Hi, I'm Ryan.

I'm an instructional designer at Idaho State University, a Ph.D. student in English and the Teaching of English, and an academic journal editor.

Whether as a community college librarian, a college radio d.j., a rhetoric and composition instructor, or the other positions I've held, I help people understand complex ideas and systems, embrace curiosity, and explore new alternatives.

A better world is possible, and I aim to help make it happen. If you're curious for more details, here's more about me.

Featured Sections

Blog
Somewhat regular posts.
Notes
My digital garden.
Reading
What I'm reading.
Bookmarks
Annotated links.
Featured Pages
Other pages of note.
Colophon
How I make this site.
Postroll
Other people's posts.
Uses
I use & enthuse.

Featured Posts

Freire and Critical Librarianship

For Week One of the Critical Pedagogy MOOC MOOC, I write about Paulo Freire’s problem-posing method and its potential links to critical librarianship.

Recent posts

Software Carpentry Workshop Reflections

Although aimed at scientists, Software Carpentry’s workshops offer great learning experience for librarians, digital humanities folks, and anyone looking to work on digital files in groups.

Review of Online Archive of California

The Online Archive of California lies somewhere between a finding aid and a digital library—and is a huge boon to researchers that would be worth emulating elsewhere.

Bigfoot Spotting and Other Jekyll Adventures

A post where I describe trying—and thus far, failing—to use Bigfoot.js to make footnotes more engaging in a Jekyll/GitHub Pages blog. I’ll revisit this soon to give it another try.

New Directions in Information Fluency

Brief reflections on a talk about bringing digital humanities to the reference desk, which I co-presented with Katherine Ahnberg at the New Directions in Information Fluency conference.