Productive (adj)

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...

Last week I gave a talk at the annual meeting of 4S, the Society for Social Studies of Science , in Copenhagen. It was a great excuse to visit a city I'd never been to before, and a nice change of scenery from an autumn devoted to reading for my comprehensive exam (and in York's STS program, is it ever comprehensive !) After giving myself permission to enjoy my trip and not feel guilty for not keeping up the reading pace, I ended up doing much more work than I expected; mainly writing notes on pdf files of papers in my Documentary Film list. I use GoodReader to read and annotate files on my iPad, which was much easier than lugging stacks of printed papers or books on a transatlantic flight. The difficulty is that I find the iPad sluggish when I try to type notes and work off the pdf file at the same time, so I just wrote in my moleskin notebook and typed them up later. The conference itself was vibrant and well-designed, much like Copenhagen. Based on the theme of "De...

It's starting to be clear to me that I am no good at keeping this blog updated. My last post was from last November, and it wasn't a "real" post; instead it was advertising a conference I slightly helped to organize. It was a wonderful conference, mind you, but having recently heard all about the benefits of having online outlets for our thoughts and musings, academic and otherwise, for graduate students by the visiting postdoc at my department, Melinda Baldwin , I'm motivated to update more frequently. The last time I worked on my online presence, about 6 months ago, I maxed out my facebook privacy settings, started to tweet , and built an academia.edu page . The next step is probably to build my own academic website, and most universities offer their graduate students the resources to do just that. Some of my friends have blogs that integrate their professional lives (CV, publications, etc.) with some outside interests, and some run more research-nuggets type...

There have been some pretty exciting developments in the last few months, and my poor blogging skills mean you may not have heard about any of them. Get ready for a barrage of updates! February: I applied to York University's  Science & Technology Studies graduate program . It's an interdisciplinary field that looks at science and society through the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies. This program seemed like a better fit for my project on wildlife films and the public perception of animal behaviour. March: I was accepted (yay!) and began preparing for the transition from U of T to York. We also got an exciting new desk, courtesy of IKEA. April: Isaac proposed and I sad yes! (I told you this would get exciting!) May: Loads of travel. I attended the 6th European Spring School in History of Science and Popularization on Visual Representations in Science, which meant a week on the sunny island of Menorca, Spain. Then I flew home to Montreal...