As faculty, you likely spend several hours every week carefully reading, evaluating, and grading student work. Research shows that students report higher course satisfaction when they get better grades and when faculty exhibit “immediacy and presence behaviors”. This finding suggests that giving inflated grades on student work without reading it first may save you valuable time and dramatically improve students’ evaluations of your course. This method, called the “Rubber Stamp” method, consists of a few easy steps:

• Collect student work
• Randomly assign grades from a range between “A-” and “A+” to all papers
• Cavalierly sprinkle encouraging handwritten statements like “Good Point!” or “I never thought of that!” throughout the paper.
• Take up the hobby you always wanted to pursue but never had time to.

Students in “Rubber Stamp” courses report high satisfaction with the prompt turnaround times and unfailingly optimistic feedback they receive from faculty. They often report that they are “amazed” at their grades in these courses, and that their high achievement “almost felt effortless”.

Please note that the “Rubber Stamp” method is most effective on April 1st of each year.

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS’ DAY!

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!“
-Thomas Alva Edison

“I discovered the meaning of life but I forgot to write it down.“
-Hugh Gallagher

You know those times when you are struck with a brilliant, life-altering, million-dollar, save-the-world idea at the exact moment when you can’t do anything about it? As a person who works with ideas, you will probably have more brilliant ideas than you can ever put into action. Paradoxically, we’ve all had the experience of finally “getting in writing mode” and realizing that the ideas just won’t come. I think this is because the “inspiration” and the “perspiration” parts of your brain seldom come to work on the same day, and good note-taking is the key to helping them work together.

By capturing ideas in an organized way, you can come back to your “inspiration” moments while you are in your “perspiration” mode– thereby tearing down the barriers to getting started.

HOW you capture ideas is a personal choice that has a lot to do with how you like to work, where and when you get your best ideas. There is no one-way to do it, but the best idea-catchers have these features in common:

1) You can take it with you everywhere. This is where systems like a little paper notebook, voice recorder, or cell-phone based idea-catcher work best. I always have my smartphone with me, so I can always capture voice, photo, and text-based notes on Evernote (my favorite idea-catcher of them all). My best friend carries a folded piece of paper in his pocket and swears it holds his whole life together. It doesn’t matter what it is, just that you have it on you at all times.

2) It doesn’t take much thought to get started. You don’t want an idea-catcher that requires too many steps (like remembering a password, logging in, checking your email) before you can record this idea. If it takes more than 10 seconds or two steps to get started, you may lose that precious idea. I like making voice notes to myself, so I keep ReQall.com on speed dial on my phone. One click and I am dictating voice notes to myself.

3) It can store ideas of all types. You want an idea-catcher (or catcherS) well suited to the many forms your ideas may come in. You may find it more effective to use a suite of tools to capture to-do’s, interesting website bookmarks, snippets of writing, tweets, audio recordings, photos, videos, and whatever else you need to save.

4) You can easily come back & review your ideas. Saving your ideas is great, but a good idea-catcher system should make it easy to come back and view your ideas in an organized way. You don’t want to wade through a mess of weird files and scrawlings when your “perspiration” mind just wants to get started!
This is where Web 2.0 technologies really shine, because they make it easy to tag, categorize, and search your notes. My beloved Evernote is my repository for everything from song lyrics, to do’s, business cards, blog posts-to-be, meeting minutes, etc. etc. etc. I have a tag for “song ideas”, so when I am sitting down at my home studio looking for some lyrics to sing, I can fire up Evernote and be recording in seconds.

While Evernote is great for that, many blogs, tumblelogs, online office apps, and even microblogging services (like Twitter) allow you to tag & search your ideas for future review.

SuggestedTools:

Evernote– ideally suited for everything I’ve discussed here. The more you work with it, the more you’ll find it can do!
ReQall.com- Voice to “To-Do List” webapp
Mind Mapping software (like FreeMind)
RememberTheMilk.com- To-Do lists done right
Stickies/ Text- simple and easy evergreen solutions
Voice Mail- call yourself and dictate notes!
little pocket notebook- some people swear by them
Twitter- easy to do, easy to review!
Audio recorder (like Audacity)
Web bookmarks (like Del.icio.us)
Web clipping (like ClipMarks)
blogging (like WordPress, Posterous, or Tumblr)
Google Voice – A revolutionary mixture of phone, voice mail, email, SMS, and awesome. Great for catching ideas!

Don’t Forget the Perspiration!
We’ve done a pretty good job of storing our “Inspiration”, but remember that this is only 1% of the job. Your job as a creative individual is to take these pieces of inspiration and weave them into something that the world can use. As Merlin Mann so eloquently states (and I’m paraphrasing), there is no magic tool for this. You just have to do it. A lot. And be prepared to suck. A lot. The people who find ways to move through this ugly, challenging phase of creation become the masters of their craft.

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GSpell is a great little add-on for the Mac OS that basically uses the power of Google as a spell-checker for all your desktop applications. It works in Word, Firefox, email…. everything on your computer. It’s cool because it searches the internet for the misspelled word, so it automatically knows words that your computer’s dictionary wouldn’t know. For example:

Spell checking phrases in TextEdit. Direct download to .mov file if above clickiness doesn’t work.

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In my literature classes, I found that one of the biggest challenges for students when they sit down to write a paper is finding good quotes from the text. A great solution is to put the full text of a novel on your website (or at least link to one). Students can then use their browser’s “Find Word” function (Ctrl+F on Win or Cmd+F on Mac) to search for main Keywords.

You can see above that I searched the text of Crime and Punishment for “agony” and can then find every instance in the book where that word appears. I find this really helps kids review main themes and find the most relevant quote easily.

You can find most classics at Gutenberg.org, Bibliomania.com, or by googling “full text” and the name of your novel.

Another way is to put a passage from the book in quotes in your google search, such as “My watch was still
unwound, and I am rigorously accustomed to wind it the last
thing before going to bed, and many such details.” (remember: the quotes make it so that you find this exact phrase). The likelihood that these words appear together outside of the desired text is nearly nil.

By making the full text available, you can move from students who slavishly insert the first quote they see– because they lack the stamina to search through page after page of quotes– towards students who are making critical decisions about a few easy-to-find choices.