Tag: higher education

#AECT24 Reflections

This seems like the perfect time to come back to write a blog post again, after recently returning from the 2024 AECT International Convention. I am worried that if I share everything that I want to share, this blog post would be super lengthy. So, I going to do my best to it keep short and sweet!

I first joined AECT in 2009 and that year I attended my first AECT conference. I had ZERO funds to attend the conference but a classmates of mine offered to let me crash in her hotel (at no extra cost) and share her per diem with me (our plan was to live off pizza for a a few days). The organization she worked for was paying for her trip and she wanted to support me. I am never going to forget that. Thank you Dr. Sonya Bland-Williams!

Back to #AECT24.

This year the AECT International Convention was special in many ways. First, the conference was returning to Kansas City. A place that is very special to my heart:

In the spirit of sharing stories, which is the theme of AECT 2024, I thought I would share a short but special story with all of you: Exactly twenty years ago, I embarked in my higher education studies in the United States. I was accepted into an International Business program at Emporia State University in Emporia, KS. I left the safety of home and started my own journey. The first stop on that journey was Kansas City and very specifically this hotel, The Kansas City Marriott Downtown. So, in many ways, getting to do this AECT keynote here, in Kansas City and in this hotel, feels to me like I have come full circle. So, for that I am very thankful!  

Also, conferences in Kansas City are wonderful opportunity to meet with my college roommate, Mikelle. There is something about sharing a college dorm with someone else, you either become really close or you may never want to see each other again. Mikelle and I have been friends from the moment we met, 20 years ago! She is such a kind soul! Her and her family were so incredible welcoming of me when I was in college. Mikelle was living in the dorm just for fun, because her family actually lived in our college town. So I was able to spend time with them (her family) regularly!

Another aspect that made this conference so special was that I was attending #AECT24 with my doctoral advisees: Wei Wang, Ashley King, and Yuexin (Jennifer) Duan. We have been working on projects for some time but we were finally able to start sharing some of the findings from our research with the AECT community this year. Wei is a force to be reckoned with! He is making moves as a researcher and a graduate assistant for the Digital Learning team at UTK. This year, Wei and his colleagues from Digital Learning presented “Implementing Generative AI in Practice: Designing Assessments and Learning Activities in Faculty Development Programs“. This work focuses on professional development that Digital Learning has been doing in the UTK campus to engage in conversations with faculty about the use of generative AI in higher education and its implications.

Ashley and Jennifer presented on a “work in progress project”. As a research team, we have been working a on a range of different systematic reviews. The project that Ashley and Jennifer shared related to “small group dynamics in asynchronous online learning”. The presentation primarily focused on the introduction of the topic up until the process of analysis of the journal articles for inclusion in the systematic review. We will continue to move forward with data extraction and the remainder of the process. Also, quick shout to all the members of our team who were not able to attend but have worked with us on this project!

The best way I can describe this experience is that: I am a proud advisor and that I am lucky to work with such an amazing team!

Then there is Dr. Lucy Santos Green! What else do I need to say! Lucy is the mastermind behind this project called “Online Ready”. Long story short, Online Ready is a federally funded project that aims to equips school librarians to deploy effective practices for culturally competent and inclusive K-12 online instruction. Having Lucy at AECT to speak about this project with me, was definitely a highlight! We have been working on this project for the last 3 years virtually and getting to see her and feed off her energy is just so amazing! Here are our slides. Our presentation at AECT 2024 focused on the implementation of Online Ready with school librarian with the goal of receiving feedback during Summer 2023. Online Ready will be available open access for anyone to use and share by next spring! More on this coming soon!

This is getting long! Yikes!

This year, it was such a humbling experience to also be the closing keynote for the conference. When the organizer of AECT 2024, Drs. Tonia Dousay, Tutaleni Asino, and Rebecca Reese reach out early this year, I was so incredibly honored! I know that we have a wide range of colleagues who are doing impactful work, so it meant a lot to be considered for this role. What made it even more special was that a dear friend and colleague was also going to be a keynote speaker, Dr. George Veletsianos. George’s keynote, as expected “delivered”! It already had a major impact on my advisees and their career goals. So, I am very grateful for his message!

Technology, Imagination, and Education Futures: Education systems worldwide face profound economic, demographic, political, environmental, and social challenges. Traditionally, our field has responded by either embracing the latest technological advancements or striving to make instruction more effective, efficient, and engaging. However, these approaches are not enough. They are limiting and insufficient. They constrain our imagination and curtail our ability to create better educational futures for ourselves, our students, and our societies. In this talk, I will explore how speculative methods can offer creative, exploratory, and fruitful ways to examine, produce, and rethink the learning environments we are developing and supporting.

