2023 Academic Year in Review

[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 things over the start of my winter break, I was looking back at the year to see how things moved along.  I think I've written (or at least said) this before, but before I started my doctorate I felt like I had a rhythm so far as academic communities, activities, and outputs go, and things got disrupted while I was pursuing my EdD.  Coming out of that doctoral process, I felt like I took one exit off the freeway, while many of my other colleagues and friends took another. It feels like the end of a doctoral program is about rediscovering who you are and where things fit.  It seems like 2023 was the year for that, even though I finished my EdD in 2021.

Anywhooooo 🧐 Here's a bit of a look back to 2023...

Spring 2023

I kicked off the spring looking to get some work done on a paper I wanted to write in 2021-2022 called "MOOCs Ten Years Later."  The "10 years" was a bit of a callback to my "Digital Natives: Ten Years After" but the "ten years" bit really depends on where you're counting from. The "real" ten-year mark for me would have been 2018, but I was otherwise busy then. Then again, 2022 was the ten-year mark from "the year of the MOOC" (in North America at least). I kind of lost steam on this paper, so I kind of dropped this project. To be honest, I feel like I am sort of "done" with MOOCs, but I wanted a kind of closure; and a look back at the last 15ish years to examine the innovations, the stagnation, and the ultimate "who cares?" feeling that seems to exist these days would have provided that.  While xMOOCs had some innovation,  I think things really went south around 2015 and have never looked up since then.  So, I put this paper idea in the freezer. To be clear, I still participate in MOOCs from time to time, and my edx, coursera, and futurelearn queues have things I want to explore, but I don't find researching MOOCs all that interesting any longer.  

At the same time, I was writing and editing a book chapter on Emergency Remote Teaching for a SAGE Handbook (thank you colleagues for inviting me to participate! I appreciate the call!🥰)   ERT was one more of these closure things that I wanted to get off my plate.  During 2020-2022 (the height of ERT IMO), I was otherwise occupied, and I decided to lurk, and not actively participate in what was being discussed. Not because there wasn't value in some elements of ERT, but rather because I was tired of reading bad research and having to defend online learning (I suspect neither the former nor the latter will ever go away 😅) Doing a retrospective on ERT and engaging in that discussion this way was both informative and a good way to move ahead.  I think ERT has its place in online learning and building resilience into the educational ecosystem is important, but I have my doubts that we'll actually be like the scouts and be prepared for the next unexpected thing to disrupt us (or that we'll use what we learned to really improve physically-proximal learning). Maybe I'm a bit of a pessimist, but time will tell. This chapter is the second academic thing I did after completing my dissertation and it felt rather good to complete.

Around the beginning of the semester, I decided to take two graduate courses.  One course was on a whim, Archival Methods and Practice (on-campus) and the other was intentional, Negotiations (Online) because I was (and still am) on my union's contract bargaining team and thought that a theoretical review might be useful. I was going to skip the Archival methods course, but it was the last semester that the course was being offered at my institution (the program is winding down), and the course started at 16:00 which meant that I wouldn't be too late in getting home. While I prefer online courses and have an affinity for asynchronous courses (like Maha), I see the reasons for this course to have a physically present component: we processed a donated collection of materials that would (ultimately) find its way into the university archives (somewhere out there is a finding aid with my name in the version history! 😇). That said, the first half of class (an hour or so) was a bit wasted in my view.  While I did enjoy some of the conversations we had, I felt like that component could easily have been done asynchronously while keeping some of the on-campus time for hands-on archival processing and other Q&A and archival banter.  Even with a course that ends at 18:45, that is one long day to be on campus. If the program were continuing, and if I were wearing my instructional design hat, I'd recommend that this course be blended. This way there is some on-site component for the physical processing, while keeping the overall duration of the on-site visit shorter.

The negotiation course was interesting too. From a meta-perspective, it's interesting to see group work in action (again) within a graded course setting.  My dissertation work was about group work (but notably it was ungraded work), and things from my literature review came back to mind as I was doing an instructional design analysis of the course.  At the time, I thought the groupwork component failed to be big enough to be something appropriate for a group. In other words, I thought one person (me) could do this on their own.  That said, in reflecting upon it, I was wondering if I could do it alone, whereas the average graduate student starting their studies in the field might not (this was one of the first courses for the Conflict Resolution MA program).  I have no answer to this one, but it does make me pause and ponder about the different backgrounds and ability levels that students bring to the classroom. In the end, the group project was fine (I think we did a good job), but it could have gone smoother. If any of my group mates are reading: you can probably tell which parts could have gone smoother, that one person who seemed to ghost us 😬.

During this term we also had the AI Panic. Sort of like ERT, I decided to lurk from the sidelines. It's not that I wasn't interested in it, but between work, the classes I was taking, and writing (and some workshop teaching), I just had no mental energy for the public discourse around it (especially people who saw cheaters everywhere, and I was dealing with this on my campus too!).  I am happy, and thankful, that Aras invited me to participate in a collaborative article titled Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape. It was just the right size of engagement for what I wanted to do, thinking through things, and engaging in a process that was new to me and kept me learning while engaging with the subject of GenAI.

