Fantastic news....one of the founders and fathers of the field of distance learning, Dr. Michael G. Moore (Wikipedia), to be given an honorary doctorate in May at the University of Wisconsin (Michael's alma mater and mine too).
The last time I saw Michael was August 2016 at the Wisconsin Distance Teaching and Learning Conference in Madison (see picture above and below...Michael is in front).
Read this article from March 9, 2020.
V. Craig Jordan, Michael G. Moore to receive honorary degrees from UW–Madison, Doug Erickson, University of Wisconsin-Madison News : https://news.wisc.edu/v-craig-jordan-michael-g-moore-to-receive-honorary-degrees-from-uw-madison.
I am delighted to have been asked to provide a support letter for such a distinction. Below are three paragraphs from my six page support/nomination letter:
"Ironically,
I arrived in Madison for graduate school in January 1986, which was just a few
months prior to when Dr. Moore last taught a summer course at UW-Madison as a
visiting professor. In retrospect, I truly wish that I had met him during the
months in which we overlapped and had enrolled in his graduate seminar in
distance education as it was the only such graduate level course in the United
States, and perhaps the entire world, at the time. My mistake! As the enormous
explosion of online and blended forms of learning revealed a decade or two
later, Dr. Moore was far ahead of his time. Because of that missed opportunity,
I would not learn much about this field of distance education until after I
completed my doctorate, even though I took correspondence and television
courses in educational psychology to qualify for graduate school.
I
first got a chance to work with Professor Moore in 2002 when he was preparing
his first “Handbook of Distance Education” to be published the following year
by the prestigious Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. My colleague, Dr. Vanessa
Dennen, and I wrote a chapter on “Frameworks for
research, design, benchmarks, training, and pedagogy in Web-based distance
education” for that particular handbook. That timely and tremendously
successful volume was widely read and discussed. Dr. Dennen and I were
privileged to be asked to write a follow-up chapter in the second Handbook of
Distance Education that appeared in 2007. As an indicator of its popularity and
importance, the fourth edition of that handbook is scheduled to be published
later this year.
Four
years after his handbook first appeared, I was most fortunate that Dr. Moore
agreed to write the foreword to my own handbook, notably, “The Handbook of
Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs,” published by Pfeiffer/John
Wiley in 2006. He was the first person that my co-editor, Charles Graham, and I
thought of for such a prominent and important task. As someone who had worked
in blended environments for decades, Dr. Moore was indeed the natural choice. Importantly,
he could explain the history and role of blended forms of learning across
society during the past couple of centuries."
There is more. There is always Michael Moore.
Labels: distance learning, DT&L, honorary doctorate, Michael G. Moore, Michael Moore, University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Distance Teaching and Learning Conference |
