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...

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 ...

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...

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 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 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...