Wikipedia will tell you that, in poetry, an envoi is a short stanza at the end of a poem used either to address an imagined or actual person or to comment on the preceding body of the poem.

I want to use this last mini-lecture as something of that kind–and to do a bit more than that, too. I want to address all of you, dedicating this course to you, and to comment on the preceding body of this course, your work and my work, and where we can go from here. When I started thinking about this course, my first idea was to just very mildly modify the Science Fiction course that I’ve taught online for almost ten years now. It’s a very good course (at least I think so!), and it works as an exploration of the genre of science fiction, thematically organized, with some forays into science (physics, astronomy, evolutionary biology, among others). But it’s basically a literature course. It works fine for people who need an upper-level literature elective, and even better for English majors (and absolutely for SF fans). Lately what I’ve been seeing and thinking about, though, as a teacher and an administrator, is much wider than that.

So I started think more broadly about what kind of course I could teach if I could teach any kind of course I thought students could like and use. And what came to me was that the best courses I’ve ever taken, as well as the best courses I’ve ever taught, were all about exploring, together, a subject that really was newly evolving. So that we (as a class) could be creating new knowledge, not just passing along something that one of us already knew.

And that’s what I tried to do with this course–and that’s where I think you folks have really succeeded far beyond anything I even expected. You have taught me, through this course, more than I expected. I’ve learned from you, and I feel like together we’ve only started the exploration that the course can create. We’ve looked back, we’ve looked at today, and we’ve looked ahead, and now we can proceed into our own future–not just the future of education, but the futures of our educations.

So that’s my challenge to all of you. This final mini-lecture is a kind of saying good-bye, but it’s also my way of wishing you clear skies and hot jets. You’ll be pursuing those futures, creating those futures, and this course will still be here for you to look back at, to add to, to make part of your futures.

Live long and prosper!