Work

• I was in Kamloops for the week, meeting with folks to talk about planning campus engagements regarding common platforms for learning management systems. TRU has a really fantastic engagement started, documenting everything in a wiki and trying really hard to include anyone who is at all interested in participating. Looking forward to seeing how their process evolves this year.
• Got to hang out with Brian, Alan cough, Irwin, and so many others. Lots of great people working together at TRU!
• Our campus datacentre had an “unexpected power outage” yesterday. I don’t have details about what exactly happened, aside from the visible symptoms of every online service at the university going dark (including the website, and CAS authentication - so, even though D2L was happily chugging along, nobody could login ¹ ). We need to work on rapid communication about these catastrophic failures. I was tweeting updates from the @eLearningUofC twitter account for almost half an hour before I saw anything official from campus.

Read

• Tony Bates: Balancing the use of social media and privacy protection in online learning
• Jared Stein: Infographic on LMS course web site designs (by the Instructure Research and Education team)
• Tony Hawk: Who You Callin’ A Sellout? (on getting paid to do what you love)
• Yuki Noguchi: And So We Meet, Again: Why The Workday Is So Filled With Meetings (NPR). “Parkinson’s Law. This is the idea, backed up by research, that tasks take as long as the time allotted. If you budget two hours, it takes two hours.”
• Trevor Owens: Advance Praise for Designing Online Communities - this is another one on my to-order list. Looks like the book will be available in a couple of months…

Other

Next time I head to Kamloops, I’ll have to try to get out a bit more. Maybe a day trip to Sun Peaks (which I saw from the air on the way in, and it looks like fun!)… All I saw of Kamloops was the bottom couple hundred feet of the valley, buried under an inversion for the week…

And, I think I messed up on week numbers for this year already. Week 5 in January? Hrm.