Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Category: Education Technology
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Thoughts on Licensing: Why I Prefer CC-BY Licenses
Robin DeRosa recently posted an open question about CC licensing on Twitter that got me thinking: Thinking of changing my @creativecommons default license from CCBY to CCBYNC. I get that CCBY is the more open technically, but I'm thinking here about my vision for open (in particular as it relates to public higher ed), and…
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Getting Started with Pressbooks: A guide for Higher Education use cases
For the past few years, I’ve been helping faculty and other subject experts at UW-Madison develop and publish openly licensed textbooks and other learning activities using Pressbooks, free and openly licensed software which was originally conceived by Hugh McGuire as a way to extend WordPress in order to publish electronic books. I began this work…
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Adding Interactivity to Web Annotation
For the past few years, I’ve been working to improve how content experts at my university can write, develop, and publish open educational resources. Early in 2016, I published my own set of core principles for an authoring & publishing tool. I first began developing these principles in the summer of 2015, and after comparing…
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A Guide to DIY Podcast Recording
A little more than two years ago, my friend Dave had an idea: he wanted to do a weekly podcast called “Off the Chain,” on which he would talk about things he thought were off the chain: chiefly, his love of Vin Diesel and terrible action movies. I couldn’t care less about Diesel or action…
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Making a Personal Website: A guide for grad students and other academics
I currently work as an educational technology consultant at a large Midwestern research university. Most of the people I work with are humanities/social science grad students or faculty. One of the most common questions I get asked is how to build a website. I’ve heard it so often, helped so many friends build quick, simple…
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2016: The Year in OER at UW-Madison
2016: The Year in OER at UW-Madison OER STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK On an institutional level, the big news at UW-Madison in 2016 was the publication of the Open Education Resources (OER) page and strategic framework (pdf) on the Educational Innovation (EI) website at the beginning of the Fall 2016 semester (full disclosure: I was a co-author…
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Core Principles for an eText Authoring Tool
eText Authoring at UW-Madison About a year ago, I began thinking seriously about an eText authoring platform that could be used to write and publish openly-licensed texts. I work at a large research university in the American midwest, which means that a large percentage of my colleagues are engaged directly in both high-level academic research…