By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes Back in mid-September, my COVID ticket finally got punched--2.5 years was a good run.  It was inevitable.  Not because it had to happen but because it had been a long time since my partner, I, my place of employment, my family--nearly everyone--decided to give up on navigating a world where we took care to remember the most vulnerable are left to have to do all the extra labor of caring and protecting.  It's a very common and unfortunate way we exist and something that lots of folks with disabilities of all sorts know all too well. And COVID knocked me on my ass.  I started to really notice symptoms on a Thursday, but in hindsight realized there were symptoms 2-3 days before that I hadn't realized or just assumed were other things. As Thursday turned into Friday, it was evident that I was sick but the first and second tests I took showed negative results. By the end of Friday, I was full chills, aches, brain fog/headaches, and just u...

Estimated Reading Time: minutes While my Substack, AI+Edu=Simplified is the place where I share thoughts and developing work on generative AI in education, I still look to use this blog as a curation space for publications elsewhere that I can pull into one place, namely under the category, " Other Publications '.  So even when there are publications related to generative AI, they are going to be mentioned here as well.   In this case, it's a collaborative piece that I wrote after a webinar I did back in April.  It was one of those pieces that came together very quickly and clearly in that I was able to get a good chunk of it together and decided to see if the person hosting the event (Stan Waddell) also wanted in on the work.  Very quickly, we put together this piece of advice to tech leaders around how to support their institutions.   You can read the full article in the EDUCAUSE Review:  10 Ways Technology Leaders Can Step Up and In to the Ge...

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes Don't hate--I know, it feels cliche and late to game to start a Substack--especially have been such a loyal user for blogger for over 12 years and 2000 posts !  But don't worry--I'm still sticking around here! Created with Bing Image Creator. Prompt: “human and robot sitting at a table across from each other in noir style with a neon aspect to it” I am starting a substack called AI+Edu=Simplified and I'm also continuing with By Any Other Nerd.  Why run 2 writing platforms?  Well, I've been posting lots of AI stuff here and while it's normal for me to focus on different topics/projects in this blog, I think the work I'm doing around generative AI is substantial and ongoing enough that creating a different space for that is necessary.   What I like about By Any Other Nerd is its eclecticness.  It's a my wonderful hodgepodge of things big and small in my life.  I like that I've used it as a place to work through the p...

Estimated Reading Time: 21 minutes Content Warning : Discussions of self-harm. I recently finished reading The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson for the last 3 novels). It's literally something that has taken over 26 years. Which is to say that it took me longer to read the series than how long it took the series to be fully published (24 years; 1990-2013). But I finally finished it.   This might be one of those examples of the sunk cost fallacy or the opposite? Not sure. I know for me the read was worth it not because it was a really great series per se but because of how it fits into my own history of reading, growing, and changing over the past 26 years. How to Read This Post What follows is me just sharing about my history of reading it and what I thought about it finally finished.  What then follows is a deeper history of reading and how this series fits in with my own growth and development.  All of that is to say, if you want to stay...

Estimated Reading Time: 25 minutes It's been feeling like "another week, another talk" the last couple of weeks, even while navigating COVID.  This talk was for faculty in Boston University's School of Social Work.  This talk felt a bit more smoother and natural than some of the others that I've done and I think it's both a mixture of doing better with my slides as my visual guide and how I arched the discussion.  I also made parts of this more interactive which also helped.  Additionally, the group was an energetic crowd for a 90-minute session.   I leaned into doing the annotated slide deck and folks seem to find that to be a key piece in helping them both in the moment and as a follow-up if usage stats tell me anything.   The Good, The Bad, & The AI: Exploring Generative AI in Education  Hi all, I’m Lance Eaton and I’m excited to talk with you today about the role of AI in education and pull together some of the ideas that I’ve been s...

Estimated Reading Time: 25 minutes Recently, I was asked to give some talks on the role of generative AI in the job-search for Endicott College and Northeastern University. I had higher hopes for them being more dynamic and richer in the live session but unfortunately, they both happened while I had COVID, which limited my usual ability to bring the energy that I like to have in these. Still, I believe there are things here that folks can find helpful--whether they are job-searching themselves or helping others. There continues to be a lot going on in generative AI and education. Less about the fact that people are using it and more about how they are using it and how we can think about navigating student and staff usage of these tools. Since I last posted about my work, there's been a couple new and exciting things that have happened including being interviewed for this CNN.com article , being name-dropped in Forbes , being a guest on the Future Trends Forum with Bryan Alexan...