2020 Week 06

I’m off Twitter. Again. For now. It’s just not a healthy place to be. The relentless twitter-ness is just not something I need. I get it - the world is on fire and everything is on fire and nothing matters and we’re all doomed all of the time. It’s just exhausting. I’ll still be posting stuff here on the blog, and following the 350 feeds I subscribe to. RSS is where it’s at. Still. I’m not planning on deleting any accounts or anything. Who knows.

The Oval doesn’t have public skating this week because of some international speed skating competition thing, so I’ve been trying to go for walks at lunch to keep doing something active.

⚙️ Work

We read this article on Turnitin and its ilk, to discuss IP and privacy in our team meeting this week:

Zimmerman, T.A. (2018). Twenty Years of Turnitin: In an Age of Big Data, Even Bigger Questions Remain. In Ratliff, C., & The Intellectual Property Standing Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. (2018). The 2017 Intellectual Property Annual. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3fc6t3d6

Our 2020-2025 Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning Unit Plan was released.

🤔 PhD

Another lunch session of D&D. I’m enjoying just having the time to be a grad student. I’m also going to try dedicating Fridays to be PhD think/work time, to get back into a regular cadence.

I’m preparing my candidacy reading list - currently developing the section on program evaluation and curriculum review / planning…

📚 Reading

• Todd Conway: YOU ARE THE PRESENTATION: a few ideas I have about presentations - a master class in creativity and design in creating a compelling presentation experience.
• Top Hat raises $55M to sell digital texbooks - making textbooks available for $50 in digital form is better than, say, a $300 printed book that you can’t resell. But it sure ain’t an open textbook. This more about reinforcing the status quo and trying to build a new commercial platform than it is about making textbooks accessible to all students.
• David Jones, on Alten’s Theory of Workarounds¹
• Bond, M. and Bedenlier, S., 2019. Facilitating Student Engagement Through Educational Technology: Towards a Conceptual Framework. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2019(1), p.11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.528
• Matuk, C., Hurwich, T., Prosperi, J., & Ezer, Y. (2020). Iterations on a Transmedia Game Design Experience for Youth’s Autonomous, Collaborative Learning. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 11(1), 108-139. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijdl.v11i1.24911
• Alter, S. (2014). Theory of Workarounds. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 34, 1041-1066. https://doi.org/10.17705/1CAIS.03455

🧺 Other

• The UCP gutting of our health care system is proceeding nicely. (the last review of AHS was 3 years ago, but it was done by icky NDP commies so the cons have to pretend it didn’t happen and do a fresh review that fits their party line) shocked pikachu face dot gif
• I got fed up with macOS not having a text-sorting Service available, so I followed the recipe and made one. Now I can select text in any application and sort it in place. It probably strips out formatting, because it just feeds it through the sort shell script, but it’s better than nothing. Then I got fed up with that Automator service not being able to handle text formatting, so I searched for something better and found WordService. It’s been abandoned for awhile, but seems to work fine. It was built by Devon Technologies (makers of DEVONthink - which I used back in like 2005…), so it’s probably trustworthy. It’s still listed on their freeware download page. Why in hell is that not built into macOS?

I’m working on my iPad this weekend because I forgot my laptop charger on my desk at work. Holy crap this multitasking interface sucks. I just spent 5 minutes trying to get Pretext and Safari running side-by-side. I gave up.

about 2 hours later, after coming back to the iPad and actually searching for and reading the docs on Apple’s website, because that’s a thing that someone who’s used technology for over 40 years should definitely have to do in 2020 - turns out, I was swiping up from the bottom to get to the dock too quickly. Because, of COURSE, the speed of the up-swipe should determine whether you’re trying to do a split-screen with the contents of the dock, or just trying to launch another app. Good lord, what a mess. Slowly up-swipe, gently, then pause, as if to admire your handywork. Then, again, ever so gently, touch and hold a dock icon (but don’t hold it too long) and drag it to the side of the screen to launch the second app. Insane. Now that it’s working, it’s perfect. But having to repeatedly try and fail to properly gesticulate without a UI hint is, how do you say? Shitty design?

🗓️ Focus for next week

• YuJa quarterly review call with the vendor
• TI monthly staff meeting
• Collaboration between TI & IT to plan shared support for learning spaces
• Learning Technologies Advisory Committee meeting - will be providing an overview of the work of the Processes Working Group