Things are going well. Really well. … These are sentences one does not hear very often these days. Yet, here in this blog they ring true. And for that I am grateful. Grateful to you. To you the readers. To you the listeners. Thank you. And let me explain.
Dresden, Germany, and the river Elbe, flowing, of course, Panta Rhei
It’s going on a full year. In September 2025, I set myself the goal of posting at least four times a month, roughly once every week. In October I started. After almost 11 months, I would still say it’s hard. A full-time job and life with its joys and hazards keep me busy otherwise. And that’s a good thing. And ironically, it was AI that kept me going. No, I did not use it to generate posts. I used it as the topic of my writing. Mainly AI in language education. And most of the 48 posts over recent months are on this topic. And there is still so much more to say. I have 21 texts in various stages of completion in my Draft folder, that are all waiting to become real posts. Some of them are just sign posts or an aide memoir about what I want to write. So Mat, you have your work cut out – as they say. Follow this blog so that you don’t miss the next posts …
Looking back. And being grateful. Between October 2025 and today, 6,614 times this blog and its post has been read. The busiest month was May of this year with 862 views. And this August has seen 709 reads already, as I am writing this. As someone who is used to the meager numbers one gets in academic writing and publishing, I am looking at these numbers with great happiness and appreciation. Appreciation for you, the readers: artificial intelligence – and my different takes on it – seem to find and interested audience. Hopefully, I can make small contributions to a better understanding and use of these powerful tools. Let me know.
If you are particularly interested in blog posts about GenAI, in the top menu is the sub-item GenAI and LL under Language and Learning. One of the most-viewed items is not a post, but a page: Opening AI for Language Learning (OAILL) with 325 clicks in recent months.
We started this podcast on March 17, 2026. 12 episodes have dropped already. And they have been downloaded well over 1,000 times. We are working on the next mille. We are grateful to you for the first and you can help with the second … The episodes are on topics such as large language models and the Turing test. Or practical topics such as the ten areas of knowledge and skills teachers need in the context of GenAI and language education for Sustained Integrated Professional Development (SIPD). Three more episodes have been recorded already. Whenever I find the time, I post on this blog to highlight a particular episode. I still have five more texts in my Draft folder on these episodes … Mat, you have your work cut out …
And so it continues … Please feel free to get in touch with comments, requests, questions, … And I am sure you know, it helps a blog and podcast to get its information out to people, when you follow, subscribe, like, and comment. Please do. My fellow podcast host, Phil Hubbard, and I promise – for both the blog and the podcast – that you will not be interrupted by any ads or commercials (other than the ones that subscribed to with the platform, like Spotify) and that we are not making any money with this work.
