2015 was another garbage year. To repeat what I wrote this time last year, “The planet got hotter, and it sure felt like it got more violent.”

Good things happened in 2015, to be sure. But even more than 2014, this year delivered tragedy after tragedy, loss after loss. I’m relieved to have weathered it all… more or less.

I’ve written “my year in numbers”-type posts in the past, and I’ve done some of that accounting below. But I’m working on a different sort of reflection as well, one that tries to capture my feelings about the deaths of my dad and my granny within days of each other this summer. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get the words right, let alone publish it…

Elegies delivered

1

Elegies written

2

Travel

• San Francisco
• Toronto (twice)
• Sydney
• Washington DC
• Berlin
• Barcelona (thrice)
• Eugene (twice)
• Philadelphia
• Casper
• Madison
• Amsterdam
• Brooklin
• Sun City
• Pretoria
• Olympia
• Austin

* I only count cities in which I stayed overnight.

Totals:

• 16 different cities
• 4 continents

Hermosa

I think, but I haven’t done the math, that Kin and I spent more time “at home” this year. Of course, it helps to have a home. And this year we were happy to have a number of guests come and stay with us too.

Keynotes and Presentations

• The Algorithmic Future of Education, October 22
• Technology Imperialism, the California Ideology, and the Future of Higher Education, October 15
• Existing Digitally, September 10
• And So, Without Ed-Tech Criticism, August 15
• Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning, August 10
• Is It Time to Give Up on Computers in Schools?, June 29
• Learning Networks, Not Teaching Machines, June 10
• The Golden Lasso of Education Technology, May 8
• Ed-Tech's Inequalities, April 8
• Men (Still) Explain Technology to Me: Gender and Education Technology, March 11
• The History of the Future of Education, February 19

Other Speaking Engagements

A panel at API Strategy and Practice. A webinar with Alan Levine on Connected Learning TV. A webinar with Bryan Alexander on "Developments in Higher Education Educational Technology: The Horizon Report in Action." A workshop at ICDE. A workshop at the Digital Pedagogy Lab. A guest appearance on TWIT.tv.

GitHub Updates

Late last year, I moved all my various writing projects to GitHub. I use GitHub Pages (Jekyll) to run my websites. It’s been quite liberating for me to be able to better manage my infrastructure – or at the very least, to not have to worry about setting up a MySQL database every time I want to start a new blog.

I made 2590 commits on GitHub over the course of the last year, and as this graphic underscores, I worked almost every day:

Number of …

Newsletters: 50

Blog posts on Hack Education: 143

Most Popular Blog Posts

I don’t know. I don’t have analytics on my sites any longer.

Articles Published Elsewhere

My work appeared in Europa World of Learning, Boundary2, World Innovation Summit for Education blog, The Kernel, Bright, Hybrid Pedagogy, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Inside Higher Ed, and Tech & Learning.

Books (By Me!)

I published two books: Claim Your Domain and The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology.

Books (By Others)

I read Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, Wolf in White Van, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Test, Designing Online Communities, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, Men Explain Things to Me, The Race to Oz, Never Mind the Laptops, The End of College, River of Shadows, The Unidentified, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Building School 2.0, The War on Learning, The Emerald City of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz, Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia, Addressed to the Count de Montalivet, The American Model of State and School: An Historical Inquiry, Weapons of Mass Instruction, Ready Player One, A Golden Thread: An Official Critical History, The Evolution of American Educational Technology, The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Homeland, The Black Box Society, and Is Technology Good for Education?, in addition to a bunch of books that I started but didn’t finish.

Awards

It’s not really an award per se, but I was selected one of the “Tech Innovators of 2015” by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Business

I didn’t make much money this year. I end the year more in debt than I’ve been in a long, long time thanks to a number of unforeseen circumstances.

(One thing I’d like to do in 2016 is be more transparent about where my income comes from: how much I make from book sales, how much I make from articles, how much I make from donations, how much I make from speaking gigs. I’d also like to find someone who’ll sponsor my Top Ed-Tech Trends project and give me enough money so I can make that an even smarter, more useful series.)

Tattoos

1

At the Movies

I saw just two movies in the theater this year: Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But I saw the former three times in the theater, and I'm a bit surprised I haven't gone back to see Star Wars again. I'm not sure these were my two most favorite movies this year, but they're the ones I left the house to see, so that counts for something.

Music (Live/Recorded)

I saw The Mountain Goats, Everlast, and Suns of Jimi play live. Favorite song of 2015: “King Kunta” by Kendrick Lamar. Favorite album: the Hamilton Broadway recording.

Wildlife

Beasts I saw in the Pilanesberg National Park: elephants, impala, zebra, white rhinos, wildebeests, springboks, giraffes, warthogs, lions, waterbucks, vivid monkeys, tsessebes, hippos, a leopard, a black-backed jackal, and a fish eagle.

Visiting South Africa was truly the most sobering highlight of my year. Thank you, Tressie and Paul. I needed that.