Ryan P. Randall @foureyedsoul@scholar.social

‪Pretty sure there's a lot of folks in the Fediverse who teach—particularly library folks—who'll enjoy this take on how instructional design can be improved by thinking like a dungeon master.‬

‪"Benevolent subversions" is a phrase that'll stick in my mind, too.‬

‪https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/53553/five-best-practices-teachers-can-learn-from-dungeon-masters‬

Can anyone link to a—preferably open access / open web / OER—source with a good definition of "positionality"?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on "Feminist Perspectives on the Body" ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-body/#Inte ) is the closest I've found thus far.

I'm hoping to find something closer to 3 sentences long. Social sciences, ethnic studies, critical race theory would be closer to the target audience's mindset than philosophy.

If you're tenure-track, contingent, or tenured faculty, please consider signing this petition in support of UC Santa Cruz grad students striking for decent housing and livable wages.

They are now threatened by Janet Napolitano with being fired if they don't stop their strike by Feb 21st. #cola4all #UCSCstrike

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdG2HqiSsC2XFFaT26e0YfGkRNo0LbIxQAiCxHoG12IlErlSw/viewform

Over on the birdsite, Dr. Robin James reiterates: "All claims for the non ideological or apolitical character of X are political and ideological claims." https://twitter.com/doctaj/status/1228349332807614465

Considering all the asinine approaches to "neutrality" in libraries lately, I had to make this image to help reinforce the point.

#libraryNeutrality #critLib #timeToTalkAboutIF

So I ended up making good progress on that academic website theme for GitHub Pages.

The goal is for it to be editable entirely within the browser interface, for folks who don't want to have to install Jekyll or other techie stuff.

If you want to try it out, here's an early version of it: https://github.com/ryan-p-randall/distance-learning

Here's a link to a meta-thread with antiracist resources, compiled by a medievalist: https://twitter.com/isasaxonists/status/1223217691462455297?s=21

That simultaneously seems like a good insight and profoundly unworkable, since what I consider my best products & my best ways of working have always been connected to sustained ADHD hyperfocusing… ways of using my brain & time that really aren't compatible with the daily structures that come with any life rhythm beyond 24/7 grad student living.

Here's to making new practices & dispositions, I guess?

Running with the music analogies, maybe what I need to do is *~practice~* writing like I have in the past practiced guitar / bass.

Then each article submission or conference paper would be more like playing a show or recording a song: a smaller set of movements I want to showcase, having honed and discarded related movements elsewhere.

Feeling those interdisciplinarity blues & wondering what sort of genre/form would suit the ways I think.

If academic disciplines are roughly equivalent to ways of knowing, each of which correlates to a preferred genre / mode for expressing knowledge… what's an adequately interdisciplinary form?

A dj mix? A (sequenced, unmixed) mixtape? A field recording of a listener scrolling through radio stations? A compilation / anthology with reading notes?

Clearly, the question is: what to call it?

I want the name to nod to its origins, possibly be funny, …and to be honest, possibly *discourage* its adoption by anyone who'd expect lots of maintenance / free labor from me.

Ideas so far:
- Remote Academic Mistakes
- Distance Learning
- Minimal Academics

If anyone has inspiration for names or ideas about the theme, I'm interested.

Now that I'm back in the mindset of updating my website, I might spend time the next few days / weeks making an academic-oriented fork of Minimal Mistakes^1 that incorporates some of the AcademicPages^2 techniques for creating a CV.

1: https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/
2: https://academicpages.github.io

The new version of Minimal Mistakes has a remote gem option, which basically simplifies maintenance by letting its creator update a source that everyone else's site pulls from.

As part of my emerging "hey, infrastructure" theme, I've been trying out a sort of "interface layer" between my daily tasks & my longer-term goals (weekly, monthly, choose yr fave longer-than-a-day increment).

So far I've been doing this in a single file with headers.

It simultaneously feels like a powerful addition to this way of tracking tasks & a really dangerous deviation from how I've managed everything the last few years.

https://scholar.social/@foureyedsoul/103263513789853183