Even after many years of attending, being a member of, and now serving in Community of Christ, I’m still alternately surprised by how many things are the same as my Latter-day Saint upbringing and how many things are different. In the latter category, even though I’ve intellectually understood this for a while, it still surprises me that the World Conferences of Community of Christ (renamed from General Conferences in the 1960s) are sites of debate and discussion rather than a series of sermons.

I’m happy to share that the Fall 2023 edition of my remixed Introduction to Data Science textbook is now available on my website. This book adapts material from the “ModernDive” Statistical Inference via Data Science course, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s excellent Data Feminism, a number of other Creative Commons-licensed works, and some of my own contributions to put together a no-cost, openly-licensed textbook for my data science students. I put together the first edition of this book for last Fall’s version of this course, but the first run through taught me a lot, and I’m very happy about this edition (though I do have a small laundry list of errors to fix, and I’d like to eventually get into some fiddlier bits like removing social media icons from the header).

I just barely microblogged something about what I want to say here, but over the past hour, it’s been nagging at me more and more, and I want to write some more about it.

I was introduced to academia through educational technology, and I was introduced to educational technology through a class at BYU taught by David Wiley. This class was not about educational technology, but David’s passion for Web 2.0, Open Educational Resources, and remix culture were so strong that I got hooked. OER and Creative Commons licensing both got firmly planted deep in my thinking, and even though they never became a focus of my own edtech work, they’ve also never left my brain.

This summer, I’m remixing an alternative textbook for my Fall intro to data science class, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how helpful Creative Commons-licensed journal articles are proving. Shows that “open access” is only part of license’s benefits.

Unsatisfied with the Intro to Data Science textbook I’ve inherited. Fortunately, an earlier version is Creative Commons-licensed, as are some other fantastic resources. Guess who’s going to remix himself a new textbook for next Fall!