Since January, I’ve been enrolled in the M.Ed program in Educational Technology at the University of Arkansas. As is not uncommon with such programs, I’m being asked to blog as a course requirement. It feels a bit odd to write the 500 word bio, since this is actually the third iteration of my personal blog. When you put them all together, they run to just over 250 posts and 19 years. For those 19+ years, I’ve been involve52103d in educational technology in some capacity. Almost all of that involvement was at the two-year college level.

While there is some tendency to think of blogs and the things that grew from them (podcasts, email newsletters, substacks, etc.) as a broadcast platform, I’ve always leaned more toward the “outboard brain” model (Doctorow, 2002) It says something about the transience of all the ed tech we’re busily doing that I had to pull that link from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but I suppose we can’t all be Ea-Nasir.

It’s probably also a tell that I’ve named this blog in hypothetical West-Saxon (explanation here – It does have the advantage that a search using the actual blog title will find it, even amongst all the AI) and I labeled my various attempts at web based bookmarking Πίνακες, after the lost catalog of the (also lost) Library of Alexandria. This has something to do with wanting to understand all of this new stuff as part of a long tradition of organizing, preserving, and disseminating knowledge.

Part of the rubric for this post expects something about purpose and topics to be discussed. In the short term, topics to be discussed will derive from course blog assignments. I’ll use a category so those who need to can find them. My non required posts tend to focus on two broad questions:

• How can technology allow learners to shape their own learning?
• To what ends aspires this whole education enterprise and how does the availability of various technology shape those ends?