Blog
Biographies of Creative Women
I wrote in my previous post about one of the main things I’ve been focused on during the pandemic. But since the pandemic started, I also have been listening to biographies of creative women. I’m on my 10th one now. I started by reading a biography of May Sarton after having listened to her memoir…
Cancer: A Timeline
I was diagnosed with cancer in September of last year. I decided to record the timeline of my treatment progression, mostly so I can remember it. But I thought others might like to know what the treatment looks like in the US for someone who has good insurance and access to excellent health care…
Thinking about Educational Cooperatives
One of the many biographies of women artists that I listened to on my daily walks this year was Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon. Lange was a complicated, talented photographer committed to social justice. There were a couple of things about the book that annoyed me but mostly I loved it…
Raspberry Pi Christmas Project
Like a lot of people, I am spending this Christmas/New Year holiday by myself because of COVID-19. It really hasn’t been a bad thing but I did want to plan something different for me to do on Christmas Day. I decided to try to build a network accessible storage (NAS) server to use primarily for…
Design for Collaboration
Every Fall I teach a class called Tackling a Wicked Problem (TWP) for first year students at Plymouth State University. A major goal of this class is for students to design and implement a project with their classmates that addresses some aspect of a wicked problem and makes a difference in the world. This is…
Data Analytics and the Science of Learning
Now that this shortened, very challenging Fall 2020 semester is over, I have started thinking about January followed by the Spring 2021 semester. As I posted back in October, we received a grant from the Northeast Big Data Hub to create a Data Analytics Learning Community (DALC). The grant provides stipends for 5 steering committee…
Data Analytics Learning Community
I was excited to send this email to my colleagues today. I am looking forward to participating in this learning community: It is my pleasure to announce that Plymouth State University is the recipient of a grant from the Northeast Big Data Hub to develop a Data Analytics Learning Community (DALC). The DALC will begin…
The Dispossessed
I’m reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and am fascinated by the portrait of the three societies in the novel. An interesting side note is that my copy of the book doesn’t have the subtitle (An Ambiguous Utopia) on the cover. In fact, I only realized it had a subtitle when I looked for a…
Online Asynchronous Collaboration: Mid-Semester Reflection
As is typical in the Fall semesters, I am teaching a section of our first year, project-based course Tackling a Wicked Problem. Back before we knew the extent of the COVID-19 crisis, we knew that there were going to be at least some students who wanted to take all of their courses online. Some of…
Developing Habits of Mind
The latest assignment for the Tackling a Wicked Problem/Integrated Capstone track of Plymouth State University’s Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community asks us to: Write (and share if you feel comfortable doing so) a self-assessment on your own development of the Habits of Mind. Pay particular attention to the signposts on the benchmarks for the level of…
Indie Web Camp West 2020 Project Update
I attended the virtual IndieWebCamp West meeting this weekend. Yesterday, I listened to people talk about their web sites and how they did what they did on them. It was inspiring. Today, I worked on my own project to implement something I wanted on my web site. My project (not finished) is related to…
Values and Cluster Learning
For the second summer in a row, I’m participating in a faculty learning community at Plymouth State University focused on our cluster learning model. One of the exercises we engaged in during our June meeting asked participants to begin to develop some values for our group. For our homework in preparation for our July meeting,…
