Work
A short week, with Victoria Day and an added vacation day to make an extra-long long weekend. Still, a busy week with lots of little things like working on Pearson integration with D2L in a couple of places, working with D2L to see what options are available for a better mobile experience, and some work on our EDU strategic plan - more on that soon.
Read
- via Bryan Alexander: A powerful donor versus academic freedom - at least this isn't a Queen Sacrifice. Yet.
- Jim Groom: We're Only #HumanMOOC - I think the MOOC label is distracting here - this is some interesting stuff, which will be missed or overlooked or absorbed into the collective of MIT/Harvard/Silicon Valley Innovations because it's described as MOOC.
- via CBC News: Canada's internet performance on trial with public's help. I ran it a few times from home, and got some pretty underwhelming results. I ran it again from campus, and recorded the fastest real-world internet speeds in the city (both downloading and uploading). The CIRA servers are kind of overloaded, so it may take a few times to get an empty slot to test.
- Harold Jarche - social learning is personal - sounds like a really interesting workshop!
- Dave Winer: Something doesn't smell right about the rush to "deprecate" HTTP. Yeah. Planning to stop supporting the protocol that 99% of the web uses is probably not ideal, even if they have the highest ideological reasons for pushing HTTPS support. Breaking everything isn't the way to fix it - people will just switch browsers.
- Dean Shareski: Looking Back: The Value of the Archive
- Audrey Watters: Ed-Tech and the Californian Ideology:
We tend not to see education technology as ideological. (No doubt, we largely fail to scrutinize the ideology of education as well.) We do not recognize the ways in which education technology can, as Selwyn notes, "accommodate all these agendas (from the countercultural to the commercial) with little sense of incompatibility or conflict." How does a push for "self-directed learning" feed a libertarian anti-institutionalism? How does the mantra "everyone needs to learn to code" serve the interests of global capitalism? How much of the "Maker Movement" is venture-backed consumerism? What does it say that this profitable version of "making" dovetails so neatly with some visions of progressive education?
- via Jason Kottke: Mining the internet for time lapses. Holy. Between this, automated facial recognition, automated tagging of content, geolocation, and automated stitching of panos from photos, there is some seriously science fiction level stuff possible with the billions of photos already helpfully posted online.
- Mark Drechsler: How I lost my faith in the LMS (or ‘my journey towards LMS nihilism'). And a response by Phil Hill. Personally, I don't think nihilism is the way to go. There will always be a place for an LMS (or whatever we wind up calling it) - even if just to take on the boring administrative details that have to be taken care of when teaching a course. If an LMS doesn't do it, something else will have to adapt to take that stuff on. Best to let LMSes do that so other things don't need to worry about the boring stuff.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your LMS.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio (adapted)
- Hugh Howey: Renting vs. Owning. A wonderful indie author, rather successfully self-publishing several interesting books, on why he does that rather than renting access to Big Publishing. He'd rather own his House. Nice analogy.
- via Maria Popova: Spineless: Susan Middleton's Mesmerizing Photographs of Marine Invertebrates. Beautiful.
- Tony Bates: UBC develops an institutional strategy for learning technologies. Interesting. Haven't had a chance to go through the UBC strategy document yet. I'm really curious to find out how it compares to our strategy (initial glances show UBC spends about 10x what we do on learning technologies, and they produce much shinier documents, too).
Other
We did the relatively easy hike up the Grassi Lakes Trail on Victoria Day. Had a great day.
And, I got out for a short-ish bike ride out to Cochrane and back. Almost at 100km so far this year. So far, about 1400km behind a normal year for me. Sigh.
But, we're putting in a patio / firepit in the back yard, so lots of activity around home.
