By Any Other Nerd

So now we come to the next part in our series on “Freeing the Course.”  In the first part, we dealt with free programs and tools , this time, we're looking at free readings and material for your class.  We all know that textbooks are a significant challenge for any course.  The prices are challenging for students between affording them, getting them from the bookstore, and glitches or problems with financial aid.  Then, of course, there is the problem of ordering them online on their own and waiting. Read the FULL POST HERE . Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and  check out some of my other posts! . You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by  signing up for them via email. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

Currently, I'm reading Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir by Wael Ghonim, which thus far feels more like a guy who works at Google talking largely about how Facebook helped to generate the revolution in Egypt in Spring 2011 (I'm sure it's more than that but at the 1/2 mark, that's still largely my impression).  Coupled with this is an ongoing discussion through email, GoogleChat, Facebook posts, Facebook Chat, and Twitter that I've been having with a friend.  And friend is an interesting choice in this context. Jane and I met in college.  She was a freshman when I was a senior.  Over the year, we ran into each other a handful of times, were friendly enough.  After college, like many people, we fell out of contact.  It was early 2000s.  The extent of social media was instant messaging, which I'm sure if I looked back, we were "Buddies" on AIM.  But largely, no real interaction after that.  ...

We know that the cost of education is high and continues to escalate for various reasons ; even at community colleges . This is problematic since we do serve as a gateway of economic and intellectual opportunity for a wide range of students who might not get into or finish college without us. But costs are prohibitive to many people and in digital age, finding ways of making class and class tools cheap is quite important. So this will be a short series of posts on Freeing Up Course Programs, Course Readings, Course Delivery, and Course Extras filled with great resources for you to use in your course that are entirely free for you and your students.   For the full article, click through to the blog ! Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and  check out some of my other posts! . You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by  signing up for them via email. This work is licensed under a  Creative Comm...

Success is possible in the 21st century without post-high school training or education, but it’s increasingly unlikely.  (Success is hard to define; but in this context, I am largely thinking success in terms of employment and compensation; that is not the final say on success, there are many other ways of valuing and understanding success as the Happiness Index indicates .   With the context of employment and compensation, I then would say that success is being gainfully employed in a way that is not directly exploitative to one’s mental and physical health while simultaneously covering one’s needs and a reasonable amount of extra compensation for savings and basic upkeep of one’s life; it’s vague, but that’s largely because success will look different for everyone).  In the globalized interconnected world, more training is needed to fulfill the more complex jobs of that world and we are not giving people a good opportunity to fulfill those jobs (or their own potential f...

Greetings and salutations one and all. So it's 6 months since last we met and many of you have faded off into the sunset--for good reasons.  A blog doesn't live on lack of posts.  But much has been changed over the course of the last 6 months and clearly this blog is taking on a new direction (Not to be confused with EC Comics' New Direction ). So what is this new direction(s)?  Well, I am no longer a hitch-hiking adjunct (or rather not as much).  In the fall, I interviewed for and started my new position as Coordinator of Instructional Design at North Shore Community College .  This means that I have "largely" reduced to just teaching at 3 schools (soon to be 2--all for good reasons) and I've started work on my 3rd Master's Degree (what a nerd!).  Ok--that's a lot of shuffling and I can break it down.  I got the new position (yay) and quite most of my teaching gigs to the capacity that I was teaching them (6-8 courses per semester). ...

How Come Everyone’s Talkin’ Smack About Adjuncts? I have a request for the great wide Internet.  Please stop talking about me as if I’m some partially-crippled frenzied zombie. I am not incompetent. I am not ready to self-destruct.  Maybe I should blame myself for using the Google Alerts for letting me know when the Internet is talking about “adjuncts.”  I just know that I read a lot of negative press about adjuncts from full-timers, administration, other part-timers, and culture at large.  Sure, there’s the token appreciation from all the segments, but whether discussing us in positive terms or negative, the basis of the discussions is not necessarily something this Freeway Flyer finds useful. For the rest, check out AdjunctNation . Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and  check out some of my other posts! . You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by  signing up for them via...

So for those that have noticed--or most likely, haven't noticed till I actually made note of it; I haven't been as up-to-date with my blog as I have been in the past.  Summer has been good to me in many ways--giving me some much needed down time from teaching the crazy course load that I usually handle, but still rather taxing in the intellectual department. I've been working on several writings for various publications including articles for book publications, entries for encyclopedias and other reference type material.  So my mind has been focused in part on audiobooks, monsters, and comics (or some mix thereof--though truth be told, we know my mind is often on these subjects even when not writing about them).  In addition, I have been teaching a few summer courses (take what I can get--and in this case, it's a nice catch:  American Literature I, World Literature I, and The Horror Story).   To add more fuel to the fire, I have also been working on perso...

Taking Classes At The Last Minute: The FreewayFlyer Forte Some friends often knock me for constantly checking my email, but the habit isn’t born of bad manners; it’s a necessity for Freeway Flyers. Opportunity knocks via every email.  Most recently, that fact was reinforced when I received an email from a department chair looking to staff a course at the lat minute—last minute as in the email was sent out mid-Monday and the class started Tuesday evening.  Sound familiar fellow Freeway Flyers? If I weren’t so obsessive about checking my email, I might missed the opportunity.  As a freeway flyer, we live and thrive by making sure we’re connected. Read the rest at Adjunct Nation. Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and  check out some of my other posts! . You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by  signing up for them via email. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attr...

In the last post, I discussed the ways that college education is like a car .  In extending this analogy, I also want to talk about elements of the vehicle (degree) that again, not all students really consider.  Vehicles can indicate a great many things about a person.  Some of these things might be true and some may not; and often, the car-owner’s opportunity to explain choices comes when being asked.  The person driving a new Porsche might be perceived as financially stable and potentially successful while the one driving a beat-up shitbox be poor or a slob.  The person driving the hybrid might be understood as an environmentalist or an elitist.  Driving a big-truck and tailgating people could be understood as aggressive and anti-social behavior or someone in a rush.  The clichés and stereotypes are endless; we all know them.  A person’s degree (and the transcript, resume, etc) are going to be interpreted in many different ways, often well-b...

A college education is like a car.  We own and use cars for a variety of reasons including (but not limited to): Travelling more efficiently (essentially reclaiming time) Getting to new places (Not entirely the same as reclaiming time—and that will make sense below). It is a requirement of where we live/work (Living in certain suburbs, it does become a practical requirement and some jobs do require or provide a vehicle). Cruising about to enjoy the sights (That is, merely enjoying the act of driving and what it offers). Before any of that can happen though, one needs a license, first.  The license is a great achievement; it indicates some sense of competency in driving (This is the same with a high school diploma or GED certificate.).  It doesn’t imply you will automatically get a car or that you will be a masterful driver; but merely that the state has deemed you knowledgeable to drive a vehicle (The student has proven a certain level of competency but it doesn’t g...