As George’s colleague, Dr. Bruna Damiana Heisfeld mentioned: “great minds think alike.” Because both keynote discussed how we can move forward as a field considering ways in which we can humanize learning design research and practice. Here are the slides from my closing keynote and my abstract:

(Re)Igniting Empowered Actions: Over the last few years, we have seen many political, social, and educational shifts that have impacted how we live, work, and learn. We have also experienced a global pandemic that changed us. In many ways we have spent a great deal of  time simply surviving. All of these experiences have shaped who we are as individuals, but also as learning designers, educators, and researchers. Today, as we move forward, it is even more important than ever before that we critically reignite our purpose with empowered actions. This talk reflects on why and how we connect with the world around us in intentional empathetic ways that at the core aim to humanize learning design practice and the use of emerging technologies in education. Let’s tap into the power of our stories to share the narratives that often go untold. For good reason, there is a strong focus on the reimagining of our educational futures. Yet, we need to be cognizant that our actions today already shape those visions of tomorrow. Today, equitable and ethical learning design practices and research are not just a “good idea,” they must be the norm. The reality is that efficient, effective, and engaging in not enough to fully capture the socio-cultural context of the world we live in. 

Thank you AECT for such a memorable experience!

Also because I always take a million photos: Here you go! Also, thanks to those who shared photos with me!

LDT Graduate Students Present at the CEHHS Graduate Colloquium

Every year the College of Education, Health, and Human Services organizes a Graduate Student Research Colloquium. Of course, when the notification for the graduate colloquium was shared with faculty, I encouraged all the Learning, Design, and Technology (LDT) graduate students to submit their research to the colloquium. I was extremely excited to find out that three of our LDT students were accepted to present! Unfortunately one of the students was unable present due to another commitment. Ashley King and Wei Wang were there to share their projects with attendees of the colloquium.

Ashley King is a lecturer at University of Tennessee Knoxville in the College of Business. She is a LDT Ph.D. candidate. I am her advisor and dissertation chair. She is also a research team collaborator! Wei Wang is an LDT first year doctoral student and I serve as his co-advisor (along with Dr. Josh Rosenberg). He recently presented at AERA 2024 in one of the graduate students research-in-progress roundtables!

Very proud of them! #GoVols

#AERA24 Resources

These are a few resources that were shared in some of the sessions I attended during the AERA 2024 Annual Meeting. I want to share in this blog post:

  • Session: Empowering Emerging Online Learners: No More “Boring” Discussion “Boreds”—The Experiences of Teacher Candidates
  • Session: “Ethical Imperatives and Pedagogical Potentials: AI Integration and Primary Source Analysis in Early Childhood and Elementary Education”
  • Session: “Politic Born of Necessity”: Latina and Latinx Feminists Remembering Genealogies, Imagining Futures
    • Lugones, Maria A. 2003. Peregrinajes/pilgrimages: Theorizing coalitions against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Google Scholar
  • Session: “Rupturing the White Gaze: Centering Chicana/Latina Feminista Methodologies and Epistemologies in Qualitative Research” Symposium Resources
  • Session: “Critical Feminisms as Pedagogical Spaces for Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning” organized by Staci Gilpin and Mary Rice:

It was such an amazing honor to listen to Kimberly Crenshaw! Her keynote was everything!

The freedom to learn, is the freedom to live!

Kimberly Crenshaw

Book Release Date!

In March, after our in-person meeting in New Orleans, my co-editors and I submitted our book manuscript to Athabasca University Press. Our edited volume “Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online” (Issues in Distance Education Series) is set to be released January 4th, 2025 (or at least that is the date that Amazon will release the book).

You are welcome to pre-order it via Amazon. You also can wait until it is released because it will be available open access! As the date gets closers and we find out more information, I will be sharing more about the book. So excited!

I should add that Athabasca University Press has stated that it is possible that the book could be release Fall 2024. More than anything just know that the book is coming either later this year or early 2025 we will have the pleasure of sharing with you!

