Talks
Giving talks has been a major component of my contributions to educational technology over the years, enabling me to share my work directly with a range of different audiences and engage with their responses as my projects evolve. This is a curated selection of those presentations.
THETA 2017 Invited Speaker
- “An Integrated Domain: Visions of a Connected Future” presented in Auckland, New Zealand on May 9th, 2017 as an invited speaker to THETA 2017. This talk is an attempt to outline two visions at the core of my work: 1) providing faculty, students, and staff more control over their personal data in the teaching and learning ecosystem, and 2) building spaces that celebrate the independence and creativity of any single course on the web.
AMICAL 2016 Invited Speaker
- “Small is beautiful: A study of ed-tech as if people mattered” given in Rome, Italy on May 13, 2016 as an invited speaker for AMICAL 2016. Higher Education’s online push for the equivalent of “bigger is better” over the past four years in the form of the Massive Open Online Courses has left some questioning the value of massive as it relates to teaching and learning. This presentation examines the concept of “enoughness” and how re-thinking questions of scale and efficiency may enable us to imagine ed-tech as if people, as opposed to numbers and data, mattered most.
OER16 Keynote Presentation
- "Can we imagine tech Infrastructure as an OER? Or, Clouds, Containers, and APIs, Oh My!" was given as a keynote [resentation at OER16 in Edinburgh, Scotland on April 20th, 2016. In this talk I look at how we often frame OERs, open, shareable educational resources, in relationship to content, but rarely in relationship to shared technical infrastructure. How would our conception of OERs expand if we could easily and efficiently create and share applications across institutions? What if we focused more on small, focused, re-usable software as reflective of specific cultures rather than large, institutional repositories as monolithic solutions? What if we worked towards a collaborative infrastructure for open educational resources that was always framed and scaled at the level of the individual, not unlike the web. With the shift in web infrastructure to the cloud, and the advent of APIs and containers, we may be entering a moment wherein the open culture of networks, rather than pre-defined educational content, is representative of the future of OER culture. How might the agile contours of a burgeoning network of distributed and collaborative edtech be the key to sustainable future for open educational resources?
TEDxUSagradoCorazon
- "Domain of One's Own" presented at the TEDxUSagradoCorazon in San Juan, Puerto Rico on November 13, 2013. This presentation provides an overview of the inspiration and philosophy undergirding Domain of One's Own, a project at UMW that championed providing faculty, student, and staff with a domain and web space, Not only as a means of providing a framework for digital literacy, but also reinforce the importance of a distributed, individually authored web. The success of this project led to the birth of Reclaim Hosting that provided this possibility to universities around the world.
TEDxNYED 2012
- “The Educational aPOPcalypse” was an invited talk given at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY on April 24th, 2012. This talk is given entirely in GIFs as a way to try and explore the current obsession with apocalyptic narratives (disruption) around education. This is a call to try and recapture the joy of learning by exploring networked visions of this approach, using ds106 as an example.
2011 Open Education Conference Keynote
- “#occupyopened11" was an invited keynote talk for the Open Education Conference in Park City, Utah on October 26, 2011. This talk starts out as a performative protest and moves on to be a deep dive into the digital storytelling course ds106 that had emerged the previous spring as an exciting sense of what was possible with networked learning with the web as platform.