Finally, in the spring, a book chapter I had written for a book on Rhizomatic Learning came out. This was a request that came from someone I didn't know. I was initially reluctant to participate because the last time I did the author totally ghosted me and my coauthor and the book never came out 🙄. We posted our chapter on Gamification on ResearchGate, so the work wouldn't go to waste, but honestly, that experience left a bad taste in my mouth.  Since the Rhizo stuff was fresh in my mind because of my dissertation, I thought I'd capitalize on the opportunity and see what happens.  I am happy that this book came to fruition and that something of my dissertation is now. published.  My thanks to Myint who invited me, and anyone else who might have recommended me as a contact!🥰

Summer 2023

Summer was back to tinkering with ChatGPT and other kinds of LLMs.  During the spring term (and early summer for that matter), a lot of conferences on teaching and learning seemed to focus on the potential for using AI to create course syllabi and other such materials. I started experimenting with this premise over the summer, but in July I ran out of steam on it (ha! recognize a pattern here? 😂). The results really seemed sub-par and I honestly thought that the results seemed so self-evident that no one would bother publishing this.  I kept all my data just in case I changed my mind.  I switched gears to another call for papers that Sarah H. had shared with us, this one about the demise of the platform formerly named Twitter.  We got a ragtag crew together to put write a paper (currently in review) on platform migrations, with a special emphasis on Twitter.  We had a good group of folks working on this, some people were new to me, and others old acquaintances from MOOCs past.  I think we had a lot of fun writing this paper and we learned a lot in the process. 

One thing that might have gotten lost in the AI Hype of early 2023 was that Twitter was bought by nutty billionaire Elon Musk and it (pretty quickly, IMO) went to 💩.  By June I think about half my network had migrated to something else (mastodon🐘, bluesky🦋 for those who had special invites, and Threads🧵 later on) but Twitter was still hobbling along. In 2022, as I was getting back to "normal" after the doctorate,  I had hoped to get more active on Twitter to try to re-establish those academic connections I lost track of during the dissertation years, but I guess (womp-womp🎺)🤷🏻‍♂️

Finally, this summer I earned the PSM-I (professional scrum master level I) credential.  While it's nothing to write home about, it was an interesting experience trying to earn a credential that doesn't expire (the competing CSM certification from the Scrum Alliance requires a course, an exam, and it needs to be renewed every two years) and get a sense of how things work.  I think theory alone didn't cut it for this one.  In my first attempt at the test, I failed by a few points; as prep for it, I took practice tests and read the scrum guide - which seems to be the general advice on the matter.  Once I did some more work on it (by completing the Scrum Master learning path and doing some more prep tests), I passed but barely.  I think experience in this instance seems more relevant to theory 😂.

Fall 2023

So, here we are.  Fall semester!  This past fall I was supposed to be on vacation in October, but COVID had other plans. I decided to not teach longer courses in the fall, except for the instructional design capstone course which is less of a course and more of a mentoring opportunity (everyone is progressing at a similar but different pace, so feedback is probably the most critical component).  This term reminded me about not making assumptions.  Yes, it's the capstone and folks should be able to put all the component parts together, but making sure that everyone is on the same page in understanding the expectations (and workload) is an important aspect of designing and teaching. I think everyone from my flock this term made it through unscathed, but I have ideas about how to make things a bit smoother next fall (assuming I am teaching next fall).

On the AK-as-Learner side of things, this term I took an ATD certificate course on Coaching. Some professional development moneys were left over in a partner department, so I thought it might be a good idea to use them to learn something new, so I applied for it and was approved. The workshop was in vILT format, it met for six half-days on WebEx.   Not a huge fan of WebEx, and this experience just provided further evidence ;-).  The workshop was good.  I got out of it what I needed to get out of it, and I'd recommend it.  Corporate training is different from what we do in higher education, so it's always interesting to see how things are designed and delivered in that field. I am wondering if it's worthwhile going the extra step and seeing if it's worth looking into ICF-ACC certification, but that's something for 2024 (or 2025)...If there are any certified coaches out there, feel free to chime in in the comments.

Finally, as I was wrapping up this term, there was the siren call for a MOOC special issue through JIME (due in about a month), titled Open Learning and Learning at Scale: The Legacy of MOOCs. I think this is going to be an opportunity to dust off my half-started work from 2021 and 2022; and maybe get together with other folks and have some fun writing a researched retrospective on MOOCs.  I know that the call is focused on FLAN (futurelearn), but maybe this is the opportunity for that closure I was talking about earlier in this post.

Looking back, looking forward

Looking at what I've written, I guess I've done a lot of academic things this year. One of the nagging things about working as a staff member with a doctorate is that you sometimes start to feel like you are not doing enough academic stuff (or that the doctorate is "wasted on you" because you choose to not do academic things). Keep in mind academics of this sort are more of a hobby since I don't really plan on applying for full-time tenure positions, so with that caveat, I think that as a hobby I did pretty well in 2023.

I think my big decision in 2024 is whether or not to adopt CIEE? CIEE is the journal that Alan G. and I co-founded back in 2012(ish?) but one that I stepped away from to focus on the dissertation.  Since Alan has moved on, workwise, to other positions, the journal needs someone new at the helm. This is something I've been thinking about since the spring, but I am reluctant to make a decision either way.  Maybe a pondering best saved for another blog post.

Happy New Year Folks! :-) 

See you in 2024!