This past Monday, March 20, was the official beginning of the Spring. This post has been in my draft folder for a few weeks. Yikes! This means I have survived my first Winter in Tennessee. So I am here to share some of the sunny day outings from the last two and half months of Winter.
So I am a little bit in my feelings. Tonight as I wrapped up AERA 2023 and was posting about it on LinkedIn. I realize that this year marks my 10th anniversary of attending this annual meeting of educational researchers.
I do not know why I feel it is special, the 10th anniversary. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that 10 years ago, I just embarked in this adventure (on my own – without my advisor – self-funded) without any clear idea of what I was doing but I just did it.
I remember a few months before AERA 2013 my advisor was talking to me about conferences and she told me: “AERA is where Sweller goes to present about Cognitive Load Theory. It is a hard to get accepted. But if you are doing education research, that is where you want to go.” I do not know why but my immediate thought was: “well that is exactly were I am going to go.” I went home and I told my partner: “I want to go to AERA, I need to invest on my professional development.” Without hesitation, he just said: Sounds like a plan!
This is the blog post I wrote after attending AERA 2013 In San Francisco: AERA 2013: First Impressions
BTW, in my post from 2013 I wrote this “The AERA program was massive! Thankfully, I had browsed through the online program and downloaded my schedule to the mobile app before my arrival to San Francisco.” Dear AERA can we go back to whatever app we used in 2013? The App this year was awful!
Here are other blogs posts I have written about AERA throughout the years:
During AERA 2015, I participated in the Division C – Early Career Mentoring Program. I met some pretty awesome scholars as part of the program. Here is a blog post about it: New Faculty Mentoring Program: 2015 Cohort [Research, Teaching, Collaboration, & Support] #AERA15 #AERADivC. This year during AERA 2023, I had the opportunity to connect with colleague Bodong Chen, who in addition to his amazing scholarly work, is genuinely a wonderful person. The first thing he said to me when saw each other was: “Remember we met here in Chicago 8 years ago in the mentoring program!”
This has been a journey. Somehow in the massive sea of people that is AERA, I have created my own community and network.
Some highlights of AERA 2023:
Two resources that I want to add to this blog post because I can come back to them later:
This past week I attend the Open Education Conference! Going to a conference you have never attended before and in a different continent is actually very intimidating. But, I made the travel arrangements and (despite some frustrations with airlines) made the journey to Inverness, Scotland to attend #OER23.
First, a shoutout to my co-authors: Josh Rosenberg and George Veletsianos. Our team has been working on a project related to self-archiving practices amongst scholars in higher education. This work has been inspired by similar work that both Josh (see blog post) and George have done in the past. The purpose of my travel to #OER23 was in part to present some of our initial findings and to get the conversation started on this topic. Here are the slides from the presentation: tiny.utk.edu/OER23
Back to the conference experience! Arriving at the conference venue (The UHI Inverness Campus so serene, accessible, and full with natural beauty) I did not know what to expect from from the conference. But I was immediately welcomed. A colleague sitting next to me an at the opening keynote introduce herself and she, just like me, was attending for the first time and had made her way to Inverness from Sri Lanka. I quickly realized that the #OER23 conference was an event with a global representation.
There were so many wonderful and insightful sessions, starting with the keynote by Rikke Toft Nørgård: “HYPER-HYBRID FUTURES? Re-imagining open education & educational resources: Places // Persons // Planets“. I also really enjoyed learning about the FEE project: https://www.feecolombia.org and organization that uses Open Education Resources to support rural education in Colombia. I ended my first day in a workshop lead by colleagues Tom Farrelly and Eamon Costello who are exploring the value place by higher education on open access publishing (very much related the work that Josh, George, and I are doing). In any case I highly recommend checking out their information letter (bit.ly/43c084q) and their survey (bit.ly/40z1OD3).
The second day of the conference was full of inspiration:
There are many other sessions that I could mention. I am still gathering links and resources from the conference. Thankful for all the presenters who shared their slides via Discord and other online platforms. I love that I got to meet so many online connections that I have in one way or another linked with in the past (likely in the bird app). Also, grateful for the opportunity to met colleagues who I did not know before and who share a passion for openness! It was also great to learn more about OER practices and policies in Scotland. Looking forward to future OER conferences!
I almost forgot! How could I forget? The OER GASTA was epic (also just in case you are wondering what is a GASTA?)! I do not have links to all of the GASTA presentations but here is the one presented by Eamon “Beyond the pedagogies of perpetual panic“. All of them were pretty epic!
I think for the most part when we think of preparing for work travel we think of getting work done that need to completed before we travel and preparing for the work that will be done during the work travel trip. In my case the work that will be done is normally a presentation.
But I know many of us also have to think of what is going on in our personal lives and what we need to prepare so that when we come back from work travel we are not to discombobulated to be involved and participate in activities in our personal lives (with family and friends). This all takes some serious project management skills!
This past weekend, it was Easter Sunday. I knew that after a week of travel I would come home to a special holiday for my little one and I wanted to make sure he knew I had not forgotten. So, my pre-travel preparations involved getting Easter goodies (thank you Party City!) and planning activities prior to leaving for my work trip. I also manage to get a chocolate bunny at the airport in one of my layovers on the way home 😊 🐰
Design Goodiness 
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