There should be captions in the video, but if you'd rather read the transcript on its own or as a companion to the video, here is the link to that document .

This might be a rather unprofessional "take" on conferences, but so be it...  Both Dr. Ann Gagne and Dr. Maha Bali covered this topic recently in their own blog entries, and I wanted to chime in ever so slightly with some specific examples and thoughts about my own conferences and conferencing observations.  Let me start with examples - My First Conference Ever: I was a grad student way back in the early 2000s, and I believe a proposal of mine - about blogging maybe? - got accepted at a graduate-student based conference in Edmonton, AB, Canada. Yes, Canada. I lived in Fargo (North Dakota), and after scrapping together some funds, I drove to Winnipeg, then flew to Calgary, then Edmonton. I found a youth hostel, and I figured out the bus system in order to get to the conference on a college campus. It was quite the experience: I knew no one, I had to learn how to navigate travel in a different country, and the only thing that reminded me of home was the damn weather. I do not...

My friend Maha recently attended a session, and three questions were asked of the participants . I’d like to try to answer those Qs for myself as my own self-assigned asynchronous activity for #MyFest22: What do you volunteer for, happily?  It happened today actually; I met up with someone to just chat about self-publishing. A few weeks back, I was invited to “come and chat” with some people in the Pacific Northwest about #Ungrading. I happily like to sit and talk and brainstorm with people. I love ideas. What do you do well?   Creating ideas, sorting ideas (yes, I took that Strength Finder survey years back), and figuring out strategies to implement them. I can usually filter out bad ideas very well, as shown when I helped plan a PD day for campus a long time ago and would take another planner’s ideas and tell her what would work and she was grateful because her strength was strategy and evaluation, not necessarily idea creation. Where do you have flow?  When I write. Wh...

As much as I complained about piloting* the new Blackboard version (called the Ultra Experience), now that I'm 99.9% finished with recreating the English 120 Online course, it wasn't as terrible as I thought. The tweaking process required me to reflect on what the class should look like and contain in order to lead students down a path of learning. I do miss some of the features of the version we'll still be using come fall (or maybe the Distance Ed office people will move all of my classes to Ultra?), but oh well. I've been making a list of issues for people to review as all of campus moves to this new fancy version (which looks a lot like Canvas to me, but whatever). *Yes, it was my idea to pilot this version for summer. Blackboard Ultra Experience Issues: The landing page is gone; I had an intro video and my contact info right there. A simple banner can be used, though, in Ultra. Embedding from Google or YouTube or TED doesn’t seem possible. Almost everything has to ...

I am procrastinating. Summer school starts up in DAYS, and I am doing that thing I rarely do: procrastinating. Why? Because I'm piloting the new version of Blackboard (Ultra Experience), and I don't like it. That's all I can say about it right now. So, my procrastination looks like this: thinking of other ideas, prepping for classes that are far off in the distance, doomscrolling on Twitter, napping... and blogging about cool things. MyFest22 is one of the cool things. It's a mid-year festival that I've signed up to participate in this summer. Thus far, I've met some lovely people in the Taster Meeting, figured out the track I'd like to situate myself upon (Critical Pedagogy / Social Justice), and liked/retweeted some things on the Twitter. Here are two of the ideas I shared during the three rounds of community building from the Taster Meeting: Equity Gaps in Ungrading (this is prep for #UngradingCon in October): While emancipatory grading practices increas...

This blog entry is a little out of the ordinary for me, since this blog is dedicated to teaching and learning, but my recent deep-dive into the world of CBD is helping me physically and mentally and THOSE are the parts that are important for the ultimate in teaching and learning, right? Right.  So, ever since turning 40 five years ago, my body has started to ache more and take on other issues... and THEN when one tosses in the chaos and instability of THE WORLD, one's mental health starts to take a hit, too. My goal in seeking out CBD products was to bring my body to a happier homeostasis and to lower my dependency on NSAIDs and opioids (Xanax). More context: I do not drink alcohol regularly anymore, nor have I ever smoked weed, but in the past, I have taken ibuprophen daily for headaches and xanax for anxiety and vertigo. Anyhow, around the beginning of this year (2022), I was reading reviews on Am*zon for some hemp something and a reviewer said that CBD can't be sold on that ...