What is appealing to me about the potential of connected learning is the idea of reclaiming the powers of the pre-corporate internet for educating and learning. I have a sense we are observing  here a counter-movement to the corporatization of learning by venture-funded MOOCs.

Indeed, the internet has long given individuals all the tools we need for tinkering with learning – search engines, forums, chats. The most important component in this puzzle has become the affordances of social networks. For they put us right into a system of values and norms, so important to any social interaction. After all, it is here where our significant peers congregate and we are forced to create public personas. It is also here that we can become exposed to other, different from our own, communities of professionals.

But then the issues about trust and, hence, success in (connected) learning become cultural (not just technological): what is it about a community that makes us recognize it legitimate and important, say, to share our learning with?

Thanks to the ConnectedCourses for creating a setting to push me to think (in writing) about the work I do. A few things to start off putting on paper (ha!):
- online education (OE) should be contextualized. I.e. we can't just talk about OE in general. OE should be discussed as a tool of professional education, life-learning education, undergraduate education, etc.
- what i have been trying to do is to use OE as a way to develop an international community of scholars
- online tools have a lot of potential for learning and for collaborative research
- collaborative research that interests me is oriented towards pressing social issues
- i believe in interdisciplinarity and talk