By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes Welcome! This blog post is part 1 in an ongoing conversation between myself and Stacey M. Johnson on her blog . Since we met a few months ago, we’ve been in an ongoing dialog about some of our favorite issues in teaching and educational technology. We decided to take the dialog public on our blogs. You can see her first post in the conversation here and she will be posting the next within a week or so of this post. I’ve very excited for this dialogue and public reflection. There’s some delightful, whimsical, and slightly risky in participating in a conversation like this. It’s the kind of thing you read about but not necessarily do. Shout out to Derek Bruff and his Take It or Leave It episode on his podcast, Intentional Teaching , that brought us into conversation!  In reading your post, I had a lot of thoughts and lots of “hmmmm” moments, which I think is part of why we started and continue our dialogue! Like you, I share concern and a di...

Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes So it's that time again. For those tuning in, each year on my birthday, I do a bit of account and reflecting on the year.  This is year #8.  You can check out previous years below: 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Let's start with some of the miscellaneous details I've collected over the years here, shall we? Home :  Cranston, RI Relationship status :  Married (10+ years) Cats Owned :  2 (Bear and Pumpkin) Other Pets :  1 mud turtle (MJ, 38'ish years old) Degrees earned : 5 (3 masters, 1 bachelor, 1 associate) Degree working on :  PhD in Higher Education Credits Completed Toward Dissertation : 72 out of 72. Reading since September 13, 2023 : 320 (Latest reads can always be found on  Goodreads ) Work : Director of Faculty Development & Innovation at College Unbound (full-time)  Teaching courses at  North Shore Community College Consulting, Facilitator, Speaker Weight :  225 pounds  Longest Distance R...

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes I've never met someone else named Lance before or maybe just once.  I've met a Lane but not a Lance.  I used to hate my name growing up: Lance Eaton.  It was mana for the folks who wanted to tease and make fun of others (to be clear; I certainly also participated in this because many who are bullied, bully, alas). But there were many refranes that I heard throughout my childhood:  Lance does a dance in his underpants all the way to France.  And of course, I get sent this meme at least once every other month: However, one thing that's interesting in the digital age is the overwhelming awareness of the uniqueness of my name.  There are only a few Lance Eatons out there.  I've come across Lance Eatons who are  a financial account , a realtor , someone serving time , a supposed chiropracto r (the only evidence is his Instagram account--hmmm?) and a mayor . There's also apparently an actor who was in like 4 thing s . S...

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes Not as wise as Gandalf, but dang, the beard feels like this at times! Photo by Elisabeth Pieringer on Unsplash So I've been shaving my head since around 2002.  But on January 1, 2024, I shaved my head and beard and pledged that I would not shave again until I had a dissertation defense date.  I knew it was something that would be help motivate me to get it done.  This week, I shaved.  I do have a finished draft of my dissertation and while I do not have a date just yet, it's much more likely than not that I will be defending in September (couldn't happen earlier because faculty are off during the summer).   Let's talk about how I got here and why. Over the years,  I've read about motivation and building habits. there are some great books out there that have been so helpful for me. Some of them include: Atomic   Habits : Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results by James Clear Tiny  Habits : The Small Changes That C...

Estimated Reading Time: 8.5 minutes Hey folks--we...ok, I have a draft of my dissertation.   No cheering yet!  It's a draft, it needs work--hell, it needs cleaned-up citations and some places to update, tighten, rearrange, and all the things. But, I have a draft, finally that includes all 5 chapters and that's a big milestone.   When last I shared, I was working away at Chapter 4 . It was going smoothly--as I said, it was one of the easiest chapters to write (not "easy" but easiest compared to the others).  Chapter 5, doubly so. In fact, it took me about a month to write a 8000+ word draft.   So let's dig into these drafts a little bit.   I used this whiteboard to capture daily tallies of writing On Writing Chapter 4 In writing, Chapter 4 took about four months; in reality, the chapter took 10 months. Summer and fall of 2023, I worked on the analysis. I did a lot of deep diving into the data to create the categories of description and di...

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes It's been a while--both since I posted (just under 2 months--yikes!) and since my last update on my dissertation progress  (for newer readers, you can check out the full series on my PhD here ). In the six months since I last wrote about this, things continued to progress--though, of course, never at the speed I want them to.  But such is the case both because life happens and other decisions I make.  Still, I'm excited about where I am. Image Source:  Karsten Würth Let's recap 2023! The first half of 2023 was digging into the data, exploring it and getting the contours of the data after collecting the interviews and transcribing them in late 2022.  In my methodology, phenomenography, there is a bit of reading through the transcripts holistically to get a full sense of what's in the data and then moving into finding differences in the experiences of participants (relating to the research questions).  What I'm doing is build...