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Ponderings on Teaching

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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
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Ponderings on Research, Writing, and Peer Review

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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
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Ponderings on Journal Editing

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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
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Hey, Strangers!

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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
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2023 Academic Year in Review

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[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
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Changing mental gears and putting yourself in student's shoes

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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
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Preferences for learning modality following COVID19

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Yesterday evening I came across a post by Tony Bates where he shared some findings from some recent reports on faculty (and student) preferences for learning in a post-pandemic world . I haven't read the reports yet, but I had some initial thoughts based on Tony's high-level overview of those three reports.   Two big things jumped out at me. The first is that students and faculty aren't on the same page (for the most part), and faculty still overwhelmingly prefer on-campus.  Tony notes that, at least in the EDUCASE case, compared to pre-covid numbers, more faculty have expressed an interest in something other than purely face-to-face (about 79% pre-covid, with 50% now). Tyton Partner's Analysis of Modality Preferences The first thing I noticed above is where students and faculty fall in their respective preferences.  If taken together, something other than purely face-to-face is a clear winner for student preferences.  Now, what that something else actually is...well,
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Analyzing the Synthetic Syllabus

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Bing Image Creator: A Syllabus Wow...it's been almost two months since I started this post! It's hard to believe that it took this long to return to this thought experiment.  Just to remind the diligent reader of this blog, this came out of not one, not two, but multiple places on the web (including professional development conferences!) whereby instructional designers (and other professionals) were demonstrating the use of GPT to put together quick and dirty course outlines for the busy adjunct. While I've got issues with this framing, I'll put those aside for now.  I thought that it might be interesting to actually go through the process to create a course outline and syllabus for a course that I used to teach often before I started my doctoral journey. The course is INSDSG 684: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses , a graduate course in the MEd program of Instructional Design at UMass Boston. I think it's important to start with a course that you know so
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ChatGPT to address faculty burnout

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NightCafe: Professor dealing with Digital Burnout  It seems like I am operating in Greek Time for #etmooc2 😅. This is a post for the second session of #etmooc which dealt with ethical issues around AI in education (and maybe AI broadly).  Since the third session record has not been posted yet, I'll make the argument that I am still "on time" for some commentary on this 😂. This post has been in my drafts for 2 weeks now.  With the end of the term upon us, I guess I have a little more time to process some thoughts. In any case, when I started to put together this blog post a couple of weeks ago, I was signed up for a symposium (or mini-conference?) hosted by a notable LMS provider, and of course, AI was the hot topic du jour.  One of the sessions that I attended was hosted by instructional designers, using ChatGPT, to assist in getting started with course development. Especially if that course development came at the 11th hour when an adjunct finds out that they are teach
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ETMOOC2 Session 1 Ponderings - Part III (the outtakes)

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Me again, anime-style AI (or at least what nightCafe thinks I look like in this setting) Alright, so here's my final post on session one of #etmooc2.  You can find post 1 and post 2 on this blog. For this post, I thought I'd post some prompts and responses from my playing with ChatGPT.  Fair warning, I tried to write a profanity-laden email (it sounds badly written IMO, but still has lots of profanities). I tried to channel the r/antiwork subreddit. I guess a content warning is appropriate. Here are some more ChatGPT prompting...about me. I have underlined  all of the information I think is wrong This can be wrong either to a small extent - i.e., it's exaggerated; or to a large extent - i.e., it's factually wrong. Prompt: Please give me an author biography for Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos that is 200-300 words Attempt 1: Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos is an educator, researcher, and advocate for open education and open technologies. He was born in New York City and raised
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