2024 Week 6

We’re continuing to hear from instructors and students that the Brightspace Discussions tool sucks. It’s sucked since 2013 when we adopted Brightspace (but, at the time, it was better than Blackboard 8’s discussion board), and it hasn’t been improved since. We had a Learning Technology Forum community session this week, with a focus on discussing community platforms used in courses. A dozen people were at the session, and they listed 14 different platforms that they use in addition to Brightspace because the built-in discussion tool sucks. This is not sustainable (despite the fact that it’s been sustained for over 10 years now). We need to provide a better default community/discussion platform. This is something I’ll be pushing at LTAC and D2L Steering. I debated breaking this out into a separate post, but I need to noodle on this so it’s not just a full-on rant…

⚙️ Work

• Tyson coined “Norman’s Hype Cycle” - “Everything gets hyped, and eventually becomes an LMS.” (After Norman’s Law of eLearning Tool Convergence and the Gartner Hype Cycle)
• Finished reviewing the grants for my committee of the 2024 UCalgary Teaching & Learning Grants review process. Some amazing projects in there. Looking forward to the adjudication discussions next week. In the last 10 years, the grants program has provided $6M in funding for 272 projects. Amazing. Proud to be a part of that process.
• Started the EDUCAUSE Learning Lab “Developing a Digital Learning Strategy”. The first 2 sessions were this week.
• Planning the next LTAC meeting, and ways to reboot it in 2024.

📚 Reading

• Between Doom & Denial - Andrew Leach.

🔗 Links

• Dan Tricarico - How a Portrait Project Showed Teachers Through a Whole New Lens - an interesting photography project to showcase people and scenes found at his high school. It reminds me of What Teaching Looks Like by Horii & Springborg, but more personal.
• Dan Rockwell - How to Enable People to Step Up (or, in my case, how to stop getting in peoples’ ways by over-helping, over-protecting, etc…)
• Kate Lucariello @ Campus Technology - D2L Expands Generative AI Beta Program. Looks like it might be part of Creator+, which we opted not to add to our campus license for the low, low “uplift” of +40%…
• Brenna Gray - TRU Digital Detox 2024
  • Toxic Tech #1: Learning Analytics and the Dangers of a Little Bit of Knowledge
  • Toxic Tech #2: The Learning Management System and the Straightjacket We Bought Ourselves. Some good points in this post, even though it glosses over some of the issues with open source and self-hosted software. She points to the CommonSense.org analysis of Brightpsace’s privacy/security, but neglects to point out that hosted Moodle is significantly worse (according to CommonSense.org). I’m not meaning to respond with Whataboutism. Many of the warnings about hosted Brightspace involve “the company might get acquired, so who knows where the data will wind up” (this is absolutely valid, and needs to be balanced with “would we do a good job of managing a self-hosted application for 40,000 daily users?”) and “third parties may access the data” (yes, but through the provision of the application itself, not as a “give us $1,000 and you can have all of our client data” thing). Regardless, instructors need to think critically about how they use the tool(s) provided, and can work with teams such as ours to figure out ways to enable and implement the pedagogical approach that best fits their goals.
• FutureCrunch - 66 Good News Stories You Didn’t Hear About in 2023. Doomscrolling is fine, but Goodscrolling? There’s a lot of good news that I was just completely unaware of…
• The Grand Theatre may have to shut down after 112 years. Dang. When I was a kid, my dad had an office in the Lougheed Building. The Grand Theatre and Don’s Hobby Shop were on the ground floor of the building, and I got to spend some quality time there in the 1970s. My sister and I were sent downstairs to watch a movie while my parents did paperwork - we would have been 9 and 7 - the 70s were a different time, where kids could hang out in a downtown movie theatre without parents. And the movie was Watership Down. Hey, it’s a cartoon. The kids will love it. Anyway. The Grand has had a long run and I hope they’re able to keep going.
• James Lamb - Keynote: Propositions for the design of positive, post digital spaces of learning.
• Leah Macfadyen - The “IKEA Model” for pragmatic development of a custom learning analytics dashboard. Interesting article with examples of small-scale DIY dashboards/visualizations that are more meaningful than the Big Corporate LA Dashboards.
• Hugo-to-WordPress options (if the Fediverse integration with WP gets useful, I don’t see how to do that in the static files generated by Hugo…)
  • Ultimate Markdown for WordPress - a WordPress plugin that enables bulk import of markdown files. Say, if someone was to migrate from Hugo to WordPress, this might be a way to do that. The plugin is commercial, and costs $39 USD/year. But you’d only need it for a few days…
  • a python script to do this manually
  • HugoWXRExporter - a way to build a .wxr archive of content. But it’s built as a self-contained Docker container that seems a bit overkilly… (I wonder if I could build something that’s Hugo-native, using layouts etc. to build .wxr as a standard output format…)
• Faculty Focus - AI-Oh My! A Closer Look at AI Tools for Educators - Golly, there’s a lot of freemium commercial platforms that instructors are being nudged to subscribe to, or risk being left behind. I’m starting to lean more toward “drop offline and live in a cabin in the woods” as a more ethical, viable, and sustainable response to AI…
• via Luke Plunkett @ Aftermath - HTML version of Canabalt (ported by Cameron Taylor)

