a potpourri of intentions, including #DigiWriMo

…always good, more often paving stones and cul de sacs. Walking the road, we make it: if not, then not. 

Looking at the date on the last post this morning, I realized it's coming on two weeks between posts. October been a busy month, with #CEW2015, a month of social justice actions and a handful of conferences behind us.

In drafts, I have three different Campus Equity Week posts: two farewell posts (random observations and link bundles) and one about sausage making for the CEW Archive Project (2001-2015 ~ not limited to this year's event). My intention is to explain the process as clearly as possible: it's a fishing lesson too. The more of us collecting and sharing information the better. During CEW, I ran the archive feed here, at the top of the left sidebar, but recently changed it out for "adjunct" with the intention of rotating topics.

Also I started a post about the 2015 dLRN Conference, hashtagged #dLRN15 and titled "Making Sense of Higher Education: Networks and Change." Notably, the event welcomed digital participation and had at least three sessions on adjunctification -- including one Plenary and a Keynote. I bookmarked a number of outstanding blog posts.

George Veletsianos neatly summarizes:

❝I was at a small gathering last week, called the Digital Learning Research Network. It was hosted at Stanford and it aimed to explore the messiness of digital learning. This was not representative of Silicon Valley’s uncritical love affair with technology. Many colleagues wrote reflections about it: Catherine Cronin, Kristen Eshleman,  Josh Kim, Jonathan Rees, Tim Klapdor,  Alyson Indrunas, Adam Croom, Whitney Kilgore, Matt Crosslin, Laura Gogia, Patrice Torcivia, and Lee Skallerup Bessette (to name a few). When was the last time you were at a small conference, other than the ones focusing on blogging, and this many people took time after the event to blog about it?

and closed:

❝I see the conference as the start of a longer and larger conversation. Many of us are doing research in this space and many were missing. Let’s expand the conversation.

This incomplete post has an excuse of sorts: I've been waiting for the videos.

On the road ahead, Digital Writing Month, the NaNoWriMo for nerdy educators, started November 1. To call the format flexible would be an understatement. It's not too late to jump in or necessary to go at any pace but your own.

Then comes semester end for most, the holiday season for all, followed MLA Convention, MLA Subconference and other conferences. Back in donkey days, covering MLA was obligatory, a burden: no longer. Siegfried Sassoon on foxhunting comes to mind. I'm more partial to Subcon for its inherent subversiveness and even more so to EVO or Electronic Village Online for sentimental and other reasons. Above all, I am interested in how conferences can become more accessible and less exclusive as they evolve. As Bryan Alexander writes about #Edu15:

❝Participants seemed eager to work both virtual and face-to-face realms to improve communication.... In short: the old conference walls are continuing to tumble down, brick by pixel. Not all the way, but watch this trend.

So many topics and potential posts tucked away between the lines ...