Digital literacy, instruction and academics

Minecraft for Research and Education

It started as an after-school programming side project for kids at the Urbana Free Library and eventually turned into 6 years of summer camps and a series of NSF grants based on informal learning and science simulation!

Makerspace Education Demos

I’ve recently been learning that not everyone knows what I mean when I say “makerspace education” – so I’ve created...

Professional Development Workshops

PD for technology educators and information professionals, including librarians, teachers and community engagement specialists. Includes substantial work internationally.

UXD Class Learning Objectives Mapping

An example of comprehensive curriculum design - connecting assignments to anticipated learning outcomes and accompanying assessments.

Mobile Fab Lab Model

We needed a way to bring the Fab Lab out into the community so I established a model that was low-cost, mobile, scalable and education-oriented that has been seeded in dozens of locations.

Have the Seasons Really Changed?

As a small child I remember the weather in Illinois being quite different. Everyone I know talks about global warming as an accepted reality and something that’s bigger than our individual anecdotal experiences of climate but I can’t help get over being hung up on my personal relationship to the weather, it feels more meaningful than charts and graphs. I decided to see how my memory matches up with data.

Lectures and Presentations

Slideshow graphics, recorded lecture presentations and tutorials from 2016 on.

Academic Posters

Collaborative Image Annotation Tool for GIS

In 2009 the Graduate School of Library and Information Science sent a team of community informatics researchers to São Tomé to digtize maps and help the local government establish a Geographic Information Systems, with the intention of putting it to use for applications related to governance and population studies. As part of this process teams located at UIUC and on the island had to communicate with one another to translate, evaluate and annotate map resources. I built a tool based on Omeka, an open source archival web app, that would aid researchers in these tasks. It also had potential for applications in medical image review or graphic asset analysis.