This is nominally a mission statement post where I write something profound about why I am publishing all my teaching materials online for anyone to poke through and play around with at their leisure. However, in all honesty, I cannot pinpoint one single reason for my decision, and the pressures of profundity threaten to derail me off into the Land of Gen-X Sarcastic Ambivalence™ if I’m not careful. Thus, it is best simply to get on with it and stop stalling.

Firstly, on a superficial level, I have been “hanging around” (in a social media sense) lately with a lot of digital humanities people who are pushing the envelope when it comes to the integration of technology and higher education. Naturally, all their talk about Zotero, THATCamps, ProfHacker, OpenCourseWare, and whatnot has started to penetrate my brain — like some sort of sentient, self-replicating nanovirus (probably exactly what the bastards want!) — and this website is one of the fruits of that DH infection.

Secondly, in a general sense, I am employed in a profession (higher education) that is all about the production, manipulation, and distribution of scholarly and general knowledge, and it strikes me as troublingly ironic that many still resist embracing those very principles in the manner and techniques in which they Edumacate Young Minds™ (uh oh, the sarcasm is slipping out…sorry). It is, I think, a resistance borne out of the idea of academic freedom but in a slightly twisted manner. The culture of higher education somewhat fetishizes the role of the professor/instructor in the classroom as an Island Unto Themselves, which inculcates a further sense of closed resistance when “threatened” with external scrutiny. In this age of macro budgetary pressures, outcomes assessment, and ideologically-driven but intellectually-stunted state legislators, wrapping up our teaching methods and materials in a Mystery Box (shout out to J.J. Abrams!) behind the walls of our Ivory Towers does not help anyone — not students, not society, and not even ourselves. If one of the goals of my profession is to showcase my scholarly activity (produce and distribute knowledge, right?), then there is no reason for me not to apply this to my teaching as well.

Ultimately, then, it comes down to a desire on my part to push past the Fear of the Open that pervades my experiences in higher education, particularly when it comes to teaching. Apologies again to J.J. Abrams’ great TED Talk for this tortured misappropriation, but, in higher education, mystery is not always more important than knowledge. Therefore, this website is me opening up the Mystery Box. Come take a look. Poke around. Take what you need (within the parameters of the Creative Commons License for this site, which you can find out more about by clicking here). And then give something back. It’s all good.