D'Arcy Norman, PhD

 September 15, 2023  |  7 minutes  |  1403 words

Back in March, an article was published in our UCalgary News describing a collaboration between one of our librarians and an instructor in SAPL (UCalgary’s School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape). The project involved students designing possible future library spaces, and they came up with some really interesting ideas. I immediately thought “hey - that’d be cool to try with a focus on learning spaces!” I reached out to folks in SAPL to see if they were interested, and got connected with Matthew Parker. Read More

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 August 26, 2023  |  5 minutes  |  889 words

My dissertation explored the connections between the design and analysis of video games and our design and understanding of teaching & learning. Much of that work was shaped by a conversation I had with one of my supervisors: Figure 1.2: One of the conversations that shaped the direction of this dissertation. AI-generated character portrayal provided by Stable Diffusion. I’d written a bit to explore the comparison between video games and online teaching, to see what it might look like if it was experienced as a Zork-like text-based adventure game. Read More

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 August 1, 2023  |  5 minutes  |  921 words

I had a random thought, triggered perhaps by the tinnitus that is constantly eeeeeeee-ing in the background of everything. What if there was a Mastodon bot that just replied to every toot that mentioned it, with a string of eeeeeee’s of the same length as the message? The second semi-random thought was that I had no idea how to even start to build such a thing. The third obvious-in-2023 thought was that I’d bet ChatGPT could help with this somehow. Read More

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 July 4, 2023  |  13 minutes  |  2564 words

I’d intended to quickly write this post to reflect on the session, but it’s stayed in my drafts pile for a couple of weeks now so I’m going to share what I can remember. I’ll likely be misremembering some of the details of the session, but this should hit the highlights at least. Recently, I had the absolute pleasure to be invited to co-present at the 67th Annual Association of University Architects Conference, conveniently hosted this year in Calgary, and even more conveniently having one day’s sessions housed within the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. Read More

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 June 15, 2023  |  7 minutes  |  1293 words

 May 3, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  521 words

In Obsidian, I use a folder of notes called “Collections”. Inside Collections are various folders that act as buckets of info, in a quasi-Zettelkasten notes-as-personal-wikipedia kind of thing. My Collections currently include (in alphabetical order): Articles Committees Ideas Institutions Organizations People Profiles Topics Vendors Some of these have subfolders to organize notes into smaller buckets. For example, Topics is organized by folders for: General Tech Higher Education Information Technologies Learning Spaces Learning Technologies Misc Pedagogy Processes TI Projects UCalgary The folders change and I add to them and reorganize as needed. Read More

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 April 4, 2023  |  6 minutes  |  1069 words

Rambling blog post alert: there isn’t a simple, straightforward way to tell the story of how I use Obsidian. This is going to be a bit of a winding post as I start to describe my setup and workflow. And there will be gaps because a) I don’t have time to write an omnibus description of this and b) you don’t want to read that anyway. I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, but kept getting stuck by the scale of what was needed. Read More

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 March 10, 2023  |  8 minutes  |  1606 words

Grant Potter asked a question on Mastodon, about how video games are being used for teaching and learning. I’ve done some work on this for my dissertation, and wanted to repurpose bits from a few chapters in response to Grant’s question. I’ll be writing more about my dissertation work, but am still in “pause and recover” mode after finishing it… In the dissertation, I explored how the disciplines of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) intersect, using the specific ways in which we design, study, and evaluate video games as the point of integration. Read More

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 January 25, 2023  |  5 minutes  |  1053 words

 January 2, 2023  |  8 minutes  |  1677 words

I asked ChatGPT to describe the state of learning space research, and how to evaluate the design and use of learning spaces in a university context. I’ll provide my prompts and ChatGPT’s responses verbatim: Robot classroom observation, by Stable Diffusion Prompt: Describe the current state of research into the design and use of learning spaces in universities. Provide examples and references. Response There is a growing body of research on the design and use of learning spaces in universities. Read More

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