[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

It is true that, as of this writing, there is much more serious stuff happening in the world today, both in the US and abroad, but this has been percolating in my brain for a while, so I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on one of my favorite topics: the MOOC.Now that I am done with my dissertation, and I've had a little time to rest my brain and refocus on what I want to geek out on, I've wanted

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 been a while since I've blogged about...anything, really!After a lot of writing, feedback, editing, some more feedback, some more editing, my dissertation is finally ready to be defended.  Since Dissertation Defense is a "DD", it reminded me a bit of the Dunkin' Donuts logo, so here's my New England mind thought it would be fun to create a logo to riff off the Dunks logo (how locals refer

 Wonder what's in this...It's been a crazy seven days. As part of my narrative inquiry into collaborations that occurred in rhizo14 and rhizo15 (or collaborations that sprung up from the work that started there), I am writing a fictional account of a newbie rhizo-learner (sort of how I was a newbie back in rhizo14) who gets to meet rhizo-alumni from past courses and ask them about their

The other day I had an interesting (but brief exchange) with Kelvin Bentley on twitter about MOOC completion.  This isn't really a topic that I come back to often, given that completion-rates for MOOCs, as a topic, seems to have kind of died down, but it is fun to come back to it. To my knowledge, no one has come up with some sort of taxonomy of the different degrees of completion of a MOOC†. But

I didn't quite expect this, but it seems like everywhere you turn you see "a decade in review" news stories (radio and TV), "the internet" (in general) and blog posts, twitter threads, and Instagram stories (more specifically).  I hadn't really thought about doing one of these posts, but what the hay, why not join in? 😜 . The last decade has certainly been eventful.  I kicked off

The last week of EL30 was on the topic of Agency.  The video chat was quite interesting to watch but the topic of agency wasn't as big as I thought it would be (maybe time to rewatch? It's been a few weeks since I watched it).  The conversation started off with some interesting examples of community agency, but it seems to have gone beyond that. I have taken some snippets of the conversation

Well, the penultimate topic for EL30 is on the subject of experience.  I wasn't quite sure, when I started watching that week's recorded chat, what I would get from the week, but unsurprisngly I had a few "AHA!!!" moments. From the course page: "It is a truism that we learn from experience, and yet creating a role for experience in learning has been one of the most difficult problems in

Continuing on with my quest to experience the remainder of el30 before work begins again, today I'll write a bit about my thoughts about the topic of Week 7 which was community. From the course page for the week: "The traditional concept of community was built on sameness, on collections of people from the same family, speaking the same language, living in the same place, believing the same