Update: Due to summer vacations, we are in the process of rescheduling this (and other) Blursday sessions for August. Sorry, and stay tuned!
We’re lucky this Blursday to be joined by Tom Cavanagh, University of Central Florida Vice President for Digital Learning. Tom has been building one of the great online and blended, evidence-based, faculty-friendly digital learning programs since before MIT and Stanford invented digital learning! He’s also the co-host of the TOPcast podcast.
Tom has always straddled the worlds of pragmatism and innovation, always focusing on the practical while being unafraid to try something new. He’s a great person to chat with about the new abnormal.
Don’t forget, folks: This week’s Blursday guest is University of Maryland Global Campus’s Greg Fowler. Greg represents the next generation of great university presidents. Having served significant tenures at both WGU and SNHU, he is now president of one of the older great public online universities which operates in a very different context than the other two.
We’re starting to crank up the Blursday schedule with some great guests. The next three are spectacular and I have more in the pipeline.
Here are the first few:
Thursday, May 26th 4 PM – 5:30 PM EST: Instructure’s Chief Experience Officer Melissa Loble. Melissa is a sharp observer of all things EdTech and a fun person to talk to. She knows both the ed and the tech parts. (RSVP)
Thursday, June 2nd 4 PM – 5:30 PM EST: UMGC’s President Greg Fowler. Greg is the kind of thoughtful, people-oriented, and forward-thinking university presidents that you wish there were more of. Having worked for a long time at SNHU, he’s now moved on to lead the (very different) University of Maryland Global Campus. (RSVP)
Thursday, June 9th 4 PM – 5:30 PM EST: Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Timothy E. Wirth’s Professor in Learning Technologies Chris Dede When I first met Chris on an advisory board for Macmillan, we both said, “How is it that we haven’t met before?” That’s the spirit of EEP and Blursdays: to meet people you don’t know but should. Chris is a superstar in EdTech-related research (among other things) and is an incredibly nice guy. (RSVP)
More guests are on the way! Come join Blursdays, have some fun, and maybe learn something useful.
This is just a brief reminder that we’ll be restarting Blursdaystomorrow, 5/5 at 4 PM ET with George Siemens. We’re still figuring out the move from our old platform to Engageli. In particular, the old platform used to send out invitations with calendar meeting planners. I don’t know about you, but I need one of those to get anywhere I’m supposed to be.
So here’s a little RSVP button that will also give you a meeting planner for your calendar:
Bonus: We will debut the new Blursday theme song, written and recorded by Argos Education’s very own Eric Hilfer.
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.
George Siemens
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.
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!
We’re keeping a somewhat irregular summer schedule on Blursday Socials to allow for the customary socially distanced games of Marco Polo as people rush out of their COVID caves and into the world at large. But that doesn’t mean we’re stopping!
We have three great guests coming up:
7/15: Sasha Thackaberry, LSU’s VP of Online and Continuing Education: Prior to LSU, Sasha worked at SNHU and at Cuyahoga Community Colleges. So she has a range of perspective that is rare. She’s also hilarious, so make sure you’re not drinking while she’s talking unless you want liquid up your nose. RSVP.
7/22: Paxton Riter, CEO of iDesign: After growing up in the OPM world, Paxton has been running one of most widely recognized names in post-OPM, design-led fee-for-service companies. I’m interested in his take on how things are shaping up post-pandemic. And also in what he’ll be drinking. RSVP.
7/29:Emily Foote, Principal at Osage Venture Partners: I met Emily shortly after she sold her wonderful EdTech company Practice to Instructure. It was at least a three-beer conversation (and I’m a slow drinker). Now an EdTech investor, Emily brings the passion of an educator and the experience of an entrepreneur to her new(ish) gig. I’m curious to get a sense of how she’s processing what she’s learning given her broad experience. RSVP.
I always try to invite guests that I would seek out to have a drink with at a conference (as opposed to those I would run away from or grudgingly endure). These three folks are all on my shortlist of the good ones.
As a friend put it to me this past week, Blursday Socials essentially democratize the conference party. When I go to conferences, which I assume I will start doing again later this year, I am lucky that I get invited to lots of parties and get to talk to really interesting—and “important”—people. I get to sit at a bar with people like Paul LeBlanc and shoot the breeze. Not everybody is so lucky, which is a loss on all sides. Because a lot of the people on the outside of those conversations are just as interesting and important, if not as famous, as the people on the inside. Blursday Socials change that dynamic. Last week, everybody who came got a chance to hang out and shoot the breeze with Paul LeBlanc. Who, it turns out, is a delightful person to shoot the breeze with.
I’m going to be bringing in more people whose names you know while mixing them in with people whose names you should know but probably don’t. To that end, here’s the latest line-up:
4/29, as previously announced, will be Matt Tower, Senior Associate for SEI Ventures. SEI, by the way, is the company that owns Strayer University, Capella University, HBCU Online, and a number of other interesting but lesser known properties. SEI Ventures is their investment arm. Needless to say, he sees the world from an unusual perch. He’s also just a super-smart guy and runs a terrific weekly show on Clubhouse.
5/6 will be my dear friend Lucy Appert, NYU’s Director of Educational Technology, Faculty of Arts and Science. She’s also a PhD in English Literature. She puts the “ed” in “EdTech” and the “human” in “humanities.” I’ve known Lucy since we were both involved with Sakai back in the day. And she’s been on the front lines with NYU’s COVID response. We will have lots to talk about.
5/13 will be 2U CEO Chip Paucek. When you hear Chip interviewed, he’s the kind of guy who comes across as somebody who would be fun to talk to. As it turns out, he is. Rather than talking about the OPM wars or rehashing the 2U value proposition, we’re going to get to talk to conference-party Chip about conference-party topics of conversation.
I’ve been looking for a unified way for people to see (and register for) every Blursday social. The platform I use, Run the World, doesn’t have anything official to use, but I’ve discovered a back door. If you visit my public profile on the platform, you’ll see links to all of the upcoming Blursday events. You’ll also see links to the past events. If you click on the latter and scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll be able to watch archives of the events.
(Sadly, the intro music apparently doesn’t get recorded, so you miss the whole Tonight Show feel to the intro.)
RSVP to any or all of the above events. Dress code is casual; BYOB.
