My dear imagined readers,

I imagine you must have been wondering, these long months since my last post, what (if anything) I’ve been up to, since it clearly has not been writing punnily titled essays and posting them here. As it turns out, I’ve been up to quite a lot, for quite some time, and the first of those projects to bear fruit is finally ready for harvest today. I am pleased to announce the official launch of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, a free and open-access online academic journal that has the benefit of combining several of my academic interests, including interactive pedagogy, digitally enhanced learning, and long strings of modifying phrases. The easy-to-remember url? cuny.is/jitp.

The journal’s architecture and mission are the product of an editorial collective that includes faculty, staff, and students (with fully half of our 14 members current PhD students), mostly from CUNY, and mostly either participants in or leaders of the certificate program in interactive technology and pedagogy. Among our goals is to raise the level of the conversation around how tech is used in teaching and learning, recognizing that the tools themselves are neutral: they can harm as well as help, depending on what they’re being used for, so we should examine closely what we want to use them for, and why. The JITP has the support of some top-notch scholars in the DH and TechRhet worlds, and I’m rather excited to see where we can go from here.

My involvement, like the involvement many of the collective members, has been widespread: I’ve helped write and revise guiding documents, both internal and public; I’ve reviewed incoming submissions, and copyedited several of the articles now published. And, with my Co-Editor of Issue Two, Joe Ugoretz, I wrote the now-active Call for Submissions (running now through May 1st!), and will soon be ramping up to even fuller involvement in the crafting of the journal’s contents. But the real motive force behind this entire year-plus worth of effort is our amazing Managing Editor, and Co-Editor (with Kimon Keramidas) for Issue One, Sarah Ruth Jacobs. She is a living testament that grad students can be a powerful force against inertia, and I am extremely grateful to have worked with her thus far, and delighted to continue doing so in the future.

So: check out the journal! Leave comments and extend the conversation! We’re looking forward to hearing from you! No exclamation marks necessary.