. The template will appear as a story in the Story Listing view. 
4. This is a good point to do the following two actions: 
• Duplicate the file so that you have the template for safekeeping, and a work file for your new activity. That way, you can go back to the template if needed, or duplicate it for other uses in future.
• Click the Settings (gear) icon next to the duplicate and select “Rename Story.” Give your activity a descriptive title, as this will appear in the activity once it is complete.
5. Click on the template to open it.

Welcome

1. Double click on the “Welcome” passage to open it. 
2. Replace the all caps text in between the two sets of tildes, as well as the tildes themselves, with text relevant to your activity. (example: ~~ THIS ENTIRE THING ~~ would become Your Text)

Leaving the tildes will result in your text looking like "Title" and "Title of Text" in this 

image in the finished product-- which, if you like it, great! If not, take out the tildes.

3. You should also, of course, feel free to edit or omit other text that may not apply to your use of the activity-- for example, if you don't want your students to turn in the answers at all, or if you want them to complete the activity in one sitting, some of the instructions may not apply. 
4. If you’d like to link to a copy of the source or excerpt, edit the link text given in the Welcome passage in the paragraph beginning “If you’d like, you can pull up a copy of…” Put the URL link itself in the first set of quotation marks, and the text you’d like to link (usually the title of the source) in place of ~~LINK TEXT WITH TITLE OF SOURCE~~. 
• For example, this:
  <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp" target="_blank">Code of Hammurabi</a>
• Becomes this:
  Code of Hammurabi
5. This version of the story asks for the student’s name in the Welcome passage , so that their answers at the end will have a name associated with them. If you don’t need this feature, you can delete the question and the code for the input box ({text input: 'studentName'})
6. Close the passage by clicking the x at the top right. You’re done with this one! 

Source

Okay, this is the fiddliest bit, but I promise it’s not so bad. There’s even a nice visual walkthrough to help you out. Ready?

1. Replace “~~TITLE OF TEXT~~” with the title of your source or excerpt. 
2. Replace “~~ADD YOUR TEXT HERE. PUT TEXT YOU'D LIKE TO LINK INSIDE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:” with the full text of your source or excerpt. 
3. Identify the words within the source that you would like to link to another passage. Copy ‘em.
4. Go down to the link list. Replace “~~LINK TEXT 1~~” with the copied text. 
5. Highlight the entire line. Cut. 
6. Highlight the words you copied earlier in the passage. Paste. You’re done with the first one!
• Here's what that process looks like. Every little yellow flash in this clip is a CTRL+C (Copy) or a CTRL+V (Paste). 

7. Repeat this process with each selection of text you want to link. Delete any links you do not use.

Items

There’s lots of code-looking stuff here, but never fear! Each of these lines that begin with "{text input for:" simply creates an input box where students can write their answers, one input box per line. 

1. Add any questions or comments you’d like to the Item 1 box corresponding with the text you linked to this passage. 

2. If you’d like a text input option for students to respond to your questions:

• Cut and paste the first line of code from the list beneath the relevant question.
• Repeat for all questions in that Item. Delete any you do not use (or else you’ll have a list of extra input boxes in your passage).
• Each input option can each only be used once in your story. So, if you used ‘inputA’ and ‘inputB’ in the Item 1 passage, you’ll need to remove these two from the next slide and use 'inputC,' 'inputD,' etcetera. 
3. If you don't want a text input option, simply delete all text before {back link, label: 'Save and go back to excerpt'}.

Submission Instructions

Okay, home stretch! There’s so little you need to do here, it almost doesn’t seem fair. 

1. Choose one or both sets of instructions for submitting answers. Delete any irrelevant instructions. 
• If you did not use any text inputs in your activity, you can delete this passage entirely or replace everything before the {back link} with any concluding text you like. 
2. Replace “~~YOUR PREFERRED SUBMISSION INFO~~” in the instructions you choose with the email, LMS assignment submission link, or other details needed for students to submit any work they’ve created. 

That’s it! You’ve got a Source Analysis Activity of your own. If you have questions or get stuck at any of these steps, feel free to reach out in comments, or schedule a quick chat with me via my Calendly. 

