By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes Bear the Cat Is Not Ready for AI The last few months have given me the opportunity to talk at a few different places about generative AI and some of the concerns, challenges, and opportunities.  Many of these I've given and while some were recorded, they were recorded for the organizations I was giving them to.  As is my open practice, I like to make these available to a larger group.  I often share the slides and resources with Creative Commons licenses.  What I've been doing lately is actually re-recording the videos and posting them on my YouTube channel.  I decided to pull these together here and share them with folks in case you're interested in learning more.   I'll lean in further with the descriptions for each, but what I appreciate here is watching the slide decks and arc evolve as I've gone along in this work.  Yes, of course, my pets largely stay in all my slides (I am a professional after all--hahahha)...

Image source: Tobias Tullius on Unsplash Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes Last week, a very cool thing happened.  An essay that I wrote got published in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy was published.  The title, link, and abstract are below: The New LMS Rule: Transparency Working Both Ways This piece reflects on the asymmetrical power balance between students and instructors in any given learning management system by considering what it would look like if students had the same level of data access as instructors and how that might impact instructor practices. The piece also explores how the author as an instructional designer and instructor has perpetuated some of the more problematic LMS practices when it comes to data tracking. Finally, the article proposes that it is in higher education’s best interest to rethink LMSs by rethinking access and open the ability for students to have more control of their data as one means of improving the overabundance of s...

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes Ok, so by the time this is released, I realized that many folks will be well past the point of using Zoom or other video conferencing as much as many of us did during the height of the COVID pandemic.  Still, if you find yourself using it in the future, I thought I would share some tips that can be used to develop community and connection in video conferences.   Map the Room This activity is great if you know you are working with an international group or can be tailored if you know the full geography of people participating.  Find a map of the world-- I often go to Creative Commons to find mine .  Also--bonus points if you find a map that does not center the United States or the Atlantic Ocean-- like this one !  It offers an opportunity for people to interact, a bit of playfulness, and to understand where people are currently located.   Source: Wikimedia What to do: Open up the image of the map on your computer. ...

Estimated Reading Time: 3.5 minutes Recently, I had the opportunity to deliver a 3-session workshop on designing and teaching hybrid-flexible courses.  Hybrid-flexible course design has become immensely popular in the last few months as much of higher education is scrambling to come up with a plan for navigating fast changes in uncertain times.   There are various definitions and other valuable voices on the topic but by and large, for me, I've always defined hybrid flexible learning as:  "A learning experience designed to empower students to determine where and how they learn best. Hybrid means mixing face to face (F2F) with online learning. Flexible means students choose their conditions (online vs. F2F) which may impact which learning materials, activities, and assessments they may end up using or engaging." The idea came to me while I was teaching a once-a-week course--one of the worse structures for learning where convenience outranks what we know about learning...

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Two years ago, I participated in a program called ID2ID . It was a program that started at Penn State University and eventually became a collaboration between PSU and Educause.  It's a fun program that I hope they will continue to do (it looks like it is on hiatus this year and I would imagine that has much to do with COVID-19 and the significant demand on instructional designers everywhere).   The purpose of the program was to create more connections among instructional designers like myself.  You could sign up to find a new colleague to do a project with or to be mentor/be mentored by someone.  I had the great fortune to be paired with Alex Rockey , a fellow doctoral student (although she is now Dr. Rockey!).  We had some great initial conversations learning about one another and circling in on a project we could work on together.  We both had strong interests in constructivism as part of the learning experience and ...

As some of you know, I've been teaching a popular culture course online for years now at North Shore Community College.  It started as a face-to-face course back in or around 2009 or so and then transitioned to an online course in Spring, 2012.  Since then, I've only taught it online and have had continually looked to update it and change how I approach it with each passing year.  Image Credit: Robert Huffstutter This past spring, I was the recipient of a Course of Distinction award from Massachusetts Colleges Online for my course .  As a result, I had to do a presentation and also video tour of my course .  I figured I'd include them in this post since I'm also discussing my presentation on Saturday, October 20 at the Northeast Popular Culture Association 2018 conference . I've also been a part of NEPCA for a long while now and will be soon stepping up to be the Executive Secretary of the organization.  In recent years, I took on the Area Chair ...

