I’ve exported my entire OU student blog and used AI to catalogue it. So far, the checked files contain more than 3,750 titled entries, stretching from February 2010 to February 2025, with a few gaps of around 120 entries still to recover, including the last year.
I was first and foremost an MA student in Open and Distance Education from 2010. Though I initially joined the OU in 2001 to take what was then the MA in Open and Distance Learning, we started the course with a large box of textbooks!
A substantial strand of the MAODE focused on H810: accessibility, inclusive learning, disability, learning design, and the barriers technologies and institutions can create. Alongside that are my encounters with learning theory, educational research, creativity, assessment, social learning and the succession of digital tools we were encouraged—or occasionally obliged—to try.
There’s also a persistent enquiry into blogging itself. What happens when you write about what you’re learning? Does explaining something expose what you haven’t understood? When does recording become reflection? The blog contains assignment preparation, reading notes, experiments, frustrations, enthusiasms, and attempts to connect theory with my work in education, visual communication and corporate training.
What interests me now is following those threads through time.
I can search for an idea, return to what I wrote, and compare it with later experience.
Did I understand it?
Did I use it?
Did I change my mind—or move on to the next interesting thing?
Could I seek a deeper understanding today?
One discovery made me smile: in March 2013 I wrote a post called “Right now I need an AI Companion”. I’m now using ChatGPT to help me explore the archive where I made that request.
The 22 million+ views are entertaining. The more valuable prospect is recovering a detailed record of how my understanding of learning has developed—and where I may still be asking the same questions. And how to reply when colleagues and organisations ask me to take an interest in the online learning they wish to deliver, or already have up and running.
Do you remember your first day at school? I remember my first day at nursery school; it was short-lived. I climbed the curtains in the Church Hall with my friend Billy McFee. Do you remember your last day at school? I ended up at four of them... All in a lifetime, a lifetime of learning.