Stephen Downes

I'm sympathetic with what Todd Conaway is saying here but don't really have a solution. Basically, the lament is that a community dedicated to the open web has essentially dissolved - it never grew, and the old members drifted off. This used to happen to mailing lists too. The same thing happens to topics of discussion. Something gets hot for a while, communities coalesce, and then the world moves on. I've been through a few of these cycles - learning objects, e-learning 2.0, connectivism, MOOCs, open learning. You can go from being the centre of attention in one minute to last year's news in a minute. Remember blockchain? Covid? These day's it's AI and you can see the ebbs and flows within this domain - models, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), model context protocol (MCP), agents. All of this is hard on the durability of online community. It's hard to have something unique and interesting to share in each of these new topics as they come and go.  It's hard to find that cool change.