In this post, Jackie Hurlock catches up with one of our first Crowbirds, Dr. Aleksandra Swatek, who is now a lecturer at Old Dominion University. Dr. Swatek discusses her recent Crow work and several other projects of interest.
10 Years being a Crow Bird
Ola was one of our first original Crowbirds back in 2015. She shared that, “it has been very, very interesting to be a part of Crow for 10 years and see it evolve and change, also because my life has been changing. When I first joined, I was a graduate student.” Reflecting on this experience from when she was a new Crowbird, she was unaware how much planning and work it would take to create a corpus of student writing, and she learned over the years there is a lot to it. Consequently, Ola’s roles have changed throughout the years.
As Ola grew with Crow, her role changed from a student position to a leadership position as one of our Principal Investigators. When she first started working for us, Ola did not realize how Crow was more than data sets and the web interface. Now she understands that Crow grows and functions due to its people, highlighting how her co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Michelle McMullin, believes in developing ways of thinking about how to mentor and learn from each other across different positions—a perspective Ola shares. “Everybody in Crow’s first cohort went on their own ways in their careers and research, but that also enriched our group so much more. As each person grew, they brought some new ways of thinking or new practices into Crow,” she says.
The Makerspace (mPark)
Ola has learned a lot from Crow over the years, implementing what she has learned into her work as an assistant teaching professor at Old Dominion University (ODU). Since the spring of 2025, she has been the interim director of the makerspace (mPark) for the department of English which was opened by Dr. Margaret Kilcline (Konkol) late in 2023. The mPark lab is a public digital humanities workspace—located in room 2027 of ODU’s Batten Arts and Letters Building—where students and staff can work on projects using the technology and equipment provided to them in the space. The mPark facilities include two connected rooms containing a 3D printer, recording equipment, sewing machines, Arduino electronics learning kits, printers, computers, various cables for different uses, and much more for anyone to use.
Ola shared that, “I took the experience I had in Crow thinking about how we work in a group and how we work across different positions, and I have implemented that in the directing of the makerspace.” She brought Crow practices into mPark because she believes Crow has given her a good model—specifically the concepts drawn from Constructive Distributed Work—of how to mentor a team of people who are focused on a particular goal or creation. Over the years, through leading and attending workshops or presentations for Crow when she was a less experienced Crowbird, she has learned a lot from other Crowbirds—especiallly when it comes to mentoring—by watching them model things that she wants to get better at. As a result, Ola wants to bring this same approach to mentoring into mPark.
In the 2025–2026 academic year, Ola worked with two graduate student assistants, T Cruz and Xianzhong Meng. In 2026-2027, mPark opened up an internship position through the Mellon Foundation–sponsored Monarch Humanities Internship Academy at ODU. Through this program, Emily Dubicke, a graduating senior in the technical writing program, was hired as an undergraduate mPark assistant. Graduate and undergraduate assistants at mPark hold office hours, and during this time, someone can schedule a tour of mPark to explore the space, or use the equipment for their own projects.
One of the crucial components of managing mPark has been Basecamp, which is used by the mPark team for managing, planning, and communication purposes. Ola and her graduate assistants have schedules that rarely overlap with each other, making it hard to have face to face interactions. She wanted to make communication as clear and effective as possible by avoiding email chains where information can get lost and become confusing or disjointed. Thus, Ola incorporated Basecamp into mPark to plan workshops, assign tasks, and communicate with graduate students more efficiently and effectively.
Additionally, mPark can be used for guest speakers or leaders of workshops. During the spring 2026 semester, mPark hosted a 3D printing workshop focused on board games creation led by Dr. Kevin Moberly, as well as a book binding workshop led by an award-winning poet Dr. Luisa Igloria. The mPark lab also started a new critical making with AI workshop series based on Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter’s monograph, Critical Making in the Age of AI. For this new workshop series, mPark welcomed people from the ODU community to come read certain chapters from the monograph with them (e.g., chapters on mapping GIFs, selfies, and generative AI) to then discuss how AI technology can be used for teaching and research. Past workshops have also focused on cross stitching and sewing pattern literacy. Altogether, mPark is a space where people can create, get hands-on experience with various tools, and talk about how new technologies are playing a role in teaching and research.
Ongoing Crow Work
As someone on the leadership team, Ola does a lot of maintenance work for Crow. She attends meetings, makes decisions about applying for grants, and provides feedback on choices that impact different areas of Crow, such as choices that involve data processing or collecting. She also communicates with people who want to access our corpus and repository to use it for their research or teaching, and she will work with them to determine their access to Crow for their intended purposes. Recently, a lot of requests focused on accessing Crow for research with AI. However, at Crow we do not allow our data to be used with any language learning models, because this was not a part of our original data collection informed consent provided by participants.
Current Projects Outside of Crow
Outside of Crow, Ola has been working on a research project with Dr. Rodrigo A. Rodríguez-Fuentes at Universidad del Norte. In 2023, Ola and Dr. Rodríguez-Fuentes won a grant from Duolingo for a research project that explored the differences between students who learn English in the classroom and students who learn English through Duolingo at Universidad del Norte. They wanted to answer questions like:
- What kind of language gains do students who learn in the classroom have compared to students who learn from Duolingo?
- How can technology enhance teaching and research?
- Can someone learn English using just their mobile phone?
- How is learning a language through a phone different from learning a language in a college classroom?
- Will someone learn more from an app or in a college classroom?
- Does someone need to spend money to learn a foreign language?
Ola explained that answering these questions in a straightforward manner is not necessarily possible, as her research with Dr. Rodríguez-Fuentes shows, since a lot of students do not stick with Duolingo after their initial excitement for the app wears off. Yet, in a standard 16 week language course, fewer students typically drop the course or stop showing up to class, compared to how many learners never follow through with Duolingo. That is, it is easier to stop using Duolingo after a little while than it is to stop going to class. No wonder Duolingo uses gamification to keep people engaged! This played a role in their research findings.
Dr. Rodríguez-Fuentes and Ola recently finished this study, but they have a paper discussing this project under review in an academic journal.
What’s Next for Ola?
Ola has just submitted a grant proposal with a fellow Crowbird—Dr. Anh Dang who is also an assistant teaching professor at ODU. They have requested funding to build Open Educational Resources for corpus-based writing instruction. With the support of VIVA Academic Library consortium, they want to further develop and publish pedagogical materials based on those prepared by our Crow Fellows. She will continue in her role in Crow leadership and explore how to share our project with more people in her area. Ola also plans to continue developing her birding photography hobby she began during her visit to the University of Arizona in 2023.
We thank Dr. Swatek for her awesome work. We are looking forward to sharing more updates on Ola in the years to come!