By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Photo by  Adi Goldstein  on  Unsplash It's time for one of those--"hot dang, we hit a milestone, let's celebrate!  We've gone from my first post in March, 2010 (when this blog was called The Hitchhiking Adjunct--thank you very much, Douglas Adams!) to a rebranding into By Any Other Nerd  in 2012 since I was not long full-time adjuncting.  That year, I also hit my 100th blog post and it would be only 3 years till I hit my 1001th post .  Three years later, I made it to my 1500th blog post and today, 5 years after that, I'm sharing my 2000th blog post.  Somewhere in between there, I did celebrate my blog being 10 years old as well.  Today--well, it's a teenager--yikes. The majority of social media projects (blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, etc) usually don't last more than 6 months (at least, that's one of those things I've read over the years and it feels right based upon my experience).  Somehow, I've manag

Estimated Reading Time: 4.5 minutes Since it's been a few months from my last The Updates (sorry about that--what started as something simple got more complex--such is life) and has been...years since I wrote a post regarding The PhD Chronicles , I have been making progress on my dissertation and figured know some folks are interested in hearing the update about where this stands.   Photo by  Markus Winkler  on  Unsplash So let's recap:  2022 was a hell of a year of progress in my dissertation.  We know that I've been stumbling along ( at this point, for years! ) and 2021, I seemed to be getting my act together. I got chapter 2 done in a way that I thought represented the work that I am doing and to a point where I felt confident in my understanding of the fields and problem I am exploring.  I also assembled my committee, composed of 4 people.  My chair, a second from UMB (as required), a specialist in the area(s) I'm studying and a specialist in the methodology.  Get

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes I've known for a while that I'm better when in conversation with others than just talking to myself; we probably all are.  In fact, this blog and social media in general continue to be a place where co-learn, co-develop new ideas, and find collaborators.  And I'm lucky to be in regular conversation with folks through work, social media, and the friends and colleagues I've accumulated over the years.  This has led to co-facilitated workshops, conference presentations, and publications like this  piece on digital service learning with Danielle Leek and this piece on inclusive practices when teaching an online popular culture course at a community college with Alex Rockey.  Recently, through the luck and kindness of Anna Mills , I was invited into a conversation with her and Maha Bali around open educational practices as a means of navigating generative AI.  Anna has been a strong, thoughtful, generous, and nuanced voice within the disc

Estimated Reading Time: 5.5 minutes This is the 4th installment in a series that reflects my time in January & February 2023 serving on a grand jury in Rhode Island.  You can read about  part 1 ,  part 2 ,  part 3 , & part 4   if you need to catch up. One could use detachment to disengage with this whole process as a way of avoiding the mixture of emotions that are stirred. They certainly wouldn’t be blamed for such a protective approach. In previous pieces, I’ve spoken to the different things that I saw as problematic, challenging, or concerning–the whole system, how others reacted to the idea of grand jury, and the ways we were pushed through the process like cattle. To spend so much time writing about these things should clearly illustrate I had a lot of feelings about it all–a lot of things ran through my head day after day.  So in this post, I’m going to speak a bit more directly to that because while folks were quick to talk about how “interesting” it must be, there’s a l