A rundown of what happened in December
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| Hey everyone! Happy New Year's Eve—New Year's has always been my favorite holiday. Something about the fresh annual start just really resonates with my desire to have a starting point when working on new things. I hope the year gets off to a great start for everyone!
Here's what I was up to this past month! |
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| Chapter in The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy |
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My colleague Bobbie Eicher and I wrote an article for The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: Link Outside the Box, the latest in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series. Our article, titled "Gaining the Strength to Go Alone: Educational Philosophy in Hyrule", looks at how the design of The Legend of Zelda games—especially their lack of tutorials and emphasis on exploration and experimentation—intersects with educational philosophy. The book is available now. |
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| A few weeks ago, I played a little prank on my family where I told Google Gemini how to answer the question I was just about to ask it out loud so that it would confirm my made-up fact. It became a little teaching lesson on why my kids shouldn't trust everything AI says, but that quickly became a rabbithole about how little of the internet is trustworthy nowadays.
So, I wrote a blog post about it, in which I described the flood of fake AI-generated information online the ainternet—as in, the ain't-ernet. |
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Late last month, I attended the 2025 Online Learning Consortium Accelerate conference in Orlando, Florida. It was a bit surreal because the conference took place at the Walt Disney World Swan & Dolphin hotel, which is right alongside Disney's Boardwalk Resort, which is where my family and I have stayed three times while visiting Disney World. It got me thinking about the surreal experience of visiting a familiar physical location under a completely different context—a feeling I dub 'alterlocus'.
So I wrote a blog post about it. |
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| Book of the Month:
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor |
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Full Disclosure: As with on my blog, I use Amazon referral links in this section. That's mostly just a lightweight way to track and see if anyone's even clicking through. If you buy something through one of these links, I may get a bit of money back and achieve my dream of one day being able to buy the nicer set of kitchen scissors that Amazon sells instead of the bargain variety. |
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On My Top 10 Books of 2025 |
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As I’ve done the last five years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), I'm ending the year by picking my own personal top ten books of the year. These are the top ten books that I read during the year, regardless of when they were published.
I've written a full blog post about these in detail, but to spoil the selections, my top ten books of 2025—in the order in which I read them—are: For more details on the rationale behind these selections, and for my accompanying incredibly long list of honorable mentions, read the full blog post! |
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