Multilitteratus Incognitus

All right!  With all that pondering and throat-clearing done (see my previous series of posts), I was wondering what piques my interest in this LLM-hyped world from a practical side . I've been somewhat active in critiquing this whole thing over the past two years, but beyond creating AI images for the blog (or to amuse myself), or using ChatGPT to make silly little genre-busting poems (again amusement and play), and or using ChatGPT to give me a boilerplate letter that I can then tweak (marginal utility, but I guess if organization ask for things that can be boilerplated, they get something that is boilerplate).  I don't mean to dismiss the value of experimentation or play, they are valuable and low-stress ways to get to know a tool and then you may get an AHA!!! moment of a sort. I've been thinking of something more structured.  I was listening to a relatively recent episode (it was recent when I started writing this darned post!_ of the Vergecast , titled  The Chatbot B

Part VI of my ponderings on all the things and wayfinding in academia. This is the last part of this series - at least for now. I don't know. I think it's time to move from retrospection to some kind of next phase 🤓 Anyway, I saved the most controversial topic for last hahaha 😂 OK, so before I get the rotten tomatoes🍅🪰, hear me out!😅 I am a big proponent of lifelong learning. In fact, I joke, on this very blog, that I am "Pondering what my next degree should be 😂" Go ahead, look to the top of this page, I'll wait. In case you're from the distant future and my blog's subtitle has changed, it basically said what's in the quotes, and I added this subtitle after I completed my doctorate in 2021.  Anywhoooo.... where was I?  Ah yes, Lifelong learning ! Since completing my dissertation and graduating in 2021, I've tried my hand at professional development through various means. I've done a month-long synchronous online workshop on coaching (one

Miseristhenes the Socialmediaite This is part V of my  all the things(!!!)  blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my  professional  hobbies.   In this post, I turn my attention to social media! The topic that connects us, and divides us, and has gotten the "it's complicated" label since Elon Musk bought and fucked up the Twitter sandbox. Yes, while Twitter still eXists, the busting up of Twitter, and the rendering of it useless, has created a bit of an interesting dilemma and has fostered a working reality that is just rather f*cking tiring 🙄. But first thing's first, let's take a step back and examine the current state a bit. A few colleagues and I started pulling some strings and looking at our digital identities and networks in  Lines of Flight: The Digital Fragmenting of Educational Networks . I think a lot more work can be done in this domain, especia

This is part IV of my  all the things(!!!)  blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my professional  hobbies.  Yes...yes... I know that Kondo is no longer Kondoing and has given up the practice, but I am aiming for the gives you joy  part. This particular post tackles teaching, a topic, and an activity I love, but I think that I may be suffering from too much of a good thing . While I had taught bespoke hour-long workshops in the past, in my training jobs at the university library and in my job as a learning technologist in IT, my teaching side hustle really took off in 2012. I often joke that I got into college teaching as a kind of dare .  Once I finished my instructional design degree I was really into curriculum planning and seeing the big picture. And my laboratory for this was the instructional design program from which I graduated. I spent some time in the university archi

Part III of my 2024 all the thiiiiiings (read that with an echo😁) ponderings, and attempt to wayfind my way out around the academy... This part deals with researching, writing, and peer review. Some things I've already decided that I am not doing anymore.  Some things I've decided I may be doing a bit of.  And, other things are in limbo... So let me start with a bold proclamation: I am no longer doing peer reviewing *!  Over the last 15 years, I've been peer reviewing for a variety of journals. Initially, I found the process valuable and I was really happy to contribute to the overall discussion in the field(s) that I am active in. Since COVID I've gotten a lot grumpier with peer review requests.  I've often gotten requests for fields/research that are really peripheral to what I do.  Other times when I review articles (from certain...journals), it's like my review goes into the recycling bin 🚮 and when I get a revised copy of the article for re-review, none

Part II of my 2024 academic wayfinding ponderings! 🎓🤔 If you remember my last post of 2023, you probably remember that perhaps the thing that's been taking up a lot of mental bandwidth has been the CIEE journal ( Current Issues in Emerging eLearning ).  This is a journal that I co-founded with my friend and colleague Alan Girelli back in the day (in 2012-2013, if I remember correctly). At the time, Alan was the director for the Center for Innovation and Excellence in eLearning (CIEE), which was part of our College of Advancing and Professional Studies. The idea behind the center was to foster innovation on research (across the UMass Campuses), and to provide venues for the dissemination of knowledge.  The center was the brainchild of the CAPS Dean.  Alan arranged for a variety of events over the years, including events on MOOCs, learning analytics, active learning, and so on. The journal on his end was also a means to this end. At the same time, I had this crazy idea that now th

I guess that's me, in the style of Albert Uderzo OK...so it's been a while since I last blogged! ( checks his notes ... December 31, 2023!!! Great Scott!😬🤯) You'd think that I had given up the blogging practice, right? 😅.  Well, you wouldn't be blamed if you thought so!  Contrary to appearances, I'm still around!  It's been a busy Spring semester...and a busy Summer...and now it's looking like it's going to be a busy Fall semester too! It's been so busy that at times I feel like I am running from project to project, and then I am left with little time to ideate, ponder, or react in a form that is longer than 280-500 characters... 🙄, or even just empty my mind and think of nothing. I can't complain though, because I  think it's a calamity of my own making 😅 This might take more than one blog post to collect my thoughts and write about. In fact, to get to a completed post it's taken me a few weeks (this tab has been open in my browser

[warning - a bit of long post] Well, here we are! The end of 2023! It seems like only yesterday that we were starting to hear some whispers about this thing called "ChatGPT," but it was in fact about a year ago, and as you know we moved pretty quickly through that hype cycle.  Don't worry, this entire YIR (year in review) won't be about ChatGPT 😂.   As I was pondering other academic-y things over the start of my winter break, I was looking back at the year to see how things moved along.  I think I've written (or at least said) this before, but before I started my doctorate I felt like I had a rhythm so far as academic communities, activities, and outputs go, and things got disrupted while I was pursuing my EdD.  Coming out of that doctoral process, I felt like I took one exit off the freeway, while many of my other colleagues and friends took another. It feels like the end of a doctoral program is about rediscovering who you are and where things fit.  It seems li

Gazing at Learning The other day I was doing some reflecting on my own "return" to being a learner after my doctoral journey ended. Last semester I took a course on negotiation, which I saw relevant to both work and also for my role as a member of our union's contract bargaining team this round.  This course was a graduate-level course, and is typically taken either in the first or second term of a graduate student's journey in the Conflict Resolution program at my university.  While the semester was busy, I rarely broke an (academic) sweat.  The course was challenging, don't get me wrong, but I found the number of readings manageable (since I have my TTS routine), and the number of words that I had to write for papers was 5,000-6,000 cumulatively in the semester (and maybe another 8,000 across the forum posts throughout the term). In the grand scheme of things, this feels normal for a graduate course (from a design point of view), but it feels  easy having gone