By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes I've been working in higher education in different capacities for over twenty years. I've been involved in particular in instructional design and faculty development for over a decade.  One of the benefits or things I take great pleasure in at this point in my career is helping, advising, and mentoring folks who are interested or new to the field(s).  I enjoy it not because it's an opportunity to share about my experiences, lessons, and adventures, but also to learn about the other person and what brings them into this field.  Instructional designers are such a diverse set of folks.  No two have the same story in terms of how they found their way here and so hearing about them and what drives them is always enlightening and makes me reflect.    In the last two years, I have taken on the role of mentoring or advising several dozen folks interested in this field.  Many have come through friends' recommendations--folks wh...

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes reading, 6 minutes watching Slide 8 from the slide deck To any reader of this blog, you must know that I simply adore audiobooks .  A lot.  I listen to hundreds a year and convert many folks to listening to them.  And for really long-time readers, you know that June Is Audiobooks Month--something that I seem to intermittently celebrate with some post or another about audiobooks.  Past entries have included  capturing the full experience of listening to audiobooks ,   my love of listening to literature , and new terms I have come up with for audiobooks .  There was also the series I did a few years ago now where I looked at the different kinds of audiobooks you could find on Librivox (Note to self: update those posts--it's been a while!): Horror Part 1 Horror Part 2 Science Fiction Part 1 Science Fiction Part 2 Fantasy So here we are again and yes, I have another fun post to share about audiobooks in this month of June....

Estimated Reading Time: 3.5 minutes  Do you work in or work with libraries or in scholarly communities, particularly at the intersection of technology (or changing technologies)? Do you have an area of technology that you would like to share your skills, practices, or struggles with OR that you really want to learn practice advice and guidance from folks working with that area? Then, this CFP is probably for you! I am reaching out to folks for any thoughts or ideas for day-long workshops or 1-hour webinars for  NERCOMP , the regional entity of EDUCAUSE , serving from Pennsylvania to Maine. We are planning for such professional development opportunities for the next academic year (Sept, 2021-June, 2022). We are considering different modalites, virtual, hybrid, and even face-to-face, depending on proposers' ideas and preferences. I’m currently the Program-Track Chair of Libraries and Scholarship in the 21st Century, which means I help to find folks who want to run these events ...

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall My rating: 5 of 5 stars Hall's historical exploration of women-led slave revolts is reminiscent of Maus by Art Spiegelman in its storytelling and some of its visual layering. It's an amazing work that ingeniously melds together the story of the history, Hall's story, and the actual history that she aims to cover.  As a Black, lesbian, mother who gave up her work as a lawyer to pursue a Ph.D. in history, Hall takes readers through the practices of historians as she dives deep into archives in the United States and England to unpack the history, the historiography, and the lapses in understanding by a field dominated by white men that made them blind to the fact that there were, in fact, numerous slave-revolts in the Americas and on the slave-ships in the Middle Passage that were led by women.  That mixture of storytelling itself is enough to warrant attention and to see how the...

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen My rating: 5 of 5 stars There's so much that resonated with this book.  Peterson manages to articulate so much of the frustration and challenges of being an adult in the current age and navigating the all-consumption mental and emotional demand of work that is bread into the culture, particularly for those labeled millenials (Side note: I think the generational categories are largely BS and hide much more than reveals about the complexity of life in any age to say nothing of the problematic assumed uniformity of existence, access to technology, resources, etc, but I digress). The forces of free-market capitalism unleashed with other forces inject a precariousness that makes what we have to feel ever-fleeting--just one layoff, firing, medical emergency, mental-health challenge, etc away from falling back down the socio-economic ladder. These anxieties mean ...