Blog Collections

What the collections hold

Each monthly cycle of the program generated posts from the people taking part — teachers, faculty members and the mentors who worked alongside them. The collections gather that writing into a single reading list, with entries filed by the topic they respond to.

• Participant blog posts — classroom practice and technology integration written from the teacher's own perspective.
• Reflections on learning topics — commentary on each month's focus, from Connectivism and Digital Citizenship to Content Curation and Digital Storytelling.
• Community updates — notes on how the group was forming, connecting and sharing across the year.

Collections by topic

The program ran monthly topics across its cycle; the post collections follow the same order, so a topic and its reflections can be read together.

See the full list of learning topics

The Open Online Experience brought educators together around a shared theme: how thoughtful technology integration can support meaningful teaching and learning. Blog collections gather reflections from teachers, faculty members, and mentors who participated across the program year, offering many perspectives in one place. Each entry captures a moment of experimentation, a resource that proved useful, or a question that continued to shape classroom practice.

Across monthly cycles, participants wrote about learning, curation, digital literacy, connected learning, creativity, and the practical realities of sharing resources with students and colleagues. These posts read as snapshots of professional learning in motion. Rather than presenting a single finished model, the collections show how educators adapted ideas to their own contexts, responding to the needs of their learners and the communities they serve.

Topic-based organization helps these classroom stories, topic write-ups, and community updates be read side by side. Readers can follow a thread from an early reflection to a later conversation, gaining a sense of how ideas developed over time. The format encourages openness and remixing, while also revealing how strongly local context shapes the way digital tools are introduced, discussed, and sustained in everyday teaching.

Several posts center on collaborative practices such as synchronous conversations, webinars, chats, and peer feedback, alongside broader conversations about online learning and community. Others explore the careful work of curation, safe digital participation, connected citizenship, and creative approaches to content. Together, they portray technology integration as more than adding tools: it involves asking what learners need and building experiences around those needs.

For educators seeking inspiration, the collections offer a plain but valuable resource: the lived experience of others trying similar questions. The writing remains personal and reflective, grounded in classroom reality rather than abstract promises. Even when an entry describes uncertainty or a lesson that did not go as planned, it contributes to a larger record of experimentation, shared inquiry, and the belief that teaching can be strengthened through open conversation.

Reading beyond the blogs

Blogs were one part of a wider conversation. The programme itself was built on a connectivist model, with knowledge spread across a network of connections rather than delivered from a single centre — which is why writing was shared publicly and tagged with the #ooe13 hashtag.

• Follow the conversation on Twitter with the #ooe13 hashtag.
• Browse shared bookmarks in the Diigo group.
• Join the Open Online Experience community on Google+.
• Follow the group's own thread at twubs.

A year, concluded

The programme ran from June 2013 to June 2014, with final posts appearing in May and June 2014. The closing note marked the end of the cycle and the hope that the connections formed during it would continue: “While the Open Online Experience has ended the hope is that you have…”

Related programmes from the same period include DNLE at Stanford and ETMOOC.

Return to the Open Online Experience home page