In a blog post, outline major and minor sections for a professional website/ePortfolio in your field or discipline (or, at minimum, information you would want to make available through sites like Academia.edu (Links to an external site.) or ResearchGate (Links to an external site.)). For at least four of the sections/pages, briefly discuss how and why it is important to your field/discipline and/or specific things to remember or include. Also discuss if there are multiple sites (like some listed above) that you should maintain your professional presence. Title your blog post something like “websites/ePortfolios in <insert name of your field/discipline>;” don’t forget to categorize or tag your post “PFF Summer 2015.”

Review the Carnegie classification activity you completed in the Introductory module.  What are the research expectations/requirements for the category of institution you are most interested in?  You can do this by picking one example college/university you would be interested in working for, and then conducting more in-depth study such as by reviewing research expectation documents or the tenure guidelines of for the institution (sometimes published on the institution’s website), looking up 2-3 CVs of faculty members at the selected institutions and examining their research productivity, or discussing research expectations with a faculty member at the institution.  In a brief blog post (<250 words), discuss what you learned about the research expectations.  How has it changed the way you plan to prepare for an academic career?  Title your blog post something like “Reflections on Faculty Research Expectations” and don’t forget to categorize or tag your post as “PFF Summer 2015.”

In doing so,

• Think about all the different times of the year that you may connect with your students.  What do the students want from you at these different times?  Now, think about your student population: Who are they?  Traditional? Non-traditional?  Military?
• What are your different roles as an advisor?  What do you want your students to get out of their interactions with you?
• Think about key academic and career planning questions that would guide your advising/interactions with students. Create 3-5 questions you can ask students to get them motivated and involved in their academic and career planning.
• How can you use technology to enhance your interactions with your students?

Remember, advising is also teaching.  You may want to go back and think about your teaching philosophy and how your advising philosophy links to your teaching philosophy.

Education

Education takes a priority in most CVs. People generally want to know what schooling you’ve had and from where. This is true across nearly all disciplines.

Projects

Commonly found in careers and professions that cross with programming or more product-based work, CVs in digital humanities and related fields often want an emphasis early in the document on what the person has worked on and where it can be found online. Most people link out to their sites or to where the code can be found. BitBucket and GitHub links go here, for example.

Professional Experience

Depending on the position or nature of the job applied for, this section might be before Projects. If the person has worked as a professor of record or has other teaching experience, it would go here. The same for titles held.

Publications & Presentations

Usually later in the document, this section is the ubiquitous one where the person lists out where they have been published or spoken. Depending on other factors, this section can be subdivided into areas that make sense logically to do so. For example, if paper publishing is more important, that section can be broken out. The same with presentations or public white papers for more commercials jobs.

I can’t write I was overly surprised. I’ve seen a few CVs of active members of the digital humanities and game studies fields. In comparison, mine is rather sparse, of course, but that has more to do with my own beginning in the field and lack of time and ability to pursue conferences or publishing opportunity as an undergrad.

Still, I’m two semesters into a Masters and have had one publication and presented at one conference. I’m not behind by any means, but I could press for more, obviously. There’s always more to do, present on, or speak at conferences about.

My CV-esque (very work-in-progress) site: dancox.me

CV Resources:

• Purdue OWL
• Religious affiliation and hiring discrimination in New England: A field experiment
• cv.edu (‘Cause, get it? The college’s name is CV!)
• Community College Applications
• Anatomy of a CV (from Duke University)

CV Examples in Digital Humanities:

• Lisa M. Spiro
• Bethany Nowviskie
• Rebecca Frost Davis
• Trevor Muñoz

I can’t write that I was overly surprised after skimming through the wording of the classifications and looking up Old Dominion University’s own statistics. In recent months, as I gear up to potentially move and begin a PhD program in another state, I’ve had several discussions about the differences between “Research 1” and other classifications of institutions. Most of these conversations have been centered on how I may want to continue my academic career: did I want more research or teaching emphasis? And the realization, of course, that the choice, depending on the institution, is often made by taking a position there in the first place.

Still, I found the classifications interesting. Or, I should clarify, I found the justifications of the changes to the classifications much more interesting. Categories are always tyrannical and given down from a position of power. That Carnegie gets have its name in the classification system shows a profound level of power, there. Impressive if not equally troubling.

While I have had several conversations with professors that I consider mentors in the past about career and research goals, what most intrigued me about this class as a whole was the ability to discuss the questions and concerns I have about academia and the role of networks and professionalism in such settings. It is rare to have such safe spaces to openly discuss and learn about other people’s thoughts outside of some (frequently) negative experiences where the “what not to do” is explored. I appreciate the opportunity to consider such issues while in the midst of being able to change potentially poor behaviors.

Personally, I am the most interested in ways to leverage my existing skills in finding my own niche within academia and how I can use my current networks to both find and give support to others. As someone who has moved across very different departments in recent years, I can state with a high degree of certainty that the best way forward for academia is through interdepartmental development and programs where experts in different fields can discuss problems and find solutions together.

Dan Cox

I often lead with calling myself an “independent developer.” It’s a nice way of explaining that, while I often make things in digital spaces, I’ve rarely worked in a professional capacity while doing it, and often fund my own experiments myself. It also works well to introduce my GitHub portfolio and the open source projects I’ve contributed to in the past, too.

Some more recent (and silly) examples of the types of things I generate include “Shantal or Jesus? A quiz game” and Rumors About Dan.com.

Education:

B.S., Major Computer Science, Minor English, Old Dominion University, Fall 2013
M.A., Rhetoric and Composition, Old Dominion University, Spring 2016

Research:

In the past, I’ve been part of a semester-long research project studying mobile device usage in learning spaces and have worked to analyze the situating practices of assignment prompts generated from ODU’s QEP IDW program.

I’m personally interested in the intersection of instructional design and the increasing trends of gamification across many domains. Central to this exploration on my own time has been my on-going, weekly series of videos on using the software Twine and my many how-to guides on my personal blog.

Teaching:

While I have never taught a class myself, I have considerable teaching assistant experience through being attached to CS300T for two semesters and CS411W for three semesters. I’ve also participated in (Fall 2013) and observed (Spring 2015) two different QEP week-long sessions at ODU.

Goals:

Currently, my intention is to finish my Masters within the next year and move on to a PhD program with either an emphasis in Digital Humanities or Game Studies. Most of my personal work previous to graduate school has been based in either writing about or creating game-based artifacts and I have recently taken an interest in combining these skills with pedagogical approaches in trying to teach material in newer and often more dynamic ways.