Decade after decade and generation after generation, the possibilities of new technology and for the embodied individual are proclaimed in our scholarship and eventually critiqued, complicated, and then recast in another form. We might call each cycle an ERA of technology, complete with all of the era's prophetic connotations of distinctiveness. Critel invokes this issue explicitly in her commonplaces when she states, “Technology functions in cycles of technology hope and criticism in terms of the classroom. New technologies are speculated to improve participation.” She then notes how “[d]igital media studies/computers and composition scholarship often criticizes the notion that technology can improve participation. Ultimately, pedagogy changes participation; technology is an element of pedagogy” (195). We firmly agree with this issue about technology in general, and since our orientation comes partly from that scholarly discipline, this finding about technology cycles in relation to participation, so expertly stated here by Critel, does not surprise us, but rather confirms what we’ve suspected about MOOCs as participating in this cyclic process to proclaim yet another new ERA.

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