This morning I was grading work for a 2-credit, half-semester course I teach called Cluster Learning Springboard. While going from one assignment to the next, I suddenly realized I was having an emotion I don’t usually associate with grading: joy. It was legitimately fun to see what the students had […]
Interdisciplinarity is one of those words, like openness and diversity, that many people in academia like to affirm as a positive value, but when it comes to building the structures and supports necessary for it to be a meaningful practice, things get complicated, challenging, frustrating. The idea of interdisciplinarity is […]
I showed up to work one morning and Robin had put a print-out of a slide from my Northeast OER Summit presentation on the front door of the CoLab office. The slide offers five words that I have come to think of as my bedrock values when working on open […]
Recently, I’ve been working with some faculty in thinking about Open Pedagogy, Open Education, and syllabi. There have been great, productive conversations, and lots of good questions. But as people have begun to head back to classes, there has also been a noticeable concern about realities versus ideals. As I […]
This past week, I attended the third Northeast OER (Open Educational Resources) Summit at UMass Amherst. (For a general report on that, see Matt Reed’s write-up for Inside Higher Ed, or, for a whole variety of views, check out the Twitter hashtag #NEOERSummit2019.) I presented a 25-minute talk titled “Gift […]
The other day I explained to a student that the “cc” field in emails is a holdover from the days of typewriters, when a “carbon copy” was literally a copy made with carbon paper. Similarly, “dialing” a telephone number (and then “hanging up”) or “taping” a show. And of course […]
In the Interdisciplinary Studies program where I have begun working, we encourage students to go public with their work. It’s a common idea well beyond interdisciplinary studies: for students to feel more engaged with the work they do, to feel that what they are doing matters, they need to do […]