SPROUTLIGHT ∞ contact me

My name is Callie Dominique Karlsson Speer, and this site has been around in one form or another since the misty haze of 2000.

Education: I have a PhD in Education and an MS in Sociology from North Dakota State University. My BA is in History from the University of Minnesota, Morris. I also attended Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan. I enjoy learning and hope to never stop.
Research: I have been exploring questions of meaning making, including cognitive structures, language, and narrative in the context of education abroad. I'm also interested in digital storytelling and journaling/sketchnoting as a means of agency and self-expression in a modern world.
Professional: I currently am a Product Specialist with Terra Dotta, gathering user needs to support the development of Engage, a new product enabling more effective outreach for study abroad. I have been working in international education since 2007, and previous to that I spent some time working in both banking and travel. I studied abroad, taught English, and now have had the honor of leading student groups to Japan as part of a co-designed class on self-identity. The old classic LinkedIn has more details if you are curious.
Site: Sproutlight is lovingly hand-coded using html, css, a tiny bit of php, and lightbox. There are easier ways to do it, but I hand code for the same reason people keep a garden: I like to get the code under my fingernails.
Online: I am most active on this blog (including the connected page on micro.blog) and on Mastodon. I also post on Instagram and every once in a while on Flickr.