By Any Other Nerd

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 wi...

I recently had the opportunity to attend and "present" at the Northeast OER Summit .  This is its third year running and the first year that I've been able to attend.  I put in a proposal that got accepted called, "Stealing (Sorry, Borrowing) From One Another: An Ideas and Practices Exchange".  It is exactly what the time indicates, thus my preparation for this was limited in that I made sure to have a bucket of questions to ask but was largely going to listen and collect the ideas. But in the spirit of open educational resources (OER), I wanted to make sure I shared out for everyone there and for those not in attendance some of the great tips and tricks that were shared by everyone.  So for those interested, you can find the NE OER Summit Roundtable Handout here .  It has a Creative Commons license so you are welcome to borrow and adapt to your liking.  I've also enabled the comments feature so please feel free to contribute additional tips or, where n...

As I mentioned previously, I have been selected to deliver the Liberal Arts Lecture at North Shore Community College--and I'm very excited.  Unfortunately, the original date got snowed out but it has been rescheduled and I thought I'd let everyone know.   The new date is Monday, April 9 at 9:30am to 10:45am at the Danvers Campus (1 Ferncroft Road, Danvers, MA) in the Math & Sciences Building, Room 119, I will be delivering the Liberal Arts Lecture at North Shore Community College.  This is a great event that NSCC has been doing for a few years now as a means of exploring how the study of the Liberal Arts is valuable and meaningful in modern culture and society.  My lecture description is below and I hope you will be able to join me.  I will be creating some videos around it afterward for those that can't.  I believe this will be a fascinating journey into areas both monstrous and mundane! For those that haven't been to the Danvers C...

So it's presentation season and I had the first of many workshops that I'm participating in over the next few months.  The workshop as a whole was about open educational resource (OER) , a topic we know is near to my heart.  My session with that was focused on how to help faculty think about and adapt their efforts to use open pedagogy.   Open pedagogy is an approach to teaching that looks at what students do in the classroom and considers how assignments can be not only more meaningful to students but have a longer lifespan than the course itself.  Rather than work that is largely discarded at the end of the semester, the instructor crafts activities and assignments that help the students build or augment materials and resources that others will also be able to build off from or augment.   I'm a big fan of this approach as I think it not only makes students learning from and contributing to other students' learning but it encourages students to...

So I'm super-excited to announce that on Thursday, March 8 from 11:00am to 12:15pm, I will be delivering the Liberal Arts Lecture at North Shore Community College.  This is a great event that NSCC has been doing for a few years now as a means of exploring how the study of the Liberal Arts is valuable and meaningful in modern culture and society.  I will be presenting on the following and I hope that if you can make it, you will join me as I think it is will be a fascinating journey into areas both monstrous and mundane! Vampires Get You Famous, But The Hulk Will Get You Sued: The Intersections of Creativity, Censorship, Copyright and the Commons Why are there so many zombies and vampire movies? Where did Steampunk come from?  Why does it seem like everything eventually is adapted?  Why has Disney invested so much in fictional universes such as Star Wars and the Marvel Comics? Why does writing fanfiction come with the chance of being sued?  Whil...

A colleague from North Shore Community College contacted me in November about the possibility of presenting on Open Educational Resources at Bunker Hill Community College in January.  I happily accepted and was honored that this colleague thought to reach out to me to help her and her colleagues think about OER.  Bunker Hill Community College is in the midst of launching an OER Initiative that is part of the Achieving the Dream Grant on OER that looks to create degrees that have courses that use entirely OER.   Before talking about the presentation, new visitors to the blog (of which, there has been a significant amount in the last 3 months),  allow me just to highlight some of the ways I've discussed "open" on the blog.  Regulars, feel free to skip ahead!  This is by far not my first post to talk about my interest in openness.  I recently presented on open pedagogy at the NEFDC ; I've reviewed the occasional book on OER , I've discussed...

It's been way too long since I've written a journal entry and this one has been stewing in my mind for five or so months.  I've finally had some time to put together my thoughts on it. So as I go down the rabbit hole of dissertation, I wanted to take this post to highlight some of the projects I've taken up in some of my courses.  I do this because, in hindsight, I believe it shows some of the different places I've been and how I got to my topic.  In that regard, I think it might give some insight or hope for those just starting out about how they get to their topic (if they don't have one already OR if they have one but aren't sure how to get their angle on it).  As always, everyone's doctoral experience is different but there are certain universalities in that each student takes a collection of courses and within those, works on a variety of projects that may or may not capture their intellectual passion.  So, here's where my projects have ta...

So yesterday, I had the pleasure to attend and present at the 2017  New England Faculty Development Consortium  annual conference at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.  I'm a big fan of this group and this conference because it's a regional conference with a mixture of colleges from community colleges to Ivy League with faculty and faculty support folks like myself having workshops centered around a particular theme.  This one is about open educational resources and to no one's surprise, I put in a proposal for presenting and to my delight, it got accepted.  My presentation focused on thinking about making assignments more than what they usually are by using an open pedagogy framework.  With open pedagogy, the idea is that you provide learning activities and assignments that have the possibility of living after a class.  So often we assign students work that that essential dies once the class is over, but open pedagogy gets us to think a...

So it's been longer than I wanted in terms of blogging about my dissertation thoughts but that's not because of an absence of thoughts but an absence of time to put them down on paper (or blog, I guess).   In January, I was struck by a more specific idea about a potential dissertation topic after attending and presenting at a NERCOMP Event on OER .  It's been on my mind a lot and though there's a lot more I need to do with it, I figured I would take the time here to flesh it out so that I can discuss it further with some of my advisors and cohort members--as well as you, dear readers. Original image from here. Development of Open Initiatives and Their Impact on Pedagogical Approaches At this workshop, we were discussing how the open education resources (OER) movement has been expanding and shifting language from OER to openness initiatives.  This is in part because there is a good discussion about it being more than just about resources but really thinking a...