Andrew Cullison

I just added 42 journals to the journal surveys page! I don’t think I’ve missed any requests. If you don’t see a journal on the list that you’ve requested, please let me know.

I’ve got some other features that I’ll be adding to the survey page soon. For now, get those surveys in and enjoy!

Here’s a list of the recently added journals:

(more…)

Filed under: journal surveys news, philosophy journals, the profession by Andrew Cullison
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Hope everyone is having a good break. Since it’s Winter Break, I’m playing around with changing the look of the site. I tend to favor dead-simple themes and layouts. My previous theme, despite its simplicity, wasn’t simple enough for me. So I’m playing around with this one. Here’s a summary of of some other changes.

• The site now is now structured more like a professional page with the blog as a secondary page. I’ve seen instances of other philosophers who go for this model, and I really like it (e.g. John Basl and Jonathan Ichikawa).
• On that note - my blog (Wide Scope) is now accessible via a page link at the top, but the change doesn’t effect the permalinks. So if you’ve linked to a blog post in the past, there’s no need to change links or anything like that.
• I’ve added Twitter and Facebook share buttons. These have become more dominant in the last year than Digg and Reddit buttons, and the philosophical/academic/ed tech community is much more tapped into those networks than they are Digg and Reddit. If you have your own Wordpress install, I recommend the “Digg Digg” plugin if you want to ad Twitter and Facebook buttons to your site.

The Philosophy Journal Survey Page is still in the same working order. I hope to start tweaking the layout of that page with a custom page template soon, and this will enable me to offer more features/functionality. Stay tuned for that. If you’ve requested a journal be added and don’t see it yet, don’t worry - they’ll be added soon.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Andrew Cullison
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1. Push Google Presentation Slide to your Phone
   Let’s say you’re reviewing some presentation slides before class. There are two reasons an academic might want quick and easy access to those slides in class (2 minutes later). First, you can use your Android phone to control the presentation slides, but to do that you need to bring up the presentation view on your phone. Second, even if you don’t lecture from presentation slides, you might like to use a private Google Presentation to function as electronic note cards on your phone. Either way, Chrome to Phone is a quick and easy way to push that presentation slide to your phone just before class.
2. Push Any Google Doc to your Phone
   You might have reasons to be able to quickly browse some Google Documents in class (e.g. short lesson plans, or notes about something). As your leaving your office, push those to your notification bar with Chrome to Phone and they are right there for you.
3. Push an electronic reading that you have stored in Google Docs to your Phone
   I give my students electronic readings that are stored in Google Docs. It would be nice if I had a quick and easy way to pull up the reading on my phone to read a passage, double check a quote, etc. When I’m reviewing that reading just before class, I can click the Chrome to Phone button and the PDF is waiting for me in the notification bar when I get to class. If I feel the need to call up the reading, it’s right there in your notification bar.
4. Push Student Blog Posts to Your Phone
   I have a student blog, and I like to comment on some of them in class. With Chrome to Phone, I can push the blog posts to my phone that I might want to talk about. When I get to class, they are waiting for me in the notification bar and I can remember which posts I want to talk about.
5. Push Text to Phone’s Clipboard for Annotation
   The first four uses are all teaching related. Let’s talk about a research related use. I use Catch and Evernote for gathering notes about research. If I see a passage in a journal article I’m reading, and  I think it will be useful, I like to copy and paste it in my Catch account or my Evernote account. With chrome to phone, I can highlight text and when I click the Chrome to Phone button - the text is automatically copied to my phone’s clipboard! So if I see something I want to grab, but have to run out of the door. I can push the text to my clipboard and paste it into a Catch or Evernote file on the go.

I’ve only been playing with this for about an hour, and I’m hooked. Academics with Android phones should definitely check this out.

Filed under: Uncategorized, android, educational technology, research tools, teaching by Andrew Cullison
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I’m the technology associate for our Professional Development Center here at SUNY Fredonia. I’m giving a workshop today called “Google and Course Management”.

