Category: Blog

I’ve been teaching—with kids and adults, in schools and online—since 2005. But not this academic year. As the new year starts, ten provocations about education are on my mind. Perhaps one will resonate with you. 1️⃣ Joy and curiosity are more effective motivators than penalty or competition—and that’s true for both students and educators. 2️⃣…

Family Announcement! I’m delighted to share that everyone in our family—me, Ebony, and young Ade—will soon be starting at new schools in North Carolina. A few months ago, Ebony accepted an invitation to join the faculty at Wake Forest University. Starting this fall, she’ll be an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Fiction in the Department…

Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed a new year-end tradition: Increasing my charitable giving by donating my book royalties. This post is about celebrating and uplifting the good work of amazing people and organizations. So I’ll shelve my commentary about the fact that academic authors are seldom paid for the words we write. And…

Bard, Claude, and ChatGPT walk into a bar. Start of a bad joke. Make it a library. And rather than ordering drinks, let’s say they’re “reading” and responding to books. That’s the basic premise of what became a rather weird annotation experiment I conducted earlier this week. Three generative AI chatbots. Side-by-side-side chat sessions about…

Here’s an update: Why wouldn’t a university student assigned course readings not use Claude? Here’s a basic prompt template for Claude 2, just edit to meet your needs: >>> Hi Claude. I’m a student in the [level] course “[title].” Here’s a brief description of my course: “[course description].” I need a [length]-word [specify type of writing…

Read all #AnnotatedSyllabus Posts and Resources Yes, it’s that time of the summer. That time when you’re beginning to prepare courses for the new academic year. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably drafting and revising a syllabus, too. It’s been awhile since I last wrote about annotating course syllabi. My first entry, from 2018,…

In the mid-1980s, when I was about four, we visited Sons of Jacob Cemetery outside of Danvers, Massachusetts. Mom had a conference in Connecticut, which meant that my sister and I were in tow, as was grandma, our caretaker. The cost of four airline tickets was irrelevant as the sum was unmanageable. We drove from…

With Annotation now available and my year as Scholar in Residence at Hypothesis wrapping up, here are some notes about my summer if you’re looking to connect, learn more about social annotation and my research, and jump into some fun activities. You’re also very welcome to contact me and follow #AnnoConvo for book updates. June…

September 2020 Update: View all #AnnotatedSyllabus posts and resources. Perhaps it is not surprising, given my research about social annotation and learning, that the two most-read blog posts I’ve authored are Annotate Your Syllabus and Annotate Your Syllabus 2.0. As educators–both K-12 classroom teachers and higher education faculty–prepare for a new academic year amidst the…

CROWDLAAERS (“crowd layers”) is a dashboard that captures open web annotation data from Hypothesis and reports learning analytics for use by learners, educators, and researchers.