Work

Posts and discussion about my work.

Father’s Day, Juneteenth 2022

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Detail from an illustration of a dark gray bull bleeding on its face with red muletas stuck in its back looking at a green butterfly who is asking: Are you OK? with a bright yellow background. Are you OK? by Belén González (Matitafore) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Today two US holidays coincide: Juneteenth — long a commemoration of the 19th-century emancipation of enslaved African Americans that was not made an official US federal holiday until last year in 2021 — and Father’s Day — a more recent celebration started in the early 20th century, though recognized as a US federal holiday in … Read more

Marketing Hypothesis

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Man in red sweater holding a notebook with overlaid text saying "My notebook lives with me."

I’m incredibly excited—and deeply honored—to be joining the team at Hypothesis, the organization behind the capabilities that enable everyone to take digital notes, everywhere. At Hypothesis, I’ll be leading marketing: telling the stories that engage people to add a new layer to the web.

Buttons that activate Hypothesis.

If you haven’t seen Hypothesis before, look in the upper right corner of my blog and you’ll see buttons that let you create and add to your own digital notebook of annotated links. For your further travels, the easiest way to use Hypothesis everywhere is with our Chrome browser extension.

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Post-Fact Fictions: Let’s Get REAL About Information Literacy

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Graphic showing overlapping petals labelled information literacy, data literacy, statistical literacy, critical reasoning, visual literacy, technology literacy.

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

I’m still thinking about the 2016 US election and what it means for the people, ideas and future I care about. One thing that is clear to me is that understanding and participating in such an election calls on all of us—regardless of our point of view—to increase our information literacy and use it to inform our critical reasoning. How’s your statistical and data literacy doing?

Folks are saying we now live in a “post fact” world, but I recognize that “facts” have always been generated within cultural, political, economic, and social contexts. If anything, we are drowning in facts, not sailing away from them. To survive, we need to get better at understanding how facts are now made, circulated, and given value.

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Open Batteries

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Kid's art hung on fridge.

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

When kids are little, we are quick to share their works, without worrying if they are worthy, or if sharing gets in the way of the creator’s growth. A first scribble hung on the fridge engages its crayon-wielding artist in community, audience, and their own creative evolution. I still remember my first daughter’s prolific Blue Period, quickly far too large for her limited fridge gallery.

Yet as soon as kids enter school, their work descends into an underworld of assessment: kindergarten’s finger paintings give way to worksheets, reports, and standardized tests that fall quickly to their final, lonely resting places, giving off the dying breath of grades.

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REAL Circuits of Learning

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Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL) Now that Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning has an acronym (REAL), the next thing it needs is metaphors and cocktail napkin sketches…so here goes: A key part of REAL’s “renewability” is the idea of connecting learning and experience in virtuous cycles that rotate through activities in … Read more