I started a new job last week. I’m excited about it! I also want to issue this reminder: as has always been the case, my posts here represent my own feelings and opinions and not those of any employer, past, present, or future.
A Slack-type tool fills in a really important gap in student-student and student-professor communication. Without something Slack-like, your choices for communication are the learning management system (LMS) discussion boards or email. I think it’s uncontroversial to say we all hate LMS discussion boards. … As for email, I’ll go out on a limb and say that I suspect most professors do not enjoy answering multiple versions of the same question over and over, one by one, especially when they have to choose between knowing in their hearts that some students aren’t asking and won’t know, versus making yet another LMS announcement to address any given issue.
If you’re looking for a fun and educational thing to do this weekend, you might consider attending the second quarterly(??) Online Unconference of Niche Interests (“OUNI” for short), scheduled to run from 2pm until a bit after 5pm Eastern Standard Time, this Sunday, November 29. We have a set of volunteer presenters who will each talk for up to 15 minutes about a niche topic they’re into.
This is only interesting in an historical sense; we’ve learned a lot since I wrote it.
Right now I should be grading or preparing for classes, but honestly I’m three blog posts behind where I wanted to be by now (I haven’t forgotten my WisCon promise to make a post about tabletop roleplaying games) and fighting a pretty nasty headache. So what if I take a…
TLDR: I took two classes this semester, and I’m going to teach at least one, probably 1.5, classes next semester. I’m super psyched about it. I’ll still work for the library where I’m an adjunct, too, but fewer hours per week. I’m still available for full-time hire, if you have data for me to work with.
Librarian colleagues, sometimes I find I have been wrong, and when that happens, I feel like I owe it to the profession to confess and recant. Some statements I have made about (primarily academic) libraries, that I will take back, or at least modify heavily, here: “If you own the…
I am teaching Introduction to Programming for Information Professionals, online, for the University of Maryland this semester. My colleague, Bill Kules, has taught this class (in person) several times and has included social justice/critical perspectives aspects in at least one prior semester (docx). We talked about including it in each…
I’m on the other side of the state to attend Code4Lib this week. This is my third Code4Lib, and it just keeps getting better every year! If you aren’t here, but you’d like to see the talks (starting tomorrow morning, Tuesday), there will be a live stream on the Code4Lib…
I think there are two keys to why I was a successful electrical engineer, when I did not (initially) succeed as a computer scientist—despite being more interested in the latter, to begin with, and despite wanting to pursue the latter now. The first key: invisible struggle, no displays of fallibility…
