Thank you. This course has been quite a ride for all of us. My goal was to challenge you to re-examine your preconceived ideas and notions about distance education. My approach was to show you a mode of distance ed that you had never really experienced before. From the first week’s flood of new technologies — and even before with my emails to you before the course even began — you were being asked to do things that were foreign to your experience. Those things were intended to get you to think about the subject of distance delivery. We started “close in” by focusing on specific tools — the tools you’d be using in the course, and then widening out to tools that you might consider in your own courses that didn’t necessarily fit within the framework I was constructing. We kept stepping back and stepping back to get an ever-widening perspective on the field and on your relationship to it. Finally, your capstone projects gave you insight into what you’d learned in a way that writing a research paper would never be able to do. There’s nothing like implementation to show you where your understanding differs from reality, which many of you discovered as you tried to implement complex and complicated technologies.
For it to work, you had to trust me, and you did. For that, I thank you.
As you leave this course, remember that your blogs, your aggregators, and your minds continue to be in your control. Even though the Blackboard shell will close soon, the tools and techniques you’ve developed over the last 4 months will be available to you as long as you want to use them. The changes in the ways you think about education, teaching, and learning will color your own practice in what I hope is a positive manner. While many of you will never teach online in your careers, the ideas engendered here may be useful in your classrooms as well because — regardless of delivery — all education is at a distance.
Please feel free to keep me in your IM list if you’re so inclined and I’m always happy to hear from my past students. My writings will continue, albeit not every day, on my other blog — Cognitive Dissonance — and if you want to keep up with what I’m thinking, you should add that blog to your ‘gators.
Good luck and best wishes in your chosen dreams.