Work

• The EDU had the second retreat to work on vision/mission/strategy for the unit. Lots of great ideas on how we can have high impact across campus.
• Launch of the UofC Badges platform for use in a pilot project for professional development programs in the EDU. (I have a profile on the platform, but haven’t hooked up a Mozilla Backpack yet)
• an update on the pilot/relaunch of the UofC elearning support site
• Werklund School of Education’s IDEAS Conference is coming up, April 30-May 1, 2015.
• Cumming School of Medicine’s Health and Medical Education Scholarship Symposium is coming up, Feb. 17, 2015.

Read

• Karen Walrond on the necessity of practice

• UofC researcher Margaret Clarke, on the growing number of autism cases

• via Ars Technica, the Crash Override Network to provide community support for anti-harassment online.

• Gardner Campbell writes about Sweet Spots and pulls together some interesting reading on the topic.

• Louise Katz on the commodification of creativity in higher education

• Gardner Campbell on the relationship between play and practice

• Ben Thompson on the end of trickle-down technology (reminded me of my technology adopters curve )

• Giulia Forsythe: should faculty provide students with lecture notes? - sounds great, but does it turn teaching into a content production mill? are there better ways to record and/or share notes for a class, than having the instructor produce the canonical and static set of notes for students?

• Mike Caulfield: Rethinking wiki lifecycle: sites as bounded conversations. Federated Wiki feels right, but I’m still not sure I totally get it.

• Audrey Watters: a hippocratic oath for ed-tech - what would this look like? I love the idea, but because of the individualized nature of the field, I think we all need to craft our own code of ethics.

• Scott McLeod: avoiding worst-case technology scenarios through mindfulness (linking to an article by Mike Crowley

• Tom Woodward: It could be beautiful: aspirational vs. operational edtech

• Cole Camplese: teaching (and learning)

• Irfaan Sorathia on online tools for making affinity diagrams

• Mike Caulfield: “Users” - false hierarchies of creators and the impact of creatorism

  To coders, people who don’t code are not makers. But we keep punching all the way down. Published writers kick bloggers. Bloggers see themselves as creating on a level that readers don’t. It’s not just about your job title, it’s about your internal taxonomy.

• via Stephen Downes: Sumeet Moghe on using gamification to create a blogging culture

• UW Bothell Learning Technologies on two great technologies for the flipped classroom

• via Nick Heer: Craig Hockenberry’s description of a pretty impressive/scary near-server meltdown due to DNS craziness in China

• Gardner Campbell on downstream deliverables - sometimes the important stuff isn’t really realized until years later.

• David Jones with a proposal for fixing what’s broken with ed tech support in some universities

• I am officially “a very smart man”. Hey. It was in a TEDx talk. It must be true.

• Bryan Alexander retweeted a link to his 2014 presentation on education trends and THE FUTURE

Other

I took Friday off to go skiing with Evan, and we had an amazing day. We had the hill to ourselves for the first 2 runs. So good.