About

About

Hi there. I'm Robert Talbert and welcome to my website.

I am a Professor in the Mathematics Department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan USA. I teach math classes (mostly for computer science and engineering students), keep active with research, and participate in a large department of 40+ faculty members and hundreds of math majors in a rapidly-changing world for higher education. I'm the author of Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty (Stylus 2017), detailed on my Book page; and I'm currently working on a new book Grading For Growth with my colleague David Clark. You can read more of what David and I are thinking about at the Grading For Growth blog.

I'm on a mission to make higher education a better version of itself. This website is the home base for that mission. It's where I put my often half-baked but always whole-hearted ideas out on display about how I am making sense of the wickedly complex issues about teaching, learning, technology, and faculty work (and sometimes broadsides on higher education as a whole).

I'm active as a speaker and consultant in the areas of flipped learning, teaching with technology, self-regulated learning, and other areas. To learn more about my speaking and consulting, please head over to my Speaking page.

I have an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Tennessee Technological University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from Vanderbilt University, where I studied algebraic topology, homological algebra, and category theory under the direction of Efstratios Prassidis. Prior to GVSU, I was on the faculty at Bethel College (Indiana) (now Bethel University) and Franklin College.

I grew up in middle Tennessee, lived in Indiana for 14 years after graduate school, then moved to western Michigan in 2011. I live with my wife, two teenaged children, and three cats about 20 miles from the beach along Lake Michigan and 20 miles from Grand Rapids. I enjoy writing, reading, cooking, and being either out on the road with my bike or on the water with my kayak.

Contacting me

To contact me:

Robert Talbert

I used to be on Twitter, but I stepped away from the platform recently and while I still post content there via a third-party service, I now rarely check replies or DM's.

Where is everything?

I have been blogging in one form or another, and one place or another, since 2005. Since then, this website has undergone at least four complete redesigns and/or migrations to other platforms. Unfortunately this has led to a lot of fragmentation, and it might be hard to find stuff. Here are some suggestions if you can't find what you're looking for.

First, try the Search feature found at the top of this page. If that doesn't bring back what you're looking for, try a Google search using rtalbert.org [name of topic]. For example rtalbert.org learning objectives brings up a bunch of posts about learning objectives.

Otherwise, generally speaking:

  • All posts from 2015--2018 are located here at this website.
  • From 2011 through 2015, my blog was hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Unfortunately, the blog network at the Chronicle was closed down in 2015, and recently all the archived posts were purged. Fortunately I had a backup, and I've set up this Wordpress site for you to access all the old stuff: https://co9beta.wordpress.com/  One day I hope to port all these over to this site, but until then, it's too much work.
  • Also all the posts from 2005-2015 are at that Wordpress site too, although the pre-2010 posts are embarassing, like junior high yearbook photos.

About this site

This website is powered by Ghost and hosted on Digital Ocean. It uses a modified version of the Casper theme. Mathematical typesetting is provided by MathJax.