P.S: Now that you’ve made this lovely thing, how do you put it out into the world? We’ll talk more about that in the next post. 

Plug and Play: Source Analysis Template

Ever since I created the Source Analysis I activity, I've been wondering if there was a way to reduce the friction of creating a close reading exercise like this even further than just providing an example. Twine is a fairly low investment technology to pick up, but to start from scratch can be intimidating, and there can be a high barrier to trying new things for teachers who simply don't have much time to argue with technology. 

To help with this goal, I've created a template for making a source analysis activity similar to Source Analysis I. I have tried to make it as self-explanatory as possible to use (at least, if you’ve read the previous posts and/or demoed the Source Analysis I Activity), so feel free to download it and jump right in yourself! However, if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough to using it, one is coming. 

Download Source Analysis Template! 

This template is good for activities like: 

• Close reading of a fiction or nonfiction text guided by questions
• Encouraging annotation of specific passages
• Creating notes about a source that will inform a paper or exam question

For the particularly imaginative, you could also use it for:

• Having students read and dissect the key requirements of a paper or project prompt
• Reflecting on the different formats of a text (what different things did students pick up reading the piece in its original format versus within Twine?)

To start working with the template:

1. Download the Twine desktop app from Twinery.org and the HTML file for the template.
2. Once you reach the Story Listing in Twine, click “Import from File” on the Side Menu. Click “Choose File,” then select the template file.
3. The template will appear as a story in the Story Listing view.
4. Optional: This is a good point to do the following two actions:
   • Click the gear icon and click “Duplicate Story.” This will make a copy of the file so that you have the template for safekeeping, and a work file for your new activity. That way, you can go back to the template if needed, or duplicate it for other uses in future.
   • Click the Settings (gear) icon next to the file you plan to work in and select “Rename Story.” Give your activity a descriptive title, as this will appear in the activity once it is complete.
5. Click on your work file to open it.

In creating the template, I worked out a couple of irritations of the original:

• If using a link to an external site, placing it into the template as provided will now automatically open it in a new tab, rather than either opening in the existing tab (thus navigating away from the activity) or requiring users to right click and select "Open in a new tab" manually (which is annoying to have to remember). This update is thanks to this question and answer in the Twinery forum!
• The original activity required players to make a slightly unnecessary choice between whether they were going to write down their answers separately or in the input boxes. Although this was useful for the purposes of demonstrating two different approaches, it really wasn’t necessary for a template– if not using the input boxes, the creator can delete them, or the players can ignore them.

You may have noticed it’s been a while since my last post, and that’s primarily because every time I sit down to publish this template post, I come up with a new way to make the template or the instructions better which requires an additional hour of Googling, fiddling, and fighting with Blogger. I then created a bunch of content which felt like too much for one post; I like to keep these somewhat bite-sized. So, I’ve created a lot and split it into smaller, time-released bits, like those pain reliever capsules with the little spheres inside. (Is that what those do? Not sure, but they look fancy, so I’m going with it.)

Now, finally, I’m releasing the template out into the world, with the promise of additional supportive content to come, including a walkthrough (with a helpful video demo or two) and some upgrades to this template that you may like to experiment with. I’m also offering some small-group or one-on-one meetings for anyone who wants support or ideas for using this template; feel free to schedule an open time on my Calendly. And, if you decide to use it to create your own resource, I’d love to see the final product or hear about how you used it!

Take My Advice: Four Tech-Fueled Efficiency Tips I Wish I'd Known Four Years Earlier

If you'd like a tech-fueled inefficiency tip, this image should serve. 

I have always been technologically curious, but as one grows and changes, perhaps it is inevitable that one realizes what they didn't previously know or appreciate; so too have I realized that there were lots of technological possibilities that I was slow to take up. There seems to be an undertone of skepticism among folks in academic humanities circles about using technology, systems, or techniques for efficiency and an even greater fear of admitting one has engaged in such behavior, and so I perhaps unnecessarily developed an aversion to using it to support my research; though I was keen on incorporating tech into teaching, my process of doing so was admittedly prone to making my preparations more time-intensive rather than less (implied, I think, by my observation in this 2018 reflection on preparing my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course). Part of this, I think, was a symptom of a peculiarly humanistic tendency (or so it seems to me) to feel that to save time is to be cheating in some way; that if our work is valuable it is valuable because we agonized over it at great length, and can be said to have depended upon no one but ourselves and our incredible intellects. Ultimately, however, both students and the work, not to mention my own well-being, have been better served by embracing ways to make life a little easier and a little more collaborative. As a result, in this post, I'm reflecting on four things I came to appreciate in the last two years or so that I really, really wish I'd been doing the whole dang time.

