Part II of my 2024 academic wayfinding ponderings! 🎓🤔If you remember my last post of 2023, you probably remember that perhaps the thing that's been taking up a lot of mental bandwidth has been the CIEE journal (Current Issues in Emerging eLearning).  This is a journal that I co-founded with my friend and colleague Alan Girelli back in the day (in 2012-2013, if I remember correctly).At the

I guess that's me, in the style of Albert UderzoOK...so it's been a while since I last blogged! (checks his notes... December 31, 2023!!! Great Scott!😬🤯) You'd think that I had given up the blogging practice, right? 😅.  Well, you wouldn't be blamed if you thought so! Contrary to appearances, I'm still around!  It's been a busy Spring semester...and a busy Summer...and now it's

[warning - a bit of long post] Well, here we are! The end of 2023! It seems like only yesterday that we were starting to hear some whispers about this thing called "ChatGPT," but it was in fact about a year ago, and as you know we moved pretty quickly through that hype cycle.  Don't worry, this entire YIR (year in review) won't be about ChatGPT 😂.  As I was pondering other academic-y

Gazing at LearningThe other day I was doing some reflecting on my own "return" to being a learner after my doctoral journey ended. Last semester I took a course on negotiation, which I saw relevant to both work and also for my role as a member of our union's contract bargaining team this round.  This course was a graduate-level course, and is typically taken either in the first or second term

It's the end of the year, and the end of the term, so I look back at my own learning this past fall semester. This fall, I decided to revisit FutureLearn.  Over the past few years (since 2018ish?) I've been signing up for FutureLearn courses so that I can have them in my queue (in case they disappear). I guess I was optimistic in 2019...and 2020...and 2021 that I would get to these, so the queue

Photo by NeONBRAND on UnsplashBack in December, I had an idea: 2022 is the 10 year anniversary since the "year of the MOOC," so why not write something about it? After all, open education and MOOCs are subjects that interest me a lot, still. MOOCs of course go back before 2012, and the year of the MOOC in 2012 was really relevant in North America.  I've seen other proclamations for the year

It's a Boston thing...Alright, this blog post has been sitting in my drafts for a while, since I am procrastinating writing that paper on video game preservation (a story for another blog), why no blog?😂.Now that the dissertation is done, and the doctoral degree is completed, I've been spending a little more time observing the ID-sphere on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter and I have seen a fair number

 Courtesy of RedbubbleAfter one-too-many "news" posts on IHE about plagiarism and "rigor" I decided to stop subscribing to IHE's RSS feed.  Idiocies that used to be a comment left in an actual news article (one which you could ignore) now have been promoted as opinion pieces on IHE.  To put it quite simply the junk-to-treasure ratio is now completely off on that site and there is no

It's hard to believe, but the summer is in the rearview mirror.  Next week the fall semester begins and as I look back over the summer  I see some things I learned (or observed) in these coronatimes: The FoMo is still strong! I thought I had beaten back FoMo (fear of missing out) but I guess not :-).  This summer many conferences made the switch to online this summer due to the ongoing

HyFlex (Hybrid Flexible) is a way of designing courses for (what I call) ultimate flexibility.  It takes both ends of the teaching spectrum, fully face-to-face, and fully online-asynchronous and it bridges the gap.  Back in the day, I learned about this model of course design by taking an OLC workshop with Brian himself, but you can learn more about the model in his free ebook.