From the EDUCAUSE Learning Lab on developing a digital strategy:

• Part 1: Why do you need a Digital Learning Strategy?
  • EDUCAUSE Dx Journey
  • A Framework for Developing an Institutional Digital Learning Strategy | EDUCAUSE Review
  • Getting Ready for Digital Transformation: Change Your Culture, Workforce, and Technology | EDUCAUSE Review
  • Golden Circle model: Sinek’s theory value proposition : start with why
  • Education Sciences | Free Full-Text | Deep Dive into Digital Transformation in Higher Education Institutions
  • Deloitte - Smart Campuses - The next-generation campus
• Part 2: Using the Digital Learning Resource
  • EDUCAUSE Digital Learning Strategy Guide (Excel file)
  • Accessibility Conformance Checklists | HHS.gov
  • Online Equity Rubric
  • Example Digital Learning Strategies
    • UWaterloo - Digital Learning Strategy | Provost Office
    • UC Berkeley - Digital Learning Strategy | Information Technology
    • University of NE-Omaha’s 5-year digital learning strategic plan

🍿 Watching

• 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve been following along with the slow replay of frames via Mastodon, but thought it was worth a rewatch on the big screen. Ironically, the big screen at home meant that the backdrops of the Origin of Man scenes were visible, with wrinkles in the sky etc. Still, worth it. 1968 Kubrick was such a trip. I keep waiting for a gritty reboot of 2001, and have been glad nobody’s tried it.
• Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire. I was going to avoid this, but put it on while I did a longer ride on the indoor bike, to distract from the urge to ride faster to get it over with. Completely derivative movie built from Zack Snyder’s notes of every cool-looking scene from any movie he’s ever watched. With an opening act that felt like Inglorious Basterds ordered from Wish. And some Gladiator and viking stuff thrown in. And John Carter of Pandora, for some reason. And so obviously something that started as a Star Wars Story, with a search-and-replace for key names to switch it up. Not worth the time if you’re wanting to actually watch a movie. It served its purpose while I was riding, though.

🧺 Other

• I’ve been working on recovering some cardio and strength after losing it all last year with the back stuff. According to my obsessive data tracking in Strava, I’m back to about where I was in May - just after the back stuff kicked me off the bike for 5 months straight. I’m about where I was back in Jan. 2022, and am hoping I can continue building back up through this year. I did a decent mostly-zone-2-and-3 virtual ride from Penticton to Osoyoos, and resisted the urge to ride faster to get it over with (see Rebel Moon, above). Stayed in zone 2 longer than I usually do, and was OK with the power meter remaining well under 200W for the ride.
• My credit card was somehow included in a compromised database or something. Somebody tried to put over $6,500 worth of charges using online stores. The credit card company’s fraud detection group caught it, but now my card has been canceled and they’ll mail me a new one. Credit card security feels like it’s still stuck in the 20th century. What a pain. Now I get to wait until the new card eventually shows up before I can reset all of the things that have recurring charges, and I’m sure I’ll miss something important.

🗓️ Focus for next week

• Grants adjudication committee meeting
• Continuing the EDUCAUSE learning lab on digital learning strategy
• LTAC meeting - first one co-chairing with Wendy (interim VPTL)
• TI Program Approval Committee - presenting the survey we developed to gather feedback on our programming
• Third meeting with Rob for the leadership coaching work.