Christopher's Blog

A MALAT Student Blog

Rian Rietveld resigned, and then kept building anyway

In October 2018, Rian Rietveld resigned as lead of the WordPress accessibility team. Her stated reason was blunt: “the last year, especially the last few weeks have been too politically complicated for me” (Rietveld, 2018). The complications were specific. Gutenberg,… Continue Reading →

Khanmigo and the Ghost of the Grocery Truck

I spend a fair amount of my working week deciding which AI model does a given task and which one just makes it look done. So when Richard Clark writes that media are “mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do… Continue Reading →

What the Great Migration of 2004 Predicted About Plugin Lock-In

Weller’s (2020) Web 2.0 chapter tells the classic origin story: open source as liberation, free tools taking the technical hurdles out of publishing, no gatekeeper standing between you and hitting “post.” That’s the story WordPress tells about itself too, usually… Continue Reading →

Same Database, Different Silos: What 1998 and 2001 Predicted About WordPress

Weller’s (2020) chapter on 1998 contains the detail I did not expect in a book about universities: SPLOT, the family of minimal publishing tools built to strip account creation and technical overhead out of open web publishing (p. 38). Those… Continue Reading →

My Updated Digital Presence Plan

While I felt my initial Digital Presence Plan (DIDP) had a lot of merits, my understanding of my own online goals and how to best reach them has changed since its creation, and in the document I’ve updated the processes… Continue Reading →

The Pros & Cons of Digital vs. Paper Note Taking & Reading

By Christopher Ross, Radhika Arora, & Tracy Tang The tools we use can have a significant impact on our success. In the era of technology, academia now heavily involves the use of electronics to teach and share information. As we… Continue Reading →

Visual Network Map

I choose to create my Visual Network Map based on my overlapping areas of interest and quickly found that I have three common aspects to everyone I know. I’m related to them, I work with them, or I give back… Continue Reading →

What does “struggling to learn” mean to me?

When someone tells me that they struggle to learn and that they’re unsure if they can learn what I’m trying to teach them, I often think back to my own struggles and try to put myself in their place through… Continue Reading →

Free Photos for Learning

What does it look like to struggle to learn? I asked MidJouney AI that very question and loved the images it returned. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please feel free to share! These… Continue Reading →

Digital Presence Plan (DIDP)

Understanding Why I Need a Digital Presence Before I began planning a digital presence for myself, I was confronted with the question of why it would matter, to begin with. From a commercial marketing perspective, I understand the value intrinsically… Continue Reading →

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