So Maha Bali  is someone I follow a lot.  She's an amazing and critical educator, inviting social justice advocate, and engaging academic twitter-user along with two colleagues,  Mia Zamora , and Catherine Cronin ,  have launched a new open course for people to engage with called Equity Unbound You can check out the ongoing dialogue on Twitter by checking out the hashtag  #UnboundEq . They explain the course as such "Equity Unbound is an emergent, collaborative curriculum which aims to create equity-focused, open, connected, intercultural learning experiences across classes, countries and contexts.  Equity Unbound was initiated by Maha Bali @bali_maha (American University in Cairo, Egypt), Catherine Cronin @catherinecronin (National University of Ireland, Galway), and Mia Zamora @MiaZamoraPhD (Kean University, NJ, USA) for use in their courses this term (September-December 2018), but it is open to all. Equity Unbound is for learners and/or educa...

So yesterday, I had the opportunity to do another fun presentation.  This time, I was presenting on thinking about group work, particularly in online courses.  It's something I work with faculty a lot on and NERCOMP was looking for someone to do a webinar, so I threw out the subject.  It wasn't my first time presenting or doing a webinar on it since I was asked to do one internally at Brandeis back in September.  I always enjoy webinars and getting an opportunity to share and chat with other colleagues throughout New England, but webinars can be weird since you often don't see the others in the room and you are literally just talking at your screen for long stretches of time.  I particularly like NERCOMP because they are a great community of faculty, staff, and administrators from throughout New England at many different institutions.  For those interested in this topic, you are welcome to check out the resources .  There's just two: the presenta...

So about a month ago, I got an interesting request.  Some folks from  South Carolina Technical Colleges  reached out to me to see if I would be interested in presenting at their 2-day institution on my work with hybrid  flexible  pedagogy.  I was a bit surprised and wondered if they thought I was more local than I was, but upon confirming they wanted me there physically (I even offered virtually), I accepted the opportunity.   For those that have been reading this blog for years (yes, all three of you), you'll probably recall that this is what I focused on for my Master in Instructional Design and even blogged about running the actual course ( Post 1 ;  Post 2 ).  The topic is never far from my mind and I've continued to think about what it means to run a hybrid flexible course and the implications for higher education to attempt to do so.  Even though it's been a few years since presenting or getting to teach it, it still resonates...

So I’m running a day-long training on Digital Service Learning through NERCOMP (the regional organization of EDUCAUSE ).  The day-long training will consist of a series of small-workshops on the intellectual and practical considerations around using digital tools in the process of service learning.   NERCOMP regularly runs these Professional Development Opportunities (PDOs) on a variety of topics.  They usually run from 9am to about 3pm and include a one hour lunch.  The trainings are broken up in a variety of ways from rapid-fire short 20 minute sessions to 3-4 longer (1-1.5 hour) sessions.  They are usually a mixture of theoretical, practical, and hands-on and participants (mostly from higher ed) walk away with a mixture of new ideas, skills, and contacts.     Care to Join Me I'm looking to find others that are working with faculty on service learning (with a digital angle) or faculty that are doing digital service learning projects to parti...

So the following is a Course Preview for a course I'm teaching this fall, Comics in American Culture at North Shore Community College.  Feel free to take a look at the video and recommend it to people you know who might be interested. I'm quite excited about this course as not only am I teaching it online, I've also managed to design it so that students do not have to buy books for it, but will rely on the library's inter-library-loan feature to get a hold of many of the course works.  I like this approach because it not only gets students exposure to a range of graphic novels for free, but it also informs and encourages students to use the library, which I consider a win! As I said, feel free to watch it and get a sense of what I'm doing as well as to share it with others who you think might benefit from it.  You can watch the video below or you can go directly to the video on YouTube, here . Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below ...