Hi. And Welcome - Troy Mousia

One thing I’ve discovered over the years is that if a project looks effortless, it’s often hiding the real achievement: the patient practice of learning how to think through making.

I build things as a way of thinking.

That’s the short version. The longer version is that I am a librarian and work in media services at a university, which means I spend my days at the fascinating intersection of pedagogy, technology, and the messy reality of what happens when students are asked to make something. I’ve been doing this long enough to have opinions about how to teach multimedia production, about what gets lost when tools are treated as neutral, about the gap between what educators imagine a “podcast assignment” will be and what students actually experience when they sit down in front of editing software with a script and no plan.

What I also do is manage a media center at a university. I’ve never really seen it as a production shop or a service counter. It’s more like a space of learning the various ways to enact accompaniment. I work alongside learners as they navigate all the friction between an idea and its execution. That friction, whether it is the awkward recording session, the timeline that crashes, the script that suddenly stops making sense, is the design itself.

So I gave up early on the interest in showcasing perfection. More interested in how I can get better at cultivating the conditions where imperfection can be the spaces that keeps teaching.

What I Believe

In a culture that prizes outcomes, the most radical thing I can do with students is to celebrate all the evidence in motion. What is that evidence? I suppose it could be a student’s portfolio of polished artifacts, but for me it’s these remarkable traces of persistence I notice in students: the willingness to iterate, to risk failure, and to keep returning to their work with new questions.

Also, I’ve learned that to build learning around creative production is to make peace, over and over again, with uncertainty. To let go of that tight grip on whatever helps me maintain the illusion I can control outcomes.

I’ll also admit to a preferential option for the struggling learner. And I don’t mean the one excluded from the educatonal space but those who are just (temporarily) estranged from their own sense of capacity: the novice creator, the shy amateur, the frustrated student, the one who might feel hopelessly stuck. I guess I was once all of those, and still am, when I look around and am humbled by what little I really know about anything. So my own focus on learning is to learn myself how to accompany them and to affirm that their confusion is, or can be, one of the most generative sites of learning.

I’m often asked to present evidence of the “cool things” students make with the resources I manage. But here’s the truth: I often can’t. The best student 18-22 year old’s projects rarely arrive into the world fully formed or polished. They mostly unfold across drafts, semesters, even years. What I’m more preoccupied with is getting better at building an infrastructure of capacity. The ability to take an idea, test it in some form, and carry that practice forward into new contexts. Thankfully I’ve never seen my role as having some responsibilty to deliver students to a showcase moment in their projects. It’s to accompany them through their fragile drafts where I know that insight actually forms if it is nurtured and cared for.

I’ve never been good at measuring “success” by how polished a project looks on the outside, but by whether a student has learned to linger in a conversation with their own uncertainty long enough for it to teach them something.

What I’m Building

All of these convictions have been turning into various projects. Tools, frameworks, writing. This site is where I’m documenting some of them. Not sure how many finished products I can point to as of this writing, but I’ll share works in progress. Prototypes. Arguments that happen to be written (or hidden) in code. And yes, generative AI has and will break a lot things, but one thing it has broken is the (often gate-kept) distance between an idea of making something and actually making it. Having been in this world of “ed-tech” for many years now, and having seen the postures, my own abandoned pursuits of having to try to be a hero to make something with brittle tools, generative AI is changing the conditions of who even gets to make things.

A few threads run through everything here:

Making as inquiry. Production tools and practices are more than delivery mechanisms for finished thinking. They are generative spaces where new thinking happens. Arrangement is argument. A cut is a claim. The medium, whatever it might be, shapes what can be said, and students deserve to learn that before they’re asked to make something in it.

The invisible infrastructures of scholarly making. File management. Citation for non-traditional sources. The friction of format conversion. The moment a student can’t find their Downloads folder or install some software. These are more than just footnotes to the real work. They are the work, and they’re almost always invisible in how we design learning environments.

Choreography as the real intervention. Tools don’t fix pedagogy. Timing does. Sequencing does. Giving students early, low-stakes encounters with the medium while their ideas are still flexible. All this practice can change everything. A fifty-minute software tutorial at the end of the semester changes almost nothing.

Narrative and rhetorical thinking for research communication. How do you take a listener on a journey through your inquiry, rather than just presenting your conclusions? That’s a learnable skill, and it’s different from writing. It requires its own space. Somewhere.

On AI

I’ve been using generative AI tools, extensively, in building these projects. I want to be transparent about that because the conversation around AI in education is mostly stuck somewhere between panic and hype and refusal. I’m not in any of those camps.

Here’s what AI is doing for me: it’s helping me complete the most important step, which is the next one. I’m not a professional developer. I have ideas about pedagogy and design that I can articulate (somewhat) clearly, and I guess I also have the stubbornness to sit with a problem until something works. Generative AI helps to close the gap between those two things. I’ve let go of the expectation that it should be a source of truth or that is should get facts right about the world. And in doing so, a fair amount of disappointment evaporated. I use a repertoire of branded tools (Claude Code, Open AI Codex, Google Gemni) that let me build functional prototypes of ideas that would otherwise stay trapped in my markdown documents app and crappy slide decks.

And here’s what’s novel and worth pointing out: What generative AI does is maintain the thread between language and implementation, between articulating a pedagogical idea and seeing it run.

The irony is not lost on me: I’m using a tool that most of academia is anxious about to build things that embody a critique of how tools get used in teaching. But that’s sort of the point. The tools are not neutral. They shape what’s possible. And what I’m finding is that building with them (not just prompting for answers) can be its own form of inquiry. The code (and the over-commenting I bake into the prompts) becomes a way of testing ideas. Every design decision is in some way a question, or a claim, about how I’m exploring how learning works. These are pedagogical musings for sure, often written in React and Supabase edge functions instead of prose.

Manifestoes disguised as code, if you want to be dramatic about it. I often do.

What You’ll Find Here

Project logs. Design rationale. Occasional arguments about the state of multimedia pedagogy. Documentation of what I’m building, what’s working, what isn’t, and what I’m learning along the way.

By centering the creative friction of making, I’m trying to work toward a form of education that prepares students with the technical ability to produce media but also with the resilience, the collaborative spirit, and the willingness to hang out in the messy middle long enough for something real to emerge. In learning to hang out there, they are rehearsing for work that extends well beyond the classroom: listening when things are unclear, persisting when there is no guarantee of success, creating things in the acknowledged presence of others.

Everything here is in progress. That’s the point.

If any of this resonates, I’d like to hear from you.