Silver Lining for Learning
Six Years of Conversations About the Future of Education
Silver Lining for Learning is a weekly webinar series that began the week the world shut down, and never stopped. It is hosted by Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Lydia Cao, Punya Mishra, and Yong Zhao.
Six years and 265 episodes later, we turned the transcripts into data — and built this site to let you explore what we found.
What’s Ahead
This site presents the SLL archive in four parts. Read it in sequence like a book, or jump to whatever draws you in.
The Story
How did a pandemic webinar become an accidental dataset? What are the twelve themes that structure six years of conversation — and how do hosts and guests talk about them differently?
Story → ThemesThe Analysis
Seven interactive explorations of the same 264 transcripts. Map the terrain, trace how themes rise and fall, see where ideas intersect, and discover the conversations that broke the mold. Explore the data yourself.
Landscape → Streams → Vocabulary → Intersections → Diversity → Alliances → SurprisesThe Synthesis
What happens when six analytical methods all examine the same data? Where do they agree, where do they diverge — and what does that tell us about the arc of the SLL conversation?
Convergence → MethodsGo Beyond
Everything is open. Download the full data archive, examine the methodology, and extend the analysis in ways we haven't imagined. Plus: the people behind the show, and how to reach them.
Open Archive → Get in TouchThe analysis behind this site was conducted through dialogic coding — a new form of researcher–AI collaboration. The site itself was built the same way. Both the method and the medium are new, and neither has decades of validation behind them. So everything is open: every keyword dictionary, every episode score, every analytical decision is freely available for download and audit.