​Last week I attended the 2019 ‘E’ffordability Summit at University of Wisconsin-Stout. This two-day, regional conference focuses on practices that help drive down costs for students with a focus on open educational resources. This conference was a great introduction to understanding the reasons for the open educational resource movement, as well as a broader movement to open education (not just course materials, but overall transparency and accessibility for education, students, and educators). Read on for highlights from the conference!

​NITOP this year was wonderful, as usual! The talks and posters were inspiring, and TNP team was all together for the first time! Here were my main take-away points from the conference. 

​The Psychonomic Society is making great strides towards making science more accessible to the public. This became very evident to me when I attended a lunchtime workshop on Saturday, and I have to say, I was impressed. One way they’re doing this is through the featured content page on website. It was launched a little over 4 years ago, and since then they’ve posted over 400 blog-style posts covering research that’s been published in their journals. The posts are written with lay-people in mind, so the reading level wouldn’t be too tough if you were to incorporate their posts into your undergraduate curriculum. I’ll say more about that in a bit. 

At the Psychonomics conference, I attended the Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS) workshop. For those of you who don’t know, WiCS is an organization that seeks to improve the visibility of women in the field, create an environment that encourages young women to join the field, provide support and training, and assist with professional development. I’ve been a member of WiCS for a couple years now, and I always make a point to attend their workshop if I’m going to Psychonomics. In previous years, the topic of the workshop has always been useful, and I’ve taken advantage of their speed mentoring program. For someone just starting out or someone more established, there’s something to be gleaned from the meeting. 

In my post last week, I mentioned I was going to be a Twitternome at Psychonomics. I was actually given permission to post on behalf of the Psychonomic Society through their twitter account! What a great opportunity! I tagged myself in all of the tweets I posted for them, but for some reason they aren't showing up on my page. So I gather all of my tweets together here for you to see for yourself! 

​Not sure if any of our readers are going, but I’ll be headed to Psychonomics later this week in New Orleans. I’m looking forward to the conference; there are several talks and poster sessions I’m excited for. Also, I’m greatly anticipating the WiCS workshop and speed mentoring session! And I’m impatiently awaiting to eat the wonderful food that awaits! Cajun food in near and dear to my heart. 

Last week I posted a list of resources and technology I learned about at ACT, so I thought I would follow it up this week with a list of activities and assignments that I learned about at the conference. In no particular order, here they are!

​Last week I wrote a post discussing a SoTL agenda, which came from a talk at ACT. One of the points in that agenda was to use true experimental design in SoTL research studies. Immediately following the SoTL agenda talk (in the same room even) was a talk covering a SoTL research study where they used true experimental design! What are the chances!