In my first post, I mentioned that I had gone back to an old blog I started more than twenty years ago. I have spent more time poking around in it, following old links, rediscovering projects, and occasionally wondering what exactly I was thinking. A lot is there, and a lot is missing – missing links, context, and so forth making it difficult for some to comphrehend the usefulness. However, it has accumulated nearly 300k pageviews with a nice international audience. Some of the most widely accessed posts ranged from From Theory to Metatheory and What Are You Doing with Social Media. Two very different audiences, but none the less, apparently, the collection of thoughts found an audience.
Looking through it now, the range is striking, mind boggling maybe. I wrote about online and blended learning, social media, emerging technologies, course and program design, assessment, research methods and measurement, communication and media theory, organizational change, strategic planning, innovation, equity, and the future of education and work. There were research findings and theoretical ideas alongside conference notes, reading lists, resources, observations, questions, and unfinished thoughts.
Some of those subjects will undoubtedly reappear here, although in different forms. Online learning is no longer particularly new, but we are still trying to understand what works, for whom, and under what conditions. Artificial intelligence has replaced some of the technologies we once called emerging. Microcredentials are raising new questions about learning, credentials, work, and institutions. Questions about equity, data and measurement remain unresolved, especially since we can’t mention DEI. And, now I find myself increasingly thinking about other things due ot our unviersity climate or higher ed itself – cultural centers and communities, university governance, and the sustainability of universities themselves.
At first glance, those may seem like a rather disparate collection of subjects. Looking back at the old blog, though, perhaps that is fitting. I didn’t start it with an editorial calendar or a carefully bounded subject area. I wrote about what I was working on, what I was reading, what I was questioning, what I thought might be useful to someone else, and whatever random thought came to my mind that I wanted to share or put a pin in. And, sometimes my mind can jump around quicker than my dog chasing a fly.
I think I’ll do much the same here.
Other posts were much more practical. I shared tools, resources, presentations, research, examples, and things we were building. Sometimes I was documenting work in progress. Sometimes I was trying to make something useful available outside the walls of the university. And, sometimes I was apparently leaving notes for my future self. Looking back now is also an interesting reminder of how quickly something can move from new to normal (and to new again).
The pandemic made me feel never before, how much innovation in educatio could feel like Ground Hog day or collective amnesia as Chuck Dziubin at UCF once write about. We discovered it, figured it out, moved on, and oh look, someone else discovered it like it never happened previously. Online learning was once an innovation. Blended learning required explanation. Social media was an emerging technology. Putting course materials on the web was novel. Clickers changed what was possible in a large lecture hall. We debated whether laptops belonged in classrooms. Technologies and practices that once required pilots, grants, research, faculty development, policies, and considerable organizational change eventually became part of the infrastructure of everyday life.
Some things disappeared entirely. But many of the questions didn’t.
How do people respond when something new enters an existing environment? What makes an innovation useful rather than simply new? What needs to change around a technology for it to work? How do organizational structures, policies, resources, and cultures enable or constrain what people can do? How do we move from experimentation to implementation and scale? Who benefits? Who doesn’t? What are we measuring? And how do we know whether the changes we are making are actually making things better?
Those questions are certainly not settled.
Today, some of the subjects are different. I am thinking and working on artificial intelligence, microcredentials and new forms of learning and work, online and digital learning, equity, data and measurement, organizational and institutional change, cultural centers and communities, governance, and the sustainability and future of universities. Some are continuations of work I have been doing for years. Others are newer questions. And some may seem to have very little to do with one another. That was true of the old blog too.
What I find interesting now is having enough distance to look across all of it. Ideas that seemed separate at the time sometimes turn out to be connected. Questions disappear and return in different forms. Technologies change while human and organizational problems persist. And occasionally something written fifteen or twenty years ago suddenly seems relevant again for reasons I never could have anticipated. So I don’t intend for this new collection to be about one subject.
It will probably look a little like the old one – things I am working on, things I am reading, research and data, resources worth sharing, questions I am trying to work through, observations about organizations and people, and ideas that may or may not be fully formed yet. There will be technology, certainly. There will be education. But there will also be organizations, communities, culture, governance, equity, sustainability, work, research, and whatever else seems important enough to think about. Some of it may eventually become research, an article, a book, a project, or something I haven’t thought of yet. Some of it may simply be a thought worth putting somewhere other than inside my head. That was largely the point of the old blog. It seems like a pretty good reason to start again.