Whenever I’ve had a blog, I’ve called it The Salt-Box. It’s a self-deprecating joke from Great Expectations, where Dickens’s preposterous Uncle Pumblechook says, “Plenty of subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their tails. That’s what’s wanted. A man needn’t go far to find a subject, if he’s ready with his salt-box.”
I’m the director of educational technology strategy at Northeastern University. Organizationally, I am in the Provost’s office, reporting to the Chief of AI. My highest-priority areas right now are agentic AI systems for teaching and learning, and research into how AI is being adopted, used, and experienced across higher ed. Plus the usual variety of side quests. Feel free to email me (address below) with speaking/writing invitations, faculty AI pilot questions, & reading recommendations (the gamut from scholarly articles to scifi).
Before moving into this role I was the assistant director of teaching & learning with technology in Academic Technologies. Before that, I worked on accreditation and academic operations at Woolf, and was the director of Research, Instruction, Technology in the Library & Information Technology Services of Trinity College (Hartford). I was also a tenured, full professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. George Williams and I founded ProfHacker, the Chronicle of Higher Education blog about teaching, technology, and productivity in higher ed that ran for nearly a decade. I’m a former faculty union president and vice-chair of the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress.
I support Liverpool Football Club, as do all good people. Boxers are the only real dogs.
| Email is jas.jones @ northeastern dot edu | RSS |
Views my own, not Northeastern’s.
Colophon: All text by me unless otherwise explicitly specified. Claude and Perplexity help sometimes with Jekyll plumbing and templating as well as clarity checks.