Productive (adj)

Everyone is talking about Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s new book Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University . Mark Largent, our Interim APUE & Dean of Undergraduate Studies, just blogged about it here . Fitzpatrick gave a keynote about generous thinking at the #ITeachMSU Spring Conference on Student Learning and Success . And it’s the next pick for the Hub’s monthly book club . I haven’t read the whole book yet, but the ideas are so exciting that this is a book pre-report, as one of my favorite colleagues Bre Yaklin remarked last week. I first learned about Generous Thinking at the Envisioning the Future of Academic Work at MSU  workshop in April, where Fitzpatrick led a breakout session called “Generous vs. Competitive Thinking in the Academic Environment.” Anyone who knows me knows I’m the opposite of competitive, so this title jumped out of the schedule for me. In essence, thinking generously means rescuing academia from paths that seem to relentlessly i...

It's been a while since this blog has updated... 2.5 years, in fact. Wow! I should start by announcing that I finished my PhD and I'm working at Michigan State University at the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology and at Lyman Briggs College . I'll have way more to say about this and what I've been up to since 2016 in future posts. But right now, let's talk about blogging (how meta!). One of my goals at work this year is to turn blogging into part of my regular practice. I do so many cool projects, and the Hub has an awesome blog where people with better follow-through than I have regularly churn out posts about their work or reactions to issues in higher ed. I even had a series of posts in mind about informal learning on campus that I pitched in the spring to write in the summer... and then it never happened. Not because I'm not interested in the topic, not because the actual writing would be too hard or unpleasant, but because I never hit the rig...