However, there are some do's and don'ts (mostly don'ts though) that I'd like to point out regarding my professors and instructors there. These will probably apply to everybody else out who are teaching to at least one other person besides themselves.
Don't put your class's/section's group on Facebook.
I for one try to avoid Facebook like it is an ugly part of town, but sometimes it just comes back like a bad habit and I end up being there anyway. For example, this post gets automatically advertised on my wall and every unfortunate person on my Friends list's news feed. Other notable examples include looking for someone, trying to communicate with people I barely meet every week, and checking out a group my professor made for the class I'm taking.
And the latter isn't really supposed to be there. Facebook is still a long, long way from being a good choice to organize serious groups, like groups between co-workers or, in my case, groups between instructors and students. For one, every privacy issue associated with Facebook profiles apply to groups as well. You really don't want outsiders knowing what your little private group is up to. That's why some companies opt for private corporate "social networks" because apparently people can't communicate on the Internet anymore if it doesn't involve a news feed or an instant messaging platform. I still communicate through old fashioned e-mail, and handle most instant communication through IRC (and sometimes VoIP), so that probably means I'm old.
What's a good alternative for Facebook groups? I'd have gone and suggested Yahoo!, but to me Yahoo! is just a silly company trying to be like Google but instead became a Google clone for those with inept computer skills and awful English. Google Groups is a good place to start, and there are also a lot of other services out there besides Facebook and Yahoo! that you can try out.
Stop handing out documents to students in formats other than PDF.
I like the Portable Document Format ever since it became an open standard at around the year 2008. It does a great job of preserving the original content and format of documents and its sheer portability and commonness is due to Adobe pulling a Microsoft move and telling everybody that their PDF reader and authoring tools are the only things that matter, when there are actually a lot more better readers out there and numerous ways to create PDFs. I can read PDFs on my desktop, my ThinkPad, my tablet, my phone, and my Kindle. And that is good.
However, some instructors thought it was a good idea to hand out documents to their students in their original, editable document forms. The "editable" part isn't the problem here, I actually do not give a shit whether I can manipulate my copy of the document or not. The problem is, handing out documents in such formats hinders portability, because, for example, files that use Microsoft's new formats (*.docx, etc.) look messed up when you're not using something that has Microsoft's name on it to open them. Sure, LibreOffice has done a good job of at least trying to preserve the original formats and looks of Microsoft .doc and .docx files, but when I open these files in my tablet or my phone, things get really ugly. I haven't tried opening .doc, .docx, or .odf files on my Kindle yet, probably because I think that's a very stupid idea.
Instructors should save all the documents that they're going to hand out to their students as PDFs - this goes for presentations as well. This saves me (and other students as well) a lot of time trying to figure out the original format of the file when LibreOffice is having a hard time opening it. Don't know how to save a document as a PDF? Your (probably pirated) copy of Microsoft Office 2010 has that functionality built inside it already.
Don't upload your materials to Rapidshare (or some other bad "filehost").
Right now as I'm typing this, I'm also downloading an economics textbook encoded as a PDF about 69 megabytes big. The size really shouldn't be a problem here - 69 megabytes are downloaded in less than 10 minutes by my connection on average. But right now the estimate says it's going to take a bit like 40 minutes to download (not adjusted to compensate for how badly Chrome estimates remaining download times). The problem lies where the file lies - Rapidshare.
Rapidshare has earned its share of popularity for being the [probably most popular] site that annoys people trying to access it and ripping off people stupid enough to avail of their services by coughing up some euros. The site throttles down your download speed when you're just getting your files for free, and you can't even download more than 2 files at once; both problems are remedied once you've given in to your sanity and you've decided to pay up. They're also not the only one doing this, there are countless of other "file hosts" out there ripping off each other's business models.
The solution for this would be to use an actually decent file host, like Mediafire, or create a Dropbox account and share the files from there. And if the file is really big, it's not too hard to just make a torrent out of it.
Oh, and after finishing the first draft of this post, reading through it two times and doing some edits here and there, my download from Rapidshare isn't even done yet. That means I'm probably going to be staying up late again trying to create a very minimal presentation that no one can understand unless they listen to me talk while I'm presenting. Thanks a lot for making me lose my sleep, Rapidshare!
