2014 was a garbage year. We lost Pete Seeger and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams and Stuart Hall and Maya Angelou and Gabriel García Márquez and Ruby Dee (and so many others). The planet got hotter, and it sure felt like it got more violent.
But 2014 was a great year too. (Thank you, Beyoncé. Thank you, Kin and José and Tressie and David and Chris and Kate and Darth and, again, so many others.)
It was a wonderful and awful and strange year for me – professionally and personally. Some of the highlights:
Travel
Destinations: Amsterdam, Arlington, Atlanta (x2), Austin, Barcelona, Berkeley, Berlin, Bolton, Bristol, Chicago, Coventry, Edmonton, Eugene (x2), Fredericksburg, Kamloops, Laguna Beach, Las Vegas, London (x2), Midhurst, Newcastle, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Stockholm, Vancouver, Washington DC (x2), and York.
It had been almost 25 years since I’d been back to England. I went there three times this year. I’m really thankful to have reconnected with a lot of my cousins (I have the best cousins) and to have seen my Granny (age 98).
I also visited old friends from high school and old friends from the Internet and old friends from previous chapters of my life. That was, beyond a doubt, the best part of the year.
2014 marked the 40th anniversary of ABBA winning the Eurovision Song Contest with “Waterloo.” And I visited the ABBA Museum. The. Happiest. Place. On. Earth.
Hermosa
After living “permanent-address free” since August 2013, Kin and I decided to settle down. I rented an apartment! We bought furniture! But as you can see from the list of travel destinations above, we hardly sat still for a minute.
Keynotes and Presentations
Men Explain Technology to Me: On Gender, Ed-Tech, and the Refusal to Be Silent, November 18, 2014
From “Open” to Justice, November 16, 2014
Convivial Tools in an Age of Surveillance, November 13, 2014
The Future of Education: Programmed or Programmable, November 4, 2014
Teaching Machines: A Brief History of “Teaching at Scale”, September 10, 2014
Beyond the LMS, September 5, 2014
Ed-Tech’s Monsters, September 3, 2014
Un-Fathom-able: The Hidden History of Ed-Tech, June 18, 2014
The Future of Ed-Tech is a Reclamation Project, May 22, 2014
Against “Innovation”, May 14, 2014
Robots and Education Labor, May 10, 2014
Beneath the Cobblestones… A Domain of One’s Own, April 25, 2014
Engaging Flexible Learning, April 9, 2014
The History of the Future of Ed-Tech, February 4, 2014
Other Speaking Engagements
I also spoke on panels and “conversations” at Educon, SXSWedu, the ALA Symposium, Digital Labor, and API Days Barcelona, as well as in multiple webinars.
Educating Modern Learners
I joined Will Richardson and Bruce Dixon’s new publication, Educating Modern Learners, as its founding editor and lead writer. The site had its official launch in April, and I’m really proud of the content that we published in its first year.
I will no longer be the editor, but I’ll continue to contribute articles in 2015.
Published Elsewhere
I had articles appear in Model View Culture, Australian Educational Leader, Boundary 2, Knowledge Quest, WISE’s blog, and Ed-Tech Magazine.
Awards
I was surprised to learn in November that I’d been awarded a $5000 Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant.
Books (By Me!)
I published The Monsters of Education Technology in December (a collection of all my talks). I also signed a book contract for Reclaim Your Domain: Building Learner-Centered Technologies, coming next year. And I swear – I swear – I’m going to finish Teaching Machines in 2015 too.
Books (By Others)
I read: The Peripheral, The People’s Platform, This is Not a Test, Gone Girl, The Glass Cage, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things, Geek Sublime, Redshirts, We Have Never Been Modern, The Teacher Wars, Aramis, or, The Love of Technology, Lock In, Robogenesis, The Giver (and all the sequels), Robopocalypse, Walden Two, How We Became Posthuman, Hild, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Rainbow’s End, Distrusting Educational Technology, It’s Complicated, along with a bunch of books that I started but didn’t finish.
The Business
I don’t make a lot of money traveling and speaking and freelancing. Indeed, some of my most popular talks earned me nothing (except maybe a travel reimbursement). But I was able to pay off a credit card this year – debt that I’d been carrying forward for almost a decade. And I am no longer in default on my student loans. So that’s a start, I guess.
As always, I am thankful for (and humbled by) all those who support my work.
Tattoos
3
Technology
I bought the iPhone 6. I hate it. It’s too big and barely fits in my hand or my pocket.
I quit Facebook, LinkedIn, and Evernote. I deleted my Uber account. I deleted my Klout account. I cut way back on my usage of Foursquare (Swarm). I’ve moved my feeds off of Feedburner. I ditched Google Analytics. I’m also trying to ditch Gmail – that’s a bit tougher.
Lesson learned: we sign up for a lot of "free," extraneous bullshit, and those companies hoard and mine our data. Our tech usage doesn't have to look like that!
I started using Slack… but when you’re self-employed it’s sorta lonely. I did join a Slack full of writers, which has been pretty great.
I started using both BlockBot and Block Together, making my Twitter world so much more enjoyable. I currently block about 4000 people on Twitter, mostly racists and Goober-gaters and their sock-puppet accounts.
I recently moved my sites to Jekyll. And I’ve added Cloudflare protection. Because haters.
I also ponied up for ThinkUp. I’m not really into analytics or "social media monitoring," but I like the emails that I get from ThinkUp about my Twitter usage. And I like supporting good, small tech companies (like Pinboard and Noun Project, whose services I also happily pay for).
Other Screens
I’ll just mention a few favorites: Guardians of the Galaxy, Grand Budapest Hotel, and Snowpiercer. I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie in a theatre, and I’m still catching up on 2013 releases. Oh well.
The new apartment has cable, so I've watched a lot more TV in the last year than in the last decade. I still enjoy The Walking Dead. I hate-watch a lot of Food Network shows.
Live Music
Damn, I still suck at this. Camper Van Beethoven. That’s it. That’s the only band I saw live this year. (I did see Bill Maher live too, and I jammed with Brian Lamb, Grant Potter et al when I was in Kamloops.)
Favorite new album of 2014: The Black Keys’ Turn Blue.
The Kid
The kid turned 21. Yes, I have an adult child. I think that makes me officially old. 2015 will be the 10th anniversary of Anthony’s death. I know that makes us officially survivors.
There were moments in 2014 where I thought I would crumble. But I’m strong and fierce, and I know who my friends are. The struggle continues…