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 😊

10 Years!

You know when you go to an interview and the hiring committee ask you to predict the future! The typical question: Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years? Honestly, can we even answer this question? Don’t get me wrong I have asked this question and I have answered this question. We’re my predictions accurate? I don’t remember 😊

Today I was trying to make my way through my to-do list when I got a notification on my phone. It was one of those were you see a photo “on this days” years ago. I looked at it and it show me that:

10 years ago today I was hooded by my doctoral advisor, Dr. Ginger Watson and I celebrated my earning my doctoral degree (I actually had a bunch of revisions and didn’t really graduate until the end of summer but who cares I still partied like a rockstar!). I remember my mom and my brother came to celebrate with me and that was pretty awesome.

Doctoral advisor and a scholar who recently received her Ph.D. In their academic regalia.
Drs. Ginger Watson and Enilda Romero-Hall

5 years ago I was in Zurich, Switzerland leading a study abroad program with primarily undergraduate students and an alumni of the Instructional Design and Technology program from The University of Tampa. My co-coordinator Merrie was honestly the best! I don’t know how I would have finished this trip without Merrie! 💖

Switzerland study abroad program

Reflection on this post:

So I am now, 10 year later from getting hooded, wrapping up my first year as a faculty member at The University of Tennessee Knoxville. I am working on a research plan with my first doctoral student. I am conducting research with two additional graduate students. I am the graduate coordinator of the learning, design, and technology doctoral program and we are in the process of welcoming a nice group of doctoral students this fall (very exciting!). I am also working on other research and writing projects.

If you had asked me 10 years ago or even 5 years ago, where I was planning to be in ____ number of years, I do not know if I would have even been to come up with my current life. As we say in Panama: la vida es loca y a cualquiera le toca!

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!

ChatGPT SWOT Assignment

As part of my course this semester, I asked my students to conduct a SWOT analysis of Chat GPT. Here is the assignment:

  1. Visit the website: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/Links to an external site.
  2. Explore the website and use  AI interface (ask the AI to write an essay on the topic of your choice)
  3. Ask yourself the following questions (Source: Dr. Torrey Trust “Teacher and Student Guide to Analyzing AI Writing Tools”) and write your answers down to as many in a Google Document (we will discuss your responses to these questions in the following synchronous class):
    • Why was this tool created?
    • What are the objectives, aims, and values of the tool designer?
    • What does the tool designer gain from your use of this tool?
    • Who is the target audience for this tool? How do you know this?
    •  Who is harmed and who benefits from this tool?
  4. As you are using chatGPT think about the Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) of this tool in teaching and learning
  5. Create a figure (using Canva) that helps illustrate your SWOT analysis 

I was pretty excited to see the outcome of the exercise but also to hear the stories during our discussion. Here are some examples of the SWOT analysis created by the students, shared in this post with their permission.

SWOT analysis of the ChatGPT application.
Designed by Keiko Eda
Designed by Hunter Preston Carlheim

Drag Queen Story Hour

In the Fall 2019, The English Department at The University of Tampa hosted Drag Queen Story Hour. To be honest, I do not remember if the event was hosted every year or if that was the first time. I just know that a flyer about the event reached my inbox and it caught my attention. At that time my child was 3 years old and I thought for sure he would enjoy story time. Also, he love going to campus on the weekends to see where his mom worked. For us as parents it was a great to teach him about inclusivity at a young age and to encourage a love for learning and reading.

That Saturday, we made our way to campus and we mentioned to our son that we were going to “drag queen story hour.” We got there, found some good seat, and proceeded to hear the stories that the drag queens were reading for us. It was a really good crowd. There were lots of children and parents, also faculty and staff from the university. After the readings, we wanted to say thanks to our readers. My family and I made out way to the front of the room and talked to the wonderful queens. One of them asked me what my role was at the university and I mentioned that I was a professor in the department of education. They were a bit shocked because according to them ” I looked very young” (I laughed). So they proceeded to tell me that they were interested in getting masters in education, so I gave them my business and told them to reach out to me if they had any questions. My family and I then took a picture with the drag queens! It was a wonderful event.

As we were walking back to our car I ran into the Provost, who stopped by the say hi to me and my family. In the exchange we mentioned that were coming to from the Drag Queen Story Hour event and he was happy to hear we enjoyed it and that there was a great turn out. He mentioned that there had been some threats made about potential protest but that he was happy everything had gone smoothly.

Once were in our car out little one said to me: “mommy were were the dragons? I did not see any dragons”

I was confused. So I said: “dragons? Why did you think were going to see dragons?”

He responded: You said we were going to “dragon queen story hour!”

My partner and I just burst out laughing! We explained the title of event to him (and what exactly were meant by drag queens) and he said: “Oh, okay!” and moved on with his day!