Writing for DMLCentral

Here’s a link to recent contributions for the Digital Media and Learning Hub site, DMLCentral. Connecting Making, Designing and Composing In her closing keynote at FabLearn a couple years ago, Leah Buechley turned a critical eye on the maker movement. If you don’t know Buechley’s work, she is arguably one of the maker movement’s central…

To Badass 70 Year Olds…

Meet my mom: a 70-year old, badass, motorcycle racing woman. Perhaps this is why I believe we never stop growing, learning, and pushing…  #TeamMert Why Not Now: Mardelle Peck from Objekt Films on Vimeo.

Writing Mentors FTW

Spent the last few weeks working closely with our writing mentors at Chico State thinking about their role in the success of first-year writers. Grateful in particular to Geoff Bogan and Brittany DeLacy for their participation in our Educator Innovator conversation (with Tom Fox), and Keaton Kirkpatrick for his DMLCentral blog–“Building Community With Peer Mentors”–this week.…

Leslie & I On BlogTalk Radio

Summary: We discuss teaching writing, teaching science, and how to create classrooms in which students use writing to learn and think scientifically with Kim Jaxon and Leslie Atkins Elliott, authors of the new book Composing Science. Kim and Leslie talk about concrete approaches for engaging students in practices that mirror the work that writing plays…

Nobody Quits in April

The spring semester in academia is notoriously brutal: conference presentations, thesis and dissertation projects, graduations looming, and many classes to teach. Years ago, well into a PhD program, my friends and I started to notice a pattern: around April, one of us would lose it. Our panic rotated through the group, but on any given…

Blogging with my peeps: first-year problems

Excited to be back in the full swing of the spring semester. I spent the first day of classes completely full of jitters the whole day; funny how that doesn’t go away after 15 years of teaching. I have an amazing group of students in my jumbo first-year writing course: 88 freshmen who are a…