A line in the sand

And after that, it stopped.  I never finished MUVEnation; work, family, other interests… I couldn’t sustain the reading, blogging, on-line chat, hours in SL… couldn’t find the time and energy I needed to keep it up.  At college we kept searching for educational affordances of SL but we couldn’t make it work, at least not in the context we were working in.  About a year later we packed up our tent and moved on.  SL (or its children) is still there in my imagined but yet to be grasped future of education, nascent but not yet in bloom.

So a few weeks ago I signed up for the University of Edinburgh/Coursera E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.  The mixture of excitement, expectation and dread reminded me of MUVEnation, so resurrecting this blog seemed proper.

Over the week-end I'll try to get some stuff together...  I've looked at the film clips for week 1, which all strike me as over-simplistic, but how subtle can you get in 10 minutes?  The little reading I've done has spotlights some interesting concepts that all beg more questions.  The Hangout was a game of two halves; juggling talking heads and superheated twittering.  A quick poke about in the forums felt more like old times in Usenet... where to start?

I can already feel the drag of the EDC gravity well dragging me towards a fiery doom...