This will be a more hands-on elaboration of a few specific things I talked about in my previous presentation “What Google Can Do For You?” since we will be in a lab where everyone will have a computer.

Here’s the Handout for the workshop.

Filed under: educational technology, teaching by Andrew Cullison
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We’re coming up on our fall break, and my plan is to update the journal surveys. I’ll be adding new journals to the mix. I’m also going to try and implement the best way to do interesting comparisons as some of you have requested.

If you have any other feature requests/suggestions, now is a good time to get them in.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Andrew Cullison
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We (Android for Academics) just launched an Attendance App. It’s available for free on the Android Market. I can attest to its awesomeness because I’ve been using it in my classes this semester.

The really novel feature is that you don’t need to enter student names into your phone or export the data from your phone at the end of the semester. The app is designed to interact with a Google Spreadsheet.

Here are some details from the website:

Summary:
A great way to take attendance. Put your student list in a Google Spreadsheet, and this app takes care of the rest. There is no need to enter total absences into a spreadsheet at the end of the semester because all absences/tardies are calculated in your google spreadsheet each day you take attendance.

Key features:

• Automatically calculates total absences and total tardies.
• Stores the dates that students were absent/late.
• All data is stored on your Google Docs account!

If you have an Android phone - check it out. Search “Attendance” in the Android Market.

Filed under: android, educational technology, google phone by Andrew Cullison
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At the beginning of each semester, I teach all of my students about basic argument structure and vocabulary (e.g. valid, invalid, sound, and unsound) and get them familiar with the practice of presenting arguments in numbered-premise form.

I’ve started using Google Presentations as a cool way to let them self-diagnose. I’ve created two presentation slides. I thought that I might as well share them. Here they are. Feel free to use them with your students.

You can embed them in your own course webpage like I have embedded them below. Click to the end of each slide to get the code. You can also post direct links to them (so your students don’t have to come to my webpage).

Filed under: educational technology, philosophy, teaching by Andrew Cullison
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We (Android for Academics) just released a grade book program. I’m pretty excited about this. It’s been in the works all summer, and I’m very happy that we could get it out for the start of the fall semester. That’s really all due to  Jon Nalewajek - he did all of the coding on this one.

Here’s a link to more info.

The nice thing about this grade book is that it is designed to work with a spreadsheet that you set up in Google Docs. So there is no need to keep two separate databases. There is only one database in the cloud.

The gradebook has some other cool features. You can easily email a student an auto-generated grade report. You can set a pin number to protect your student’s data in the event that your phone is lost.

I’ll post a demo video soon.

Filed under: android, educational technology by Andrew Cullison
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I was invited to write a critical review of Jennifer Lackey’s book Learning from Words. I just submitted a draft to Philosophical Books for review, but I still welcome comments/feedback. In short, despite the fact that I disagree with Lackey on a number of issues, I think this book is excellent.

Here’s a link to the paper.

Warning: It’s a long one. This is a full-blown critical review, and my limit was 8,000 words.

Google-is-awesome-aside: This is also the first paper I wrote from start to finish entirely inside of Google Documents. It was great. Google may well have their hooks in yet another area of my life.

Filed under: educational technology, epistemology by Andrew Cullison
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This was just posted up on Inside Higher Ed. A new study is claiming that law schools lean left in their hiring. The data is based on a sample of 149 hires.

They could only get political ideologies for 40% of the sample. And here’s something weird; there is no information provided on distibution of political ideologies of the applicant pool. It would be interesting to know if it’s a liberal bias, or if fewer conservatives are applying for entry-level law professor positions.

I didn’t see anything in the Inside Higher Ed article or the article they linked too. They may discuss this in the original research article.

But if they don’t have data on the distribution of applicants, it seems premature to suggest that there is a bias in the hiring process.

UPDATE: I re-read the article linked to from Inside Higher Ed here. It notes at the end that the authors note that their study does not indicate that ideology plays a role in highering since they do not have any data on candidates who were not highered…but then it seems very misleading to say things like the hiring skews or leans left.

Filed under: the academy by Andrew Cullison
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