My One Little Word for 2024 is bricolage.

Bricolage is a French word which roughly translates as ‘do it yourself’. It is a practice of taking what is available (what is ready to hand, as Heidegger says) and reusing it for the current purpose. I use it to describe the remixing that we do in CLMOOC and DS106 (see this paper by me and Wendy Taleo). I have also used it to talk about to describe my approach to research and scholarship, and to describe a model of learning and assessment that is based on my own online experiences (this is paywalled, but I’ll happily send a draft to anyone who asks for it).

“Lines of Thought” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license