D'Arcy Norman, portrait photoI work in teaching and learning at the University of Calgary, where I’ve spent most of the last three decades thinking about how institutions adopt and use learning platforms. My PhD used video game design as a way of understanding how courses are structured, which turned out to be more useful than it sounds. I write here about edtech, digital transformation, photography, and whatever I’m currently building or reading.

Latest post

digital transformation is a teaching and learning opportunity

4 min read

Reposting the UCalgary News post I wrote for our TI Newsletter: Digital Transformation (Dx) in higher education has largely been framed as an organizational and IT challenge: enterprise systems, cloud migration, data governance, workforce development. That …

Latest Blog Posts

  1. How I built the Typeset custom theme for this website

    I’ve been running this site on Hugo for several years now, and for most of that time I used other people’s themes and tweaked things around the edges. A few months ago, …

  2. DICE in Practice: Adopting Generative AI Guidelines

    The scenario A mid-sized research university is developing its institutional response to generative AI. There is no single “AI project” - instead, there are dozens of …

  3. Introducing the DICE Framework for Higher Ed Change Leadership

    Leading change in a university involves many kinds of participation at once. In any given week, the same person might chair a committee with real decision-making authority, serve …

  4. more noodling on AI and creativity

    The 2026 Oscars™ happened, and a questionable “AI Production Studio” and “AI Talent Agency’s”1 “AI Actor” tried to use the occasion to …

  5. Prototyping a new kind of online course community platform

    On the plus side, your humble protagonist has finally figured out how to break out of “the only thing he blogs about is how he uses Obsidian.” Unfortunately, it’s …

  6. Prototyping a Brightspace Course Coach Application

    Last night while watching the Olympics highlights, I was playing around with Claude Code to see if I could implement something I’ve been thinking of for quite awhile. What if …

  7. not another think piece on generative AI

    AKA Please, God, Not Another AI Thinkpiece! Nope. There have been enough of those lately. Recent posts about art, intuition, semantic ablation, cognitive debt, cognitive shortcuts …

  8. Experimenting with RSS Reader Interfaces

    I’ve been using RSS readers for over 20 years. Most of that time has been spent using the excellent NetNewsWire application, but I’ve used others (including Google …

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