there is much

Yet to Discover is a blog written by and maintained by Yet Analytics co-founder Shelly Blake-Plock (that's me). Editorially speaking, it is essentially independent of Yet Analytics and this blog is not intended to be salesy in any way. Yet builds open source software (and our team is pretty great), but if you catch me coming off as a salesman here, please call me out on it. This is just meant to be a blog... like there used to be blogs. Some of you will remember those days. It was blogging that got me into this whole mess, erm, "world of learning technology" some twenty-plus years ago. And given the current saturation of the web in podcasts and my decidedly non-radio friendly voice, well, rather than cut my teeth on a microphone, here I am again reaching out as I best know how – through written words, debates, interviews, tangents, and – most importantly – stories.

Just by way of super brief introduction. I started out my professional career as a high school teacher. In 2004, I found myself the resident faculty nerd at one of the first schools in Maryland to go fully 1:1 with computing. Hilarity ensued. Anyhow, one thing led to another and, by 2008, I was writing a blog called TeachPaperless that more than anything was about the shift from static to dynamic ways of thinking about the introduction of technology into classrooms. In the Fall of that year, I began teaching a course at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education on participatory media in education. Shortly thereafter, a former student of that program asked if I'd join him in standing up a community tech center in Baltimore. During the roll out of that project, I got interested in the whole space of informal education and informal professional development experiences. The core group of what in 2014 became Yet got together and started working on an informal learning experience tracking app. We immediately ran into interoperability problems. After meeting with some smart folks in the data standards community, we realized we could provide the most value to everyone by building software to address those interoperability issues. And since 2014, our team has built an entire suite of open source software capabilities in order to provide that value.

I've gotten to collaborate and work with many many amazing thinkers since I first picked up a folder of xeroxed lesson plans back in 2003. I hope that through this blog that I'm able to introduce you to many of them and to introduce you to their ideas, thoughts, concerns, and dreams.

I'll be posting here regularly, and you are welcome (and encouraged) to subscribe. By subscribing, you'll get both full access to the site and updates via email. And please share the site with friends and colleagues. If you think of someone who I should interview or come upon something I should check out, reach out to me directly.

-- Shelly

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