Use OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is much better than it used to be, and it doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful. I think I became hesitant to try again with OCR after an ill-fated attempt at digitizing a single issue of Cosmopolitan magazine so I could "perform Digital Humanities" on it as an undergraduate. However, toward the end of my dissertation writing process and into my current work I've seen how improved the technology is and how much I now take it for granted. If you have archival photos or scans, try using Adobe Acrobat or a free OCR tool to recognize the text. This will not only make it more accessible if you are distributing it to students, but also make it easier for you to search for terms within it (which would have come in very handy had I figured this out earlier in my dissertation research process, as I worked almost entirely from archive photos and scans while writing).

Use Excel

You know you can use Excel for whatever you want? You don't even have to be a card-carrying "quantitative researcher." Here's one thing I now use all the time and which would have worked well in conjunction with the idea of OCRing things: the UNIQUE function, which can take a list of items and strip out all the repeats, leaving only one iteration of each name, number, list item, etcetera. Imagine how much more easily I could have answered questions about how many disabled children were represented in an issue of a periodical if I'd known this.

Use the Internet

You don't have to do everything yourself. Some subjects have existing resources, whether entry-level memorization and practice activities on tools like Quizlet or Kahoot or mid- to higher-level activities created by other instructors and distributed on educational resource sites like MERLOT or the Zinn Education Project or through affinity groups like the Reacting Faculty Lounge or via personal blogs (hi!). Some activities pitched to high school learners can be employed usefully in a higher education setting with a few tweaks. Some materials can also be created by students as part of their learning process; instead of making a Quizlet for students to practice with, ask groups to create their own Quizlets of the top five or ten topics / terms / concepts and compare their results. 

In short, I wish that I had appreciated earlier how many other things existed that I could use rather than reinventing the wheel every time. Sometimes it seemed like it would have been harder to find and enact an idea elsewhere than creating it myself, but looking a little harder could have paid off-- not only would this have saved me time, but it would have been useful to me to see how other people were approaching teaching various topics to inspire the activities and assessments that I created.

Use a Repetition-Mitigator

Relatedly: If you do have to do something yourself (making an activity, grading), you don't have to create everything from scratch every time. It's great to make something new! As I've mentioned in a previous post on career preparation, if you are an early career teacher, it's in fact essential to make some new things if you'd like to be able to fruitfully reflect on those experiences in later job interviews or teaching statements. However, if you save time on some of the more rote requirements and/or incorporate already existing resources, you'll have more time for creating novel activities and giving meaningful feedback. 

Efficiency in grading is one example of this. Rubrics and comment libraries (either technological ones, like within LMS systems, or low-tech numbered lists you can show to students in conjuction with papers marked with corresponding numbers) can allow you to skip writing "Needs to use at least three sources" in paper comments seventeen times, leaving additional time to write more specific and useful comments like "Your paper's argument might benefit from a closer read of Source A" or "If your goals are X, you should focus on Y aspect of the homework for next week." I only started appreciating what a time-saver this could be late in the game, and I wish I'd used it more thoughtfully and more often.

What tips, strategies, or tools do you wish you'd appreciated and used earlier? Feel free to let me know in the comments-- I just may have to start adopting them myself.

Related Links: 

One of my favorite activities supported by an existing resource: after being asked to deliver a short lesson to a group of epidemiology students on the fly during my time at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, I followed a brief lecture on the history of polio with asking students to play the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Got Ramps? Architectural Barriers Game and compare notes on which endings they achieved. 

If you're interested in the NMAH's work on polio, or thoughts on incorporating museum resources and exhibits into teaching, you may be interested in revisiting this 2017 post on the curator's interview with David Serlin.

Enough About Me: Deformalizing and Deformatting