These are my prepared remarks for MLA18 Panel 202: Anxious Pedagogies – Negotiating Precarity and Insecurity in the Classroom. Please join us if you’re in NYC on Friday morning, bright and early! I dedicate these remarks to Miranda, to Margaret Mary, to Robert Ryan, to all the adjuncts and contingent faculty who literally gave their…
Category: Pedagogy
Fun with MLA and AHA Programs of Conferences Past
This post is missing the original images because I’ve moved this blog around way too much. Sorry. You’ll have to take my word for it, I guess. I work with a pretty smart data science guy. In the past, when the MLA Conference program hit online, I would enter in words like “teaching” and “pedagogy”…
Thought-Chain on Learning to Code, Credentialism, and Higher Education
We’re deep into our “Learn to Code” module in Applied Digital Studies. The students have all chosen a language (HTML/CSS, Python, JavaScript are the top choices), and chosen a platform (Codecademy is the big winner). For the next two weeks, their task is to regularly and systematically “learn to code” using the platform of their…
Challenging the Narrative of “Learn to Code”
In DGST 395, we’re dabbling in coding. I wrote about the experience taking the course and “learning to code” last semester, and this semester, I decided to take a different approach. While we’re going to spend a few weeks on Nick Montfort’s book, I want the students to think critically about the rhetoric and strategies…
Erasure
This semester, I’m teaching DGST 395: Applied Digital Studies. It’s an upper-division required course for Communication and Digital Studies majors. It’s the first time I’ve ever taught this course, and the first time in a long time that I’ve been able to teach an upper-division course of any kind. Given what’s been going on over…
Finding Their Place on the Web: Ed Reform by Undergrads
*This is a lightly edited version of a talk I gave at MLA 14 that is still seems relevant. * In 2014 (or rather, in 2010 when I first created this project), doing a class blog is neither cutting edge, nor particularly revolutionary for many of us. For the students I teach, however, it was, in fact,…
Learning to Code – Why Now?
TL;DR – BECAUSE, THAT’S WHY. This semester, I’ve put myself in the strange position of being a student again, in my colleague Zach Whalen’s DGST 395 class, Applied Digital Studies. It’s strange for a number of reasons (for me at least), least of all is being a student in the same space as students who…
Reflections on Praxis at DPLI2016
It’s done. I did it. We did it. It was hard and challenging and exhausting and invigorating and inspiring and just so much fun. But it’s over, and I’m left trying to make sense of what exactly happened last week during Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute 2016. I taught the Praxis track, and you can see my…
Praxis – Digital Pedagogy Lab Tentative Course Outline
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that I’m going to be teaching the Praxis track at this August’s Digital Pedagogy Lab here at UMW (Sign up today! Spaces still available!). I’ve written elsewhere about my approach to the course (Intimacy! Vulnerability! Fun!), but I was inspired by my fellow instructor, Audrey Watters, who is teaching…
Bob Ross-ing It
Jess: What is this sorcery?Me: We didn’t need Harry Potter; we had Bob Ross. It’s late afternoon in the office, and, looking for something else, I happen upon The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross on Hulu. I decided that there wouldn’t be a better way to end the day than with 30 minutes of…
Teaching and Learning as Paying Attention
Last semester, I taught a book and an author I have long loved and studied, but haven’t been able to engage much with in a classroom setting: I am a Japanese Writer by Dany Laferrière (yes, he’ll come up a lot in this space). The book is a meditation on identity, authorship, creativity, and memory. I…
