The Archive

Below you will find links to all writing on this site grouped under a topic heading (some posts might apply in two headings, but I only list them in one, so keep scrolling!). Scroll down to the bottom if you are looking for an oddball post. The posts are usually listed in order from newest to oldest (unless it’s a series, then it’s numeric) – the newer materials are at the top.

If you’re looking for something and can’t find it, shoot me an email at david dot n do wright at gmail dot com and I’ll see if I can dredge it up for you.

Fabrication, Hackerspaces, Makerspaces, and The Digital Cultures Lab:

• ReThinking Failure in The Hackerspace – Thoughts about how we approach and judge failure, particularly as these thoughts come out of working in the Hackerspace.
• Getting to the Point – A post detailing the process of scanning an Indigenous arrow point so that a 3D-printed version could be made that the public could handle.
• Persistence and Serendipity: Summer in the Hackerspace – Here, I write about the activities of the Digital Cultures Lab and the hackerspace we ran from 2016 - 2018 in the Douglas College library.
• The Makerspace Classroom: The Classroom as Open Textbook and Ancillary OER Makerspace – This post is a run-through of a talk I gave at the 2016 Festival of Learning about the role Makerspaces might play as an archetype for classroom teaching. I reference Kin Lane and Robin DeRosa (actualham).
• The Disorder of Things: How We Might Represent Reading, Writing, and Interpretation – I write about using machines to scan books and model them as material objects. I reference trends in design, but mostly Speculative Everything and Foucault.
• Assessing the Maker Lab: What’s Going on After a Year? – A frank (and very popular!) assessment of what it takes to get a Makerspace / Hackerlab / The Digital Cultures Lab up and running, as well as an assessment of what things look like after one year of operations.

Open Education (Resources, Commentaries, Opinions)

• Kits for Open Access: The Big Picture Statement – as the title suggests, a very big, overarching, scan of my thoughts on developing kits for open learning.
• Building Board Games to Teach Literary Studies: Part I: Open Access Kits for Teaching and Learning – A preamble to my work developing board games, or the process of designing them, for teaching literature–particularly focused on entry-level concepts.
• Kits for Open Pedagogy: Towards a Physical Practice for Open Access – A post about my development of a series of kits for open pedagogy.
• The Flipped LMS: A Workflow – Working with Paul Hibbitts’ Flipped LMS in Grav – As the title suggests, this is a long workflow for using Github and Paul Hibbitts’ early version Grav-based open course software (or, flipped LMS). Might not be relevant to for Paul’s newer versions of his Flipped LMS.
• Open Inquiry about Higher Education: Purposeful Assignments as Reflective Institutional Inquiry – This post is about purposeful assignments and the role academics might play in valuing the work of students.
• The Constraints of Curriculum: Part 1 of 5 Reflections on Open Education – (The first a series of posts emerging from the 2015 Open Education Conference.)
• Open as Analogue; Or, What Do We Mean by Openness? Part 2 of 5 Reflections on Open Education – The second post reflecting on the 2015 Open Education Conference.
• Control: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’: Part 3 of 5 Reflections on Open Education – (The third post reflecting on the 2015 Open Education Conference.)
• Sponsorship & Stewardship: Passing in the Night: Part 4 of 5 Reflections on Open Education – The fourth post reflecting on the 2015 Open Education Conference. This one references Lumen Learning.
• Take a Load Off Fanny: And, And, And, Put the Load Right on Me: Part 5 of 5 Reflections on Open Education – The final post in the series, this one tackles workload and expectations on faculty.