University of the Margins: Institutional Structures and Open Practice

This is my unkeynote address for the AMICAL Conference 2019 at the American University in Cairo. Universities are, in many ways, centers. They are places of coherence, with focused (and often noble) missions related to learning and education. But as we develop these centers for knowledge exploration, we also develop margins; as we create insides Read More …

The Future of the Public Mission of Universities

Keynote for “Making Knowledge Public,” the 2018 President’s Dream Colloquium at Simon Fraser University I would like to begin by acknowledging the Squamish, Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Katzie and Kwikwetlem peoples on whose traditional territories Simon Fraser’s three campuses stand. And back home in the United States, today is the National Day of Mourning, and I would Read More …

The Library is Open: Keynote for the 2018 Pennsylvania Library Association Conference

Good afternoon! A note about accessibility before I begin. If you would like to follow along with the written version of this talk, you can visit http://bit.ly/palakeynote. That link will also have the images on the slide deck with embedded descriptions for your screen reader, and the embedded video has closed captions.   I was Read More …

Facebook: Delete and Stay

So I deactivated my Facebook a few months ago to enjoy a more distraction-free sabbatical, and there wasn’t really a minute where I missed it. I considered deleting it this week for a few reasons. The company’s ethics are crap, they have insidious practices related to data mining and privacy, and the way they ensnare Read More …

Open Assessment: The Parable of the Scorpion, with Jess Mitchell

Today, I participated in a Virtually Connecting session featuring some great folks, including Jess Mitchell, one of the keynote speakers from this year’s Open Education conference in Niagara Falls. I was so struck by her answer to a question by Hal Plotkin about what assessment could look like from an “open” perspective that I transcribed Read More …

Open Pedagogy at the Program Level: The #PlymouthIDS Case Study

For the last several months, I’ve wanted to write something to document the remarkable experience I have had being a part of the Interdisciplinary Studies program here at Plymouth State University. I keep waiting to have the time to do justice to the richness of this experience, but it’s clear that uninterrupted time like that Read More …