Work

Nope. Well, almost nope. Had some HR stuff to finalize before our new Online Learning Environment Specialist starts on the 26th. I'm out of the office until Oct. 23.

• Joni Miltenberg: University instructors open their classrooms to observers

Read

Edtechitude

• Adam Croom and Jim Groom: Indie Music and EdTech (or Indie EdTech) — Medium - transcript of a great talk, with a refinement of the EDUPUNK narrative.
  

  "Indie EdTech is many times a personal; a philosophical, decision. It's also many times a practical; an economical, decision. Open standards are about accessibility as much as anything else."

• Alan Levine: Facebook as Catfish Paradise: Its Community Standards Wears the Cone of Shame - identity is extremely important in online learning. Facebook kind of sucks at making sure people are who they claim to be. How will other platforms do better, especially in the context of online learning? (note: the article was written by a man claiming to be a dog, or a dog claiming to be a man…)

• Christopher Brooks - 2015 Student and Faculty Technology Research Studies | EDUCAUSE.edu
• Derek Mcburney: Creating A Drupal CMS That Scales - Part 1: Why This Matters - documenting how UCalgary scales Drupal to handle thousands of websites. Looking forward to the full series of articles (and where he goes next with the blog)
• GNA Garcia: "This present moment used to be the unimaginable future," once wrote S. Brand. - yup. we're living in stuff that used to be science fiction and fantasy, if that, and we're taking it for granted and using it as a platform for snark, bickering, and bile.
• Jim Groom:
  • Reclaiming Italy
  • Reclaiming WordPress for Lynda
• Joshua Kim: Articulating How Centers for Teaching and Learning Are Changing
• Justin Reich: Are MOOC Forums Echo Chambers or Bridging Spaces?
• Lynda Sea: Researcher discusses how to share an autism diagnosis with your child
• Maryellen Weimer, PhD: How Concerned Should We Be About Cell Phones in Class?
• Michael Feldstein:
  • The Rise of Antisocial Deconstructivism -e-Literate

  "antisocial deconstructivism. It's the approach of breaking learning down into teeny, tiny bits, tied to fine-grained competencies and micro-assessments, that students learn on their own by following a prescription that is created for them, possibly with the help of a robot."

  • Yes, I did say that Knewton is "selling snake oil" - I have a blog post brewing about this stuff…
• Michael Patrick Rutter: Of MOOCs and Men
• Monica Miller: Open Access Week - lots of stuff going at SFU. We've got a full week of events planned at UCalgary, too.
• Nicki Monahan: More Content Doesn't Equal More Learning
• Rebecca Penina Simon: How to Get Students Started with SMART amp
• Richard Kassissieh: How I Became the Dot Voting Guy
• via Stephen Downes:
  • (Digital) Identity in a World that No Longer Forgets
  • Raiders of the Lost Web
  • Why Twitter's Dying (And What You Can Learn From It)

Miscellanitude

• Ars Staff: Star Wars Battlefront beta provides a delightfully unbalanced battle of Hoth - we played the beta. it was too twitchy pew-pew for me, but wow was it impressive. The Teenâ„¢ is hooked. I picked up a copy of Forza 6, and am equally hooked. Wow. I mean, come ON - check out a clip I recorded on the new Rio track in a fancy Koenigsegg supercar. Crazy.
• Dan Goodin: How the NSA can break trillions of encrypted Web and VPN connections. Remember when browsers were restricted because the encryption wasn't allowed to be exported? Remember when that went away? That wasn't because anyone changed their minds.
• David Weinberger: Samuel Butler's early technodeterminism - interesting thought experiment. We're pretty thoroughly dependent on our technologies - not just for entertainment, but literally for survival. Side note - the major technologies are controlled by corporations, not governments. Which means we are pretty thoroughly dependent on corporations, not governments. Yay, democracy.
• Jason Kottke: PhotoMath iOS app can do your homework for you
• Jenny Anderson: How to sit at your desk all day—without it killing you - turns out, standing desks aren't magic. If you're a sedentary blog, standing at a desk isn't going to save you. You actually have to get exercise.
• John Gruber:
  • Historical Price Trends for Tech Products - everything is WAAAAY down, except cable TV subscriptions.
  • Only 5 Percent of Mac Users at IBM Need Help Desk Support, Compared to 40 Percent of PC Users
• Lorraine Duffy Merkl: When mentoring turns toxic
• Rob Beschizza: The Myers-Briggs personality test deemed expensive and silly - BUT I'M INTJ! RESPECT MY SURVEY-TAKING SKILLS!
• Robson Fletcher: UberX launches in Calgary, in spite of city bylaws - unregulated and illegal in Calgary, on top of the company being run by a bunch of fratboys with tendencies toward evil.
• via Paul Pival:
  • CodeBeautify - handy utility to make senese of various forms of data.
  • JustCast Turns a Dropbox Folder Into a Podcast RSS Feed

Other

Thinking about ideas for starting a doctoral degree. Nothing crystallizing, yet, but I have some things I'd like to explore.

Migrated a copy of our family photo library from Aperture to Photos with iCloud backup. The upload process took a few days, and went from an initial estimate of 160GB (which fit nicely in our 200GB iCloud storage) to 180GB (which would be tight, with device backups, but still room for it), to 216GB (which filled the storage, so I had to upgrade to the top 1TB tier). Seems to have worked nicely, and it's great having every photo available on every device. But our lowly MacBook Air seems to want to cache a bunch of it on its small SSD - the library is stored on an external volume, which has lots of room, but the iCloud cache is in my home directory, which means 20GB or so of stuff gets pulled into a boot volume that has 20GB free. Which means the drive fills up and complains. Not cool. I'll figure something out, maybe with The Magic of Symlinksâ„¢.

And, spending some time at home with The Teenâ„¢ and The Pupâ„¢ (who is working on her Chewbacca impression)