Category: Research

XR Symposium at ORETTC (Y-12)

Today I had the opportunity to participate in a panel presentation at the 2nd Annual XR Symposium organized by the Oak Ridge Enhanced Technology and Training Center (ORETTC). The specific panel that I was invited to join was focus on Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion specifically on Inclusive Technologies related to XR research & development.

The panel addressed the following questions:

  1. What are some new advancements you have seen in regards to diversity and inclusion in XR?
  2. What are some obstacles within XR technologies? What are the long-term consequences if we ignore D&I?
  3. What would you say is the most difficult part of implementing D&I especially in a world that persistently changes?
  4. In order to encourage accessible and inclusive practices within our workplace and everyday lives; how can we authentically address these topics?
  5. Can you share some valuable resources that we should all be aware of?

It was a great conversation! I am specially gratefully for my fellow panelist and the insights shared:

Huge thanks to Mary Lin, Ed.D. (Senior Manager, Knowledge Acquisition and Performance Studies ) and Austin Arnwine (Instructional Technology Lead, Knowledge Acquisition and Performance Studies) for the invite to participate in the panel.

Crowd at the symposium and the panelist in front of the big screen

AERA SIG Instructional Technology Newsletter

“Hi everyone,

First and foremost, it has been a pleasure serving as the AERA SIG Instructional Technology Program Chair. Huge thanks to everyone who submitted proposals to our SIG. It was very exciting to see the range of topics covered in the proposals submitted. I was also deeply impressed with the quality of the proposal submitted, which made for a difficult peer review process for our reviewers. Speaking of reviewers! I am profoundly grateful for our 94 reviewers who took on the very meaningful tasks of providing feedback and recommending proposals for our SIG Instructional Technology program. Huge thanks to all that have volunteered as Session Chairs, you are a critical component for a smooth conference session! Gratitude!

I can humbly say that we have an amazing AERA 2024 program for the SIG! Each session was carefully designed to ideally create a cohesive line up of presentations. I look forward to meeting you in Philadelphia and to your presentations! I am excited for all of us to engage in academic discourse, professional development, and informal social conversations. See you soon! Go Vols!

Enilda Romero-Hall, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Tennessee Knoxville

These quote is a section of the AERA Special Interest Group Instructional Technology Spring 2024 Newsletter recently shared with our members. Below is a copy of the complete AERA Special Interest Group Instructional Technology Spring 2024 Newsletter compiled, formatted, & organized by the 2023-2024 board members of the SIG Instructional Technology:

24-spring-aera-sig-it-newsletterDownload

The FPTO Editors First In-Person Meeting!

Last year, I received an invitation from my colleague, Clare Daniel, to present in a panel to discuss the Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online digital guide and other scholarly efforts related to the digital guide in person at Tulane University. The invitation to travel to New Orleans was extended to Niya Bond and myself (Clare, Jacque, and Liv live in New Orleans). The goal was for all the five editors of the digital guide to join in the panel.

Fast forward to February 2024, Niya and I travelled to New Orleans for the in-person panel. Meeting my colleagues in-person for the very first time was a joyous occasion. I have been personally interacting and collaborating with the FTPO editors for the last 3 years and we had only met through Zoom. It was so nice to fully interact outside the Zoom software and engage in informal convos that allowed us to learn more about each other personally and professionally.

“We want to acknowledge that this panel discussion is part of a lecture series dedicated to Adele Ramos Salzer (NC ’40). Her interest in academic programs focusing on women’s experiences led to the establishment of the Salzer lecture series. Her donation endowing the series has been generously strengthened through gifts in her memory from her family, friends, and classmates.”

Clare Daniel

During our visit to Tulane, we all got to have an short meeting to discuss panel, have dinner to talk about every under the sun (also, celebrate Clare’s new promotion at Tulane University), and have the panel at the Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute for students, faculty, and staff.

The editors of the FPTO digital guide
The editors of the FPTO digital guide
The editors of the FPTO after the panel presentation
The editors of the FPTO after the panel presentation

During the panel we:

  • Provided a brief explanation of the origins of the digital guide and the idea for the forthcoming book
  • Shared why and how we expanded our team of editors
  • Shared a brief description of the forthcoming book
  • Discussed how and why we expanded the guide to include annotated assignments
  • Shared an explanation of the blog and the collaborative editing process
  • Allowed for Q & A

It was really nice to have such a strong presence of students during the panel session. The students were very curious about of opinions on online learning, now past the COVID-19 pandemic. We also had some good questions and conversations with faculty who attended the event. I am very thankful for the invite to participate in this panel. I am also grateful for the opportunity to meet my colleagues in-person for the first-time. Online environments, synchronous and asynchronous, have allowed is the opportunity to genuinely connect and communicate. However, it is always nice to further engage in-person to deeper our understanding of each other (personally & professionally), converse about the future of the digital guide, and discuss upcoming projects.

Learning Designers in Context: Examining Practices Across the Global South [Book in Progress]

I guess it is time for me to write a blogs post about my forthcoming book 😊

It has been a while since I first announced that I was working on my next book and sadly due to various reasons I had to rescheduled my submission of the book to the publisher twice! But over the last two months I have moved full steam ahead with this book project.

I love how it is taking shape and that I get to work on it. Today, I was working on chapter 12 (in a coffee shop) and I was just smiling thinking that someone else would get to read this work.

This is not a book in which I tell someone else’s stories or tell you how to be a learning designer. The book is about learning designers telling their stories. It is about conversations, experiences, and journeys.

More on this coming soonish 😊

Culturally-Competent Design Mini Course

Super excited to connect with a second cohort of school librarians this summer as part of the Online Ready project led by my colleague Dr. Lucy Green and funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

As part of the project, I am teaching an online asynchronous mini-course on Culturally-Competent Design. Here is an overview of the mini-course: tiny.utk.edu/MiniCourse_CCD

Also, here is a short video I made for one of the modules:

Reflections on #OER23

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!

DICE Conference Workshop on Digital Literacy

This past week I joined the DICE Conference to host a workshop on Digital Literacy. The aim was not to enhance the digital literacy of the participants but to discuss how we can organize, collect data, and execute a digital literacy plan. The workshop was hosted at 3 am local Knoxville time. I really did not know how responsive I was going to be, but it is amazing how you feed from the energy of others. The participants of the workshop were energetic, open, and engaged, they made the three-hour session go by so fast. Grateful to the organizers of the DICE conference for the invitation to join the conference and organize this workshop. Here are some of the resources I used during the workshop:

Semana de la Innovación: Educación del Futuro (CIED)

During the week of November 22 to November 25, 2022 the Centro de Innovation y Excelencia Docente (CIED) of the Universidad Autonoma de Chile hosted the Semana de la Innovation: Education del Futuro.

I was honored to join the event as an invited speaker for the day of “Mujeres Innovadoras”. It was a wonderful experience to shared an hour with colleagues in Chile and other Spanish-speaking scholars. The hosts of the event Claudia Osorio Alfaro, Maria Jose Suazo Ocares, and Ignacio Andres Vilos Fredes were amazing and very welcoming. The title of my presentation was “Pedagogia Intersectional Digital: Inclusion y Equidad en la Enseñanza en Linea”. Here are the link to my slides: tiny.utk.edu/CIEDChile

To learn more about the event here are two press releases by the Universidad Autonoma de Chile:

“los docentes debemos de ser juiciosos en el uso de la tecnología en la aprendiza, es importante saber cuándo y cómo el uso de la tecnología es beneficioso para la estrategia educativa y cuando es una barrera para el aprendizaje“

Enilda Romero-Hall

Tenured. Again.

A few weeks ago, I found out that the Tenured Upon Appointment process at The University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) was completed. I am grateful to the UTK community for honoring my work and contributions as an Associate Professor with tenure. I look forward to continuing my work as researcher, instructor, and member of my professional community. Also, thankful to the many collaborators so much of the work that I do is a join effort with colleagues and students.

The Key Podcast | @InsideHigherEd | Ep. 91

A few weeks ago, I was invited to join a podcast to talk about HyFlex Instruction. I was on travel when I saw the email from the editor in my inbox and, without too much information, I accepted to join the conversation. I really did not know what direction the podcast was going to take. I know HyFlex learning is “controversial” and even “unwelcome” by many, but I really was just going to speak facts. I reviewed some of the research I have done on the topic and the reviewed the literature I have read on the past in preparation for the podcast. I am very happy that the editor had a conversation approach to the podcast and that guided the conversation on the “what comes next” direction. I will be speaking and doing more research on this topic in the upcoming months. So, this is just the beginning of the conversation.

I really do not like listening to my voice in recordings so I just know what I said from the actual recording session. I have not heard the podcast, so I appreciate colleagues who have reached out to let me know that they enjoyed listen to the podcast and the points I shared as part of the conversation. Above is a link to the tweet from Inside Higher Ed and here is the link to the webpage: Ep.91: The Pros and Cons of HyFlex Instruction