About

This is the personal website of Mark Phillipson, and I welcome you to it.

Currently I direct the Graduate Student Programs and Services unit in Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning, which opened its doors in Fall 2015. In this capacity I work with a staff to devise and run teaching development programs and fellowships for graduate students. Sometimes we are delivering programs, and sometimes we are in the background supporting our Fellows and other graduate students who are taking the lead with, for example, interdiciplinary learning communities and local workshops in over 30 departments a semester. We also created and now run a range of free services for Columbia graduate students, include microteaching practice sessions, classroom teaching observations, and mid-course reviews. Our Teaching Development Program (TDP) allows doctoral students to tailor a curriculum for themselves out of the programming we run and sponsor, and get transcript certification for completing foundational or advanced tracks.

The CTL incorporated two units that I had previously worked at: The GSAS Teaching Center, which I directed from late 2012-2015, and the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), where I worked from 2006-2012.

When I joined the GSAS Teaching Center, I oversaw its relocation it into a new space in the heart of Columbia’s main library called Studio@Bulter, and I developed new programs such as the Innovative Teaching Summer Institute, various workshop tracks (ex: Collaborative Learning, Teaching with Video, Peer Teaching Observation), and new opportunities for graduate students such as the Lead Teaching Fellows and the Teaching Observation Fellows fellowships. All of these programs continue, in one form or another, in the new CTL. During my five years developing projects and strategy in Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, I led the Digital Bridges strategic initiative, which culminated in the multimedia analysis platform Mediathread, and working on any number of pedagogical schemes with Frank Moretti. Mediathread and many CCNMTL projects also live on in the CTL.

I’ve also taught steadily over the years in English Departments at Berkeley, Bowdoin College, and now Columbia. The whole time I’ve paired teaching with explorations inside and outside the academy, including a formative stint at @Home (later Excite@Home) during dot com days. Having a foot in tech led me to integrate class-authored websites into my teaching (1998 on), especially wikis (2002 on). Convinced at a certain point that academic libraries should be better integrated into digital learning spaces, and that I might even be able to do something about that, I earned a library degree at Simmons after my doctorate at Berkeley. The work at Columbia has given me a chance to bring a lot of this together — to work closely with faculty, grad students, developers, librarians, and media archivists on a variety of innovative projects.

Here’s a Prezified map of some of this, for your zooming pleasure:

To give you more of an idea of how any of that has fit together, here are a few surfacings of my work:

• 2016.02 – Columbia Spectator: Center for Teaching and Learning forum on inclusive teaching engages faculty, students
• 2014.12 – Columbia News: Studio@Butler Provides a Learning Space for Digital Collaboration
• 2013.12 – Superscript Magazine: Bringing Pedagogy into the 21st Century
• 2013.03 – New Media in Education 2013: Hacking the Archives
• 2012.05 – Superscript Magazine: Remembering Václav Havel
• 2012.02 – American University in Cairo conference plenary – #celebrity#violence#resistance: Media Analysis and Social Pedagogies (starts 39 minutes in)
• 2011.11 – Romanticist Research Group of NYU: Introducing MediaThread
• 2010.10 – New Media in Education Conference: Next Generation Media Analysis – Introducing MediaThread
• 2010.08 – Metropolitan New York Library Council, Digitization in the Real World: – “Special Collections, Digitization, and the Classroom: A New Model,” by Mark Phillipson and Michael Ryan
• 2008.12 – Univ. of Michigan Press: Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom – “Wikis in the Classroom: A Taxonomy,” by Mark Phillipson
• 2008.11 – Columbia Spectator: CU Helps Preserve the Apollo’s History
• 2006.12 – EDUCAUSE podcast: An Interview with Peter Kaufman and Mark Phillipson
• 2006.11 – Columbia News: Behind the Scenes at the Havel Web Site: In Conversation with CCNMTL
• 2006.05 – Simmons InfoLink: Snapshot: Mark Phillipson
• 2005.11 – Columbia Spectator: Let’s Talk After Class: The Way of the Wiki
• 2005.07 – Chronicle of Higher Education: Romantic Poetry Meets 21st-Century Technology
• 2005.03 – Washington Post: Blogging Clicks With Colleges
• 2004.09 – EDUCAUSE: Wide Open Spaces – Wikis, Ready or Not
• 2004.09 – AP Wire: Internet Info Sharing Goes Wiki
• 2003.11 – Bowdoin Academic Spotlight: Using New Media to Understand 19th-Century Literature

Clayfox.com has been appearing in some fashion on the web since, what, 1998. It was a blog in the late ’90s, for just a short time, until I shrugged off. In 2005 I made a more sustained move into bloglandia, though as you can see things have quieted down in recent years. I may yet rev up again. In the meantime, the site still offers older thoughts, some information about my teaching, and pictures – pictures pre-2005 or so are here, and the rest are on Flickr. The site is also the only authoritative source of Kapaga rules. I insist on that.

My better half, Scott Tebbetts, has been charming, challenging, and redeeming me since 1997. We married in October 2013.