Jim McGrath, PhD

Blog

  • New Resource: Teaching In The Age of AI

    I wanted to share a link to our Center for Teaching Innovation‘s new public-facing Canvas site, Teaching In The Age of AI. As you’ll see, the course has been published by me under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, so folks who can comply with those terms should feel free to keep that in mind! Some context that may…

  • Higher Ed Reading Roundup (February 2026)

    Hi! I miss writing and sharing writing related to my higher ed work online sometimes. Here are some recent thoughts that draw on recent readings and experiences. I continue to appreciate Eryk Salvaggio’s perspectives on AI (and not just because I was fortunate enough to work with him a while back on some Wikipedia stuff…

  • Digital Processes, Not Products: Embracing Digital Ephemerality and Iteration

    Digital Processes, Not Products: Embracing Digital Ephemerality and Iteration

    Hi! Below you’ll find the text of a “PODTalk” I gave at the 2025 POD Network Conference in San Diego. This was my first time attending and presenting at POD and I really enjoyed my experience there. Thanks to CTI Director Eliza Bobek for allocating resources for this professional development opportunity, and thanks to my…

  • Blue Books Are Also a Disruptive Technology

    “Blue books” are once again changing the landscape of assessment in higher education. While the instructors who are turning to these technologies may view blue books as a revival or a return to a familiar medium, many of our students do not know what they are and do not have much experience using them in…

  • ADAPT: A Generative AI Course Design Checklist

    As I’ve previously discussed on my blog, I am one of the nodes in the network of faculty, staff, and student support helping our campus community navigate the implications of AI on teaching and learning. Salem State University’s Center for Teaching Innovation continues to support folks throughout the summer, so as part of a “Summer…

  • AI Literacy, Digital Literacy, and Labor Literacy

    Since the Fall of 2022 (shortly after the public rollout of ChatGPT’s publicly-accessible GPT-3.5 version), a not-insignificant portion of my day job as an instructional designer has involved assessing, discussing, and sharing information about the impact of artificial intelligence (and especially generative AI tools like chatbots and agents) on higher ed. Most of that work…

  • Public Humanities, Data, and Degrees (National Humanities Conference 2024 Remarks)

    Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking at the National Humanities Conference as part of a session titled “The Data Landscape of Public Humanities.” I’ve included the description of the session below: In this roundtable, presenters and the audience will explore the data behind public humanities. Speakers from faculty and staff roles, advocacy…

  • Project Endings and Precarious Labor

    In April 2021 I was asked to participate in a virtual symposium hosted by The Endings Project, a grant-funded initiative interested in “creating tools, principles, policies and recommendations for digital scholarship practitioners to create accessible, stable, long-lasting resources in the humanities.” One of the big questions driving The Endings Project was, as you may have…

  • Pedagogical Investments in Flexibility and Accountability

    As I mentioned in my last post, I’m currently an Instructional Designer at Salem State University’s Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI). At times I will use this space to highlight some of the work I’ve been taking up at SSU as an instructional designer. I’ve got a few different motivations for doing so: One of…

  • Hi

    It’s been a while since I’ve written anything for this site and I’ve recently decided to get back into blogging. Well, microblogging more specifically I guess. I’m still keeping my “About” page as my site homepage for a bit in the event that things don’t pan out the way I’m hoping they do, but you…

  • “Networks of Injustice” (Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium Talk, April 2022)

    Last April I was thrilled to present a talk titled “Networks of Injustice: Reflections on Teaching Digital Public History and Data Literacy” as part of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) speaker series. Thanks so much to the DEFCon team for inviting me to participate here, and double thanks to Roopika Risam for introducing me…

  • New Publication: “Museums and Social Media During COVID-19” (The Public Historian)

    I have an essay titled “Museums and Social Media During COVID-19” in the November 2020 issue of The Public Historian. A preprint copy of the essay is also available via Brown University’s Digital Repository. Thanks to the editors of The Public Historian and to Amelia Grabowski and Adam Kozsary for offering their own insights. This…

  • New Publication: Doing Public Humanities

    This week saw the publication of Doing Public Humanities, a new collection of essays edited by Susan Smulyan and published by Routledge. Here’s the official book description from the publisher’s website: Doing Public Humanities explores the cultural landscape from disruptive events to websites, from tours to exhibits, from after school arts programs to archives, giving…

  • Reflections on Day of Digital Humanities 2020

    Today is Day of Digital Humanities, so I figured it would be fitting to write a blog post (don’t worry: I also wrote a Twitter thread). Once the semester wraps up here in a few weeks, my plan is to blog a little more. People with blogs tend to say that they plan to blog…

  • THATCamp Reflections: On The Unfinished Business of Unconferences

    The call for THATCamp reflections in the wake of the project’s sunsetting has generated a lot of interesting writing, as well as an informal record of some of the networks that intersected with (and, in some cases, emerged from) this “unconference” initiative (if you are unfamiliar with THATCamps and are still reading these words, here…

  • New Course: Digital Archives and Digital Publics (Spring 2020; Brown University)

    This semester (Spring 2020) I’m excited to teach “Digital Archives and Digital Publics,” a graduate-level course that builds on my own experiences with digital archives and digital public humanities and attempts to survey a wide range of perspectives from archivists, librarians, digital humanists, artists, and more. Here’s the official course description: This course considers the…

  • New Publication: Review of My Nola, My Story in Reviews in Digital Humanities

    The first issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities includes my review of My Nola, My Story, a digital humanities initiative led by Dr. Shearon Roberts at Xavier University of New Orleans that does the work of “gathering, documenting, classifying, contextualizing, and sharing the experiences and legacies of communities of color who have called New Orleans…

  • Breaking Bandersnatch: Using Twine to Teach Digital Project Development

    In the press that followed the December 2018 release of the Netflix interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, several references were made to the use of Twine in the project’s development process. While early stages of planning utilized Post-it notes and whiteboards, the Bandersnatch team eventually turned to Twine, “which is often used to design video…

  • Digital Storytelling Tools and Techniques (Wilson Center Digital Humanities Lab talk at the University of Georgia)

    Last week I gave a talk titled “Black Mirrors and Melting Wizards: Digital Storytelling Tools and Techniques” at the University of Georgia’s Wilson Center Digital Humanities Lab. My mom is a UGA alum, so it was great to visit Athens and learn about all the exciting digital work happening on campus! I also found time…

  • Go Fast / Go Slow: Supporting Digital Public Humanities At Various Speeds

    Hi! This post is a revised version of some remarks I gave on a “Space and Place” panel at ACH 2019. It’s also a kind of roundup of some conversations that happened at this fantastic conference. Many of the images here are screenshots of slides from my talk. Thanks to everyone cited here who informed…