I made a book!
On the fifth day of #OEWeek, I have a present for you! But first, a very long story about how I came to be in possession of this present. 2 years ago, I saw a demo of this amazing platform for scholarly publishing, CUNY Manifold. And of course, I wanted to play with it right […]
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Scholarly Publishing, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Work Towards Open Access
My graduate training in scholarly publishing consisted of “You should publish stuff. It should be peer-reviewed.” Not exactly a full training in scholarly communication. Considering that doing and publishing scholarly research accounts for roughly one-third of my job responsibilities as a tenured associate professor, I wish they had spent more time on it, and maybe […]
We Heat Our Classrooms
So, this summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about my course policies and my increasingly open pedagogy. I’m especially thinking about due dates (or their more ominous title “deadlines”) and flexibility. I wrote about how flexible deadlines helped students learn in my Spring 2020 classes here and I really don’t think I’ll ever go back […]
What Frozen 2 Taught Me About Open Pedagogy
We are a Frozen family. We have seen both films and all of the animated shorts. We have costumes, dolls, stickers, smaller dolls, coloring books, a gingerbread house- you name it. I’ve even gotten pretty good at Frozen-themed face paint. Between the leading ladies as the focus of the story, and my history as a […]
Happy New Year!
One of my favorite things about academia is we get extra New Years- every time a semester ends is an opportunity to reflect on how things went, and think about how to improve in the future. (my long winter & summer breaks mean I usually do this at the starts of things too. I like […]
Open Educational Resources for Political Science
So, I’ve gained a bit of reputation for myself as being an OER person for Political Science, which makes sense, because I’m constantly banging on about it to anyone who will listen- on Twitter, at conferences, on my campus, and now on this blog. I’ve been working on teaching with OER (Open Educational Resources) for […]
A partial list of what my students are dealing with
This semester, I have a very light (for my institution) teaching load because of other fellowships and work I’m doing- 2 classes of 40ish students each. We have a late start to our spring semester, so we had just shy of two weeks of face-to-face classes before the emergency pivot to distance learning. Sadly, I […]
Emergency Online: Thoughts and Resources for Quickly Adapting Your Course to Online
Last night, I went on a late night tweet storm about quickly converting your face-to-face course to an online course due to corona virus closures, so I thought I’d write it up here in case it would be useful to have it all in one place. Also Sean Michael Morris went on a much better […]
Why I do What I do
These days, Open Education is one of the things that most excites me about my job- my work in open has made me an exponentially better teacher and a better scholar (open science & open access FTW!) and has given me the chance to work with faculty and librarians across CUNY and across the world. […]
Syllabus Experiments
Every year, at the end of August and the end of February, I sit down to prepare my syllabi, planning out my classes and assignments, tailoring the schedule to each semester’s holidays/days off. When I was an undergraduate, I hated vague syllabi that never bothered to include the actual dates, just Week 1, Week 2, […]
