ETUG is coming up in a few weeks; the twice yearly gathering of BC post-secondary educators, learning technologists & instructional designers.

I’m more than a bit bummed that the timing of ETUG this year coincides with the annual EDUCAUSE conference which I am going to be at. So, despite being on the steering committee for ETUG, I’ll actually be missing this one.

And it will be a good one. The steering committee (co-led this year by the excellent Janine Hirtz and wonderfully creative Jason Toal aka Dr. Jones) has taken full advantage of the fact that ETUG happens just a few days before Halloween and are calling the workshop the Little (work)Shop of Horrors.

Completely en pointe  will be Audrey Watters keynote riffing off her recent book the Monsters of Educational Technology.

Also keeping with the frightening theme is the call for proposals, looking for stories about things that went wrong. Tales of the fail. I am a big fan of failure, having failed at many things in my life. And I do believe that, while success gives us confidence, it is in failure that we do some of our deepest learning. And as educators, we need to be mindful that there are valuable lessons within failure.

Leading up to ETUG, a few of us are creating some videos with our own tales of failure. Here is my contribution – my tale of fail is my academic career, partial inspired by Johannes Haushofer’s CV of Failures. The running narrative throughout my academic life going back to high school is that I never finish. Even high school, although I did manage to get that last course and technically finish high school a few years after I was supposed to graduate. My first distance learning experience was taking a Biology 12 correspondence course that finally gave me enough credits to finish high school.

Watch the #etug hashtag on Twitter over the coming days for more Tales of Fail.

And if you are reading this and I have applied to be in your PhD program…I will complete it.

Maybe.