By Any Other Nerd

So now we come to the next part in our series on “Freeing the Course.”  In the first part, we dealt with free programs and tools , this time, we're looking at free readings and material for your class.  We all know that textbooks are a significant challenge for any course.  The prices are challenging for students between affording them, getting them from the bookstore, and glitches or problems with financial aid.  Then, of course, there is the problem of ordering them online on their own and waiting. Read the FULL POST HERE . Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and  check out some of my other posts! . You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by  signing up for them via email. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

Currently, I'm reading Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir by Wael Ghonim, which thus far feels more like a guy who works at Google talking largely about how Facebook helped to generate the revolution in Egypt in Spring 2011 (I'm sure it's more than that but at the 1/2 mark, that's still largely my impression).  Coupled with this is an ongoing discussion through email, GoogleChat, Facebook posts, Facebook Chat, and Twitter that I've been having with a friend.  And friend is an interesting choice in this context. Jane and I met in college.  She was a freshman when I was a senior.  Over the year, we ran into each other a handful of times, were friendly enough.  After college, like many people, we fell out of contact.  It was early 2000s.  The extent of social media was instant messaging, which I'm sure if I looked back, we were "Buddies" on AIM.  But largely, no real interaction after that.  ...

We know that the cost of education is high and continues to escalate for various reasons ; even at community colleges . This is problematic since we do serve as a gateway of economic and intellectual opportunity for a wide range of students who might not get into or finish college without us. But costs are prohibitive to many people and in digital age, finding ways of making class and class tools cheap is quite important. So this will be a short series of posts on Freeing Up Course Programs, Course Readings, Course Delivery, and Course Extras filled with great resources for you to use in your course that are entirely free for you and your students.   For the full article, click through to the blog ! Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and  check out some of my other posts! . You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by  signing up for them via email. This work is licensed under a  Creative Comm...

Success is possible in the 21st century without post-high school training or education, but it’s increasingly unlikely.  (Success is hard to define; but in this context, I am largely thinking success in terms of employment and compensation; that is not the final say on success, there are many other ways of valuing and understanding success as the Happiness Index indicates .   With the context of employment and compensation, I then would say that success is being gainfully employed in a way that is not directly exploitative to one’s mental and physical health while simultaneously covering one’s needs and a reasonable amount of extra compensation for savings and basic upkeep of one’s life; it’s vague, but that’s largely because success will look different for everyone).  In the globalized interconnected world, more training is needed to fulfill the more complex jobs of that world and we are not giving people a good opportunity to fulfill those jobs (or their own potential f...

Greetings and salutations one and all. So it's 6 months since last we met and many of you have faded off into the sunset--for good reasons.  A blog doesn't live on lack of posts.  But much has been changed over the course of the last 6 months and clearly this blog is taking on a new direction (Not to be confused with EC Comics' New Direction ). So what is this new direction(s)?  Well, I am no longer a hitch-hiking adjunct (or rather not as much).  In the fall, I interviewed for and started my new position as Coordinator of Instructional Design at North Shore Community College .  This means that I have "largely" reduced to just teaching at 3 schools (soon to be 2--all for good reasons) and I've started work on my 3rd Master's Degree (what a nerd!).  Ok--that's a lot of shuffling and I can break it down.  I got the new position (yay) and quite most of my teaching gigs to the capacity that I was teaching them (6-8 courses per semester). ...