Work

• planning what the EDU needs to find out regarding physical learning spaces across campus - formal, informal, f2f, blended, online. We need to build an inventory of what we have, how it’s used, what people would like to do, and where gaps exist. Then, we can smush that together with scholarship of teaching and learning, institutional priorities, funding, etc… to help plan things.
• starting to plan a campus engagement regarding lecture capture - I hate the phrase lecture capture, so I’ll eventually be calling it something else. Lecture Capture implies that all an instructor (it’s always an Instructor) needs to do is press “record” (or, better yet, have it automatically scheduled so they don’t even have to do that), and they are magically innovating and engaging as online rock stars. No. That’s uninteresting. It’s part of it - the ability to record classroom presentations can be useful, but I’d rather frame the whole thing as a media production platform that lets anyone (instructors, students, staff, others) record, publish and share their stuff without needing multi-thousand-dollar appliances or high end equipment. We’ll be working with people across campus to find out how to do that.
• I’m trying to find out if students use the D2L “Content Browser” widget, which is handy, but doesn’t show all content so things get lost (if a prof posts a syllabus to the Overview section, which seems like the best place to do that, the widget can’t display it, and students then think the prof hasn’t posted the syllabus at all. Hilarity ensues.) D2L: the Content Browser widget in 10.3.x needs some serious love. It’s incomplete and therefore confusing or worse.
• Still working with Dublabs on the next version of the D2L mobile app. It’s getting closer, but isn’t quite where it needs to be in order to replace the version that’s live now. Currently, the new version of the app can’t display content in a course. Which is kind of important.
• Thanks to Tim Owens, I’m playing around with Sandstorm.io - this has HUGE potential to let folks spin up tools as needed to support teaching and learning (and other important stuff). Jim Groom writes about it. Unfortunately, our campus runs an older version of Linux, so we can’t readily deploy it ourselves. Looking into better options for my group to be able to spin stuff up without hitting that obstacle.

Read

• Tony Bates: Identifying the unique educational characteristics of a medium for online learning
• via Jason Kottke: 80s tech and Back to the Future - got me thinking about the interaction patterns of technology and implications for course design and student centrism. 80s tech was linear - you dropped in a cassette, and pressed play. you could scrub forward or backward, but the recording was fixed. 00s tech is nonlinear - anyone (not just teachers or producers) can assemble references to any number of things of various formats, which can be accessed in any order or reassembled. What does that do to how we think of media and learning?
• Audrey Watters: Openness and Ownership: Who Owns School Work? - this is something we think about a lot, when instructors ask us about a campus anti-plagiarism tool. We don’t have one, largely because the entire concept is based on violating students’ ownership of their work, which is counter to what we are about as an institution of higher learning (and counter to what they’re asking for regarding anti-plagiarism, ironically).
• Jon Kruithof: Publisher integrations with D2L - I spent some time working with D2L and Pearson to get their stuff integrated over the last couple of weeks. Yeah.
• Isabelle Barrette-Ng does some really great work with her large classes at UCalgary
• Cyclelicious: Fast after 50 - I’m neither a racer nor over 50, but some good tips on not letting age kick you in the ass. As it is currently doing. I need to work on that… Also, I need to pick up a copy of this book.
• via Stephen Downes, BCCampus: Building better curriculum through Universal Design for Learning - we’re focusing more on space design (physical/blended/online, so UDL is an interesting/important framework to approach that
• via Jason Kottke: DFW’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech. Watch it. A few times. I hadn’t read the speech, or seen this video interpretation of it, but have been trying to push myself to think more positively about people and situations, rather than just being about ME ME ME I AM THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE. As it is easy to do. Have a nice day.
• Audrey Watters: What do we mean by Open Education?
• Tony Bates: Seeking the unique pedagogical characteristics of audio
• My Uni Trade - UofC students got fed up with the crappy return on their textbooks when the resell them through the bookstore. So they built a website to do it better. Awesome. Now, if only they didn’t have to spend a couple thousand on books each year in the first place…
• New York Times: Silicon Valley Turns Its Eye to Education. The article suggests that education is the last field to realize that the internet exists. Which is total BS, because the internet was invented by education. Do these writers have no knowledge of history beyond the last week or so?
• via Daniel Christensen: iBeacon in education case study by Stephen Perse Foundation
• We don’t need no stinkin’ badges: the impact of reward features and feeling rewarded in educational games (Elsevier paywall warning. Awesome.) (Does every badge-related article or presentation really need to reference this?)
• UFV Cascade: Sociology department head Martha Dow breaks tradition with student-centred learning contracts - interesting approach to have students design their own assessment strategy.
• A better way to tie shoelaces. Life altering. Works like a charm. I’ve been doing a simplified version of this (doing a single loop, skipping step 6) for a week and haven’t had to re-tie once.

Other

Not a lot. It’s been a busy week. Got out skiing with Evan to Nakiska, for Ski Day #9 of the season (so far). Super windy day. Super crowded. But we had a blast. (see the DFW commencement video - thinking differently about crowds and obstacles really does help).