Blursday with George Siemens…on Engageli!

Blursdays are back again! Thanks to the good folks at Engageli, we will be permanently migrating to their platform. The format will stick closely to the one we used on the old platform for now, but we hope and expect to become even more collaborative and social as we learn how to make better use of Engageli’s affordances over time.

I can’t think of a better person to kick off with than George Siemens as we blend Blursday Socials with a more purposeful Blursday Barn Raising. George rose to prominence as one of the early EdTech bloggers and co-creator of a style of scaled online teaching that eventually became known as cMOOCs (or “Constructivist MOOCs). In those days, they were just called MOOCs, since George and his Canadian colleagues actually invented the term well before Stanford, MIT, and Harvard latched onto it. But their idea for scaling was quite different from the popular format of MOOCs today. It was fundamentally social and self-organizing.

Fast forward to today, and George is working heavily with technology. You’re more likely to see him at a Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) event. To me, he embodies the ideal of the empirical educator. He’s deeply committed to the notion of education as a human and social activity while actively embracing the tools that data and computation can provide to support teaching and learning.

Our session will be this Thursday, May 5th, 4 PM – 5:30 PM EST. There is no preregistration; you just show up. Although the platform does allow you to enter without registering, please do register when you log in using GMail, LinkedIn, or your email address. This enables us to know who came and make sure we have you on the list for future events.

The login for the event is here.

Bonus: I know the feature that many of you will miss most from the old platform is the opening music. Luckily, Argos’s very own polymath Eric Hilfer has composed a new theme song for us. Don